I always wanted to be an Entrepreneur. Even at the age of 21, during my engineering college days in a laid-back city like Shimla, my dream was to create jobs and become an entrepreneur.
I started off my career as a software engineer but I guess the entrepreneurial bug had me hung over for quite long. In 2007, I co-founded an employer review website ‘Jobeehive’. That started off well and we gained heavy traction and user base, but somehow, we weren’t generating the revenue we wished to. After 2 years, we shut it down, but in my opinion that was a great business lesson for me as an entrepreneur.
I realized that for any business to be successful, it needs to have a strong revenue model and it must be able to solve real-world problems. This led me to start my next company ‘GoodWorkLabs’ in January 2013. This time, I was very clear about the USP of my business – I wanted to bring in the expertise of building products with a ‘design-first’ approach. GoodWorkLabs is an outsourced product development company and UX design studio that builds mobile apps, software products and games for B2B and B2C customers.
Soon after, Vishwas Mudagal joined GoodWorkLabs as the CEO and co-founder. Through our experience, we wanted to build high-end products, create R&D teams and build beautiful aesthetic products that showcased our design thinking approach.
We positioned ourselves as the ‘product guys’ in the IT services industry and soon we bagged few eminent clients. That was a validation that we were headed in the right direction with GoodWorkLabs and soon we grew 500% year on year in terms of revenue.
GoodWorkLabs is one of those rare companies which is bootstrapped, self-sustained and very profitable. But at the same time, it is quite disheartening to see so many tech startups shutting down and laying off employees. I feel that startups need to focus on creating business ‘values’ rather than ‘valuation’ of their businesses and chasing VCs.
Vishwas and I have always believed in mentoring the budding entrepreneurs and with the present disrupted startup scenario, my advice to young entrepreneurs is very simple. Before taking a plunge, ask yourself a few questions.. What problem I want to solve? Do I have a solution for it? How will I execute it? How will my business sustain? It’s very important to understand if you are trying to solve a real world problem and how your business is going to sustain it. After you have figured out answers to these question, go ahead and rock the world!
The Journey of GoodWorkLabs
