What makes a Student an Entrepreneur : Khushbu’s Journey

After spending hours on the ‘WHY’ of our event last week, it was time to work on the ‘WHAT’ and ‘HOW’ of the event. Palak Krishnamurthy, who has been a mentor in the past 3 months of the fellowship was the lighthouse for the week. The pressure to pitch our ideas to Palak, our morning on the 13th December started with sleepy faces brainstorming with cups of coffee to help keep our brains awake. Pens and papers lying all around we started listing the activities and the vibe we wanted to create at our event. We spent 3 hours of squeezing our ideas out about the visuals of the impact we wanted to see. It was now time to do something we, enterprise partners excel at, “Charcha over Khana”. Yummy breakfast was set up by Adi and his passion and love to serve food made it even more fun.

Charged up for the day we now got divided into different groups. I started working on the presentation for the evening to explain the activities to Palak. We decided to categorize our activities according to Theory of Multiple Intelligence. This theory categorized the attractions of the event around the 8 types of intelligence a human mind can develop.

After preparing the presentation which had a lot of research that went behind it and efforts of so many partners the evening was ready to welcome our dearest lighthouse, Palak.

It was an enlightening experience for all of us to actually learn about Palak’s life and her education background. The most important learning that I took back was her belief that she could figure out any problem or obstacle that would come by her way. There was this incident which she shared where she was challenged by her dad about her masters degree abroad. Her dad would allow her to go on one condition that she had to get a scholarship. Palak believed that she could overcome every hurdle in her way which got her a full scholarship for her master’s in the United Kingdom. This self belief is something that I was inspired a lot to build within myself.

We presented the pitch with reference to the Golden Circle that we had created of our event. After the presentation, Palak further explained the importance of the WHY of any business/event and she gave us examples of how so many businesses occur losses in millions as they are not clear about the ‘WHY’ of their plan.

 

 

 

 

WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?

The following Monday began with WBS(Work Breakdown Structure) for the event which was being planned to be held in January 2019.

The Monday meeting was really different and special compared to all the sessions we have had till date. After a beautiful and calm meditation we were asked a simple question- why are we doing whatever we are doing in life?

What bothers us in life? The smallest to the largest thing whatever it might be.

So we had spoken about things that we want to do for ourselves in the outside world(#करो fest). The main question that Adi made us actually think that day was, what are the things you want to achieve for yourself internally?

An example of this could be, try to be more confident or try not to overthink.

He also asked us the most important question:

What are the things that  make us happy internally?

If you look around, sometimes you can have all the success in the external world but are not happy or satisfied with yourselves internally

What is it that we were missing internally ?

For me it was the feeling of satisfaction that I crave for to have done all my tasks for the day and then go to bed. 

It really opened up our minds and helped us to talk about our internal happiness to everybody.

The second half of the session was spent to share our WBS that was made by few of the Enterprise Partners. An immediate Action plan was formed with the groups and some slots of working on different perspectives regarding the event was planned.

Structuring the event:

The next day began with an early meeting at the space conducted by the Enterprise Partners. The discussion for the activities involved:

1. Investment
2. Pre-requisites
3. The value Proposition

We also visited a few venues like Golibar Maidan and Deccan College Ground. We surveyed the possibilities of holding the event there and got the quotations of the ground. This helped us understand the skills we would need to execute the event. Based on the information we had collected we tweaked our excel sheets that had the comparisons for the budget of the event.

At the space, we pitched our event with the presentation to my parents and got some amazing feedback. They suggested us, that we should send the #करो  message to our participants very crisply to get a great turnout.

 

Cooking is always fun!

The next day began early for me along with few of the fellow EPs as we headed to Adi’s house to work on the most fun product at Enterprise: “The Rajgira laddoos”. We sat down to innovate/improve the Rajgira Laddoos. It was a really thrilling experience as I was using “Excel Sheets” to analyze the ingredients and price. I would have never thought of doing this in college. We spent an hour to just list down all the healthy ingredients and how much would they cost in different variations. After a lot of patience it was time to just start adding ingredients in the mixing bowl. We invented a unique product which was never tasted before. We made two different samples. One being an upgrade to the previous hit laddoos and another being a complete new invention which I fondly call the “No Bake Rajgira Chocolate Cookies”. As soon as we were done we got a positive feedback almost from our families.

Meanwhile at the office the Enterprise Partners had started working on the pitch and the presentation of our business idea for the great shark tank day.

THE SHARK TANK DAY

On the 20th December we had the great Shark Tank Day. For us it was as intense as the original shark tank series.

We had Mr. Prashant Girbane and Mr Hitendra Singh as the sharks for the night. We were suppose to pitch our business ideas to them to approve our event. This was a big deal as they had the authority to completely reject our event/business which would mean that we would have to rework our business model.

Right from 6 am in the morning to 6  pm in the evening, it was 12 hours of endless hustle at the space. Every Partner had cold feet, Chills down the hair and I wanted to just sleep. But with a lot of courage and hard work put in each partner, we were ready to give our best performance. We started with a short meditation,which really helped me to calm down and come at peace with myself. And then, the shark tank came live on our Instagram live video. The space was arranged in such a way that I could actually call it a judgement room overpowered by the cute fairy lights for the aesthetics.

The first pitch was live, the drama, the strength and the clarity of my fellow partners was very good. My nervousness had reached the ultimate peak now. And then came my group’s turn to pitch our business plan.

Our pitch addressed the topic of overthinking our tasks. One thing that struck me was “How even one line or a gesture in small conversations with my friends can force me to think for hours about all the scenarios that could have made it better?”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsGNsrfH-PI/

Taking this idea we twisted our pitch with a touch of drama to convince the sharks about how we are going to make people to not overthink and just KARO at the fest. There it was, my team alongwith Anmol Khanapure and Krishna Lohiya were announced as the most sharkastic pitch alongwith Tanish and Dhruv. It was a pretty satisfactory feeling about how we could create and plan our pitch in a structured way and more importantly the clarity with which we could present the pitch to the sharks.

Mr. Prashant Girbane and Mr Hitendra Singh, gave us amazing inputs after all the pitches were done.

Prashant literally made a beautiful pitch on the Karo Fest in just 2 minutes and convinced us to be a part of the #करो fest. On the other hand, Hitendra gave us some practical advices on how we need to be accountable to the most minute details of the budget and the expenses.

That night I Went  back home with so many learnings and was completely charged up for the project.

 

Is random thought a normal thing?

This afternoon I alongwith my partner Hussain Mala meet to make our first ever batch of the newly invented Amaranth Cookies, which we now call as CRRUNCH. Putting even a simple invention like the Crrunch into a fixed recipe is not as easy as it looks. Invention stage is the place where you use your creativity with the ingredients in front of you whereas making commercial product involved thinking of the quantities and price ratios to identify the cost. This product required the most patience I have ever needed in the kitchen. With friends playing in the background we divided the work of molding and packaging and smoothly finished our batch for testing at the Art Collective in Lonavala which a few of our partners were going to attend .

That evening, our space had a special guest, Mr. Farzan Dalal to take a workshop called ‘Thought is also matter”. Farzan was going to present an art installation at Kochi Biennale later in 2019. He intended to collect people’s thoughts from different corners of the country and later add it to his installation. The workshop started with just warming up our minds to actually see and feel objects, structures, colors, walls around which we usually would look and maybe not really look at it. You won’t believe what we did after this. We were asked to pick up threads and start tying objects and people to ourselves, which eventually connected us at one. That didn’t stop here, after this the entire unit was asked to move around the space, yes, all people and objects. We carried a stool in between 12 people trying to move in all directions possible. After this, the entire structure was asked to dance, I was as confused as you are right now as to why and what is happening with me.

This exercise was conducted to just understand how our brain works. All the entities around the thread were technically our thoughts trying to get some decisions taken in between all the randomness. It was a thrilling experience to actually visualize the working of thoughts in our minds and like they say you need to first realize the situation to actually understand what to change in the situation. This is the same way our thoughts work.

The workshop ended with threading down one thought that comes to our mind at the moment. Now that I had to think of one thought, all the random thoughts disappeared and I couldn’t think of one specific thought. After stressing my mind for a while I could remember one quote that Adi had told us earlier that week that he believes and follows which was:- “Yes Father, This too was meant for me”. This is something I want to say to myself whenever something goes wrong and also when something great happens in my life. When something goes wrong it gives me the courage to move on and at the same time when something goes right it helps me keep grounded.

A customary Enterprise weekend:

The Weekend of 22-23rd December also called for User research for #करो fest at events around Pune.

A few of our partners went to Tondala Pani, a food festival and learnt some of the points that we realized to give great focus to:

1. The mapping of the stalls
2. The entrance and exit access by people and vehicles too.
3. The type of vendors to approach
4. The ‘josh’ of the team along  with the vendors for the success of the event.

A few of our partners went all the way to Lonavala to spend the weekend at social event for all the artists and renowned creatives across the country to come and publicize their work and spend the night.

Over the last two weeks I got the chance to create, to pitch to various people, to be a part of one of a kind workshop and learn so many new things. If I am asked to list down the best learning from these days they would definitely be:-

1. The theory of multiple intelligence of a human mind.
2. The golden circle rule in a business model.
3. The art of creating a pitch and present it to people.
4. The skill to control your thoughts.

Above all I got into the momentum and spirit of starting to work for our #Karo event…

“It doesn’t matter when we start,

It doesn’t matter where we start,

All that matters is that we start”