2 C's for Entrepreneurial Success

It’s the phase where markets are fiercely competitive and the face of business is ever-changing. Every day several new businesses are launched in the hope of leveraging the opportunities available. Do you realize that about ninety percent of these ventures fail? Its not that there has been something unusual with the business plan or the market strategy; but the foundation of the businesses are weak. If you enter the market only with the profit-generation aim, you lose then and there. Yes, profit IS an important factor; but its high time we need to realize that business is NOT personal; it’s connected to several lives. Hence to grow, u need to grow ALONG with others. There is a very famous adage that says “You cannot win a war alone”. So applies to business; you need people who can believe, share, communicate, work and collaborate with you.

Considering the current scenario; I suggest 2 C’s for entrepreneurial success:
     1. CLOUD
     2. CROWD

You may find the names rhyming and similar; but there’s only one great similarity between the two. That’s the key to your Venture’s success. It is with the help of these strategies, startups such as Google, Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook… etc have grown exponentially and transformed into multi-million organizations today. You would be astonished to see that how Indian entrepreneurs such as Bhavin Turakhia and Kashyap Dalal are re-defining innovation with their ventures – Directi and Inkfruit. These young, dynamic entrepreneurs knew that they had to do something very fresh and innovative to sustain in this highly competitive market environment. They sensed the situation and put forth their strategies which were backed by the 2 C’s.

Let’s start with:

C 1: CLOUD
This is not a very new concept. This emerged as a by-product of the Internet Revolution. Google was successful in identifying it early and see the magnitude to which it has heralded the company to greatness. Even the biggies such as Microsoft have to fear from two normal Stanford Grads who showed the world that businesses run on INNOVATION and constant evolution. The idea is behind a cloud is very simple; that a remote server will provide all the services you require. This gives you the ability to make your business flexible, scalable, cost competitive and hence low maintenance. This concept has penetrated in various businesses and has affected many people. It provides the ability to bring low cost services into the market and hence acts as a factor of competitive advantage to you. Take a well established company such as SAP which sells various Enterprise Applications. It faced extreme competition from small Vendors who were selling Business Intelligence Applications as SaaS (Software as a Service) and using Cloud platform (Ex: Gooddata, Birst, MAIA). There began tremendous demand for applications using Cloud; as it costed meager several thousand dollars instead of million of dollars.

Have a look at some presentations on the technical aspects of CLOUD COMPUTING:


Cloud Computing


Cloud Computing



C 2: CROWD
“Harness the power of Crowd” is the ultimate success mantra of today. Have you ever fell short of ideas? Then this the best time when u could have got some – from the CROWD. Crowdsourcing may help your business grow with the power of unlimited, unleashed power available from the crowd. Take Wikipedia for example, there are millions of contributors to create this mega encyclopedia a profound success story. Its 15 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. And now it is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet…..! Unbelievable, yes it is.

Unlike outsourcing, where a company moves for cheaper labor costs, crowd sourcing opens up work and creative inventions to everyone — "the crowd." – says Margot Adler. If you want to get a notion of crowdsourcing, think of NASA giving a $200,000 prize to an inventor, Peter Homer, who designed a new space glove in his dining room. His goals, he said...

Mr. PETER HOMER (Inventor): One was to beat the NASA glove, and my second goal was to impress the NASA guy.

ADLER: Getting $200,000 was icing on the cake. Or think of something like Wikipedia, where people create a product together - in this case, an encyclopedia.

Most crowdsourcing involves an open call over the Internet. Take the company Inkfruit.com. Inkfruit is an online t-shirt store, where t-shirt designs are submitted and voted for by a community. Hence not only it gets several t-shirt design ideas; but also great publicity and a positive word of mouth through its community members. The idea behind this being VIRAL Marketing. The community of Inkfruit submit tshirt designs. These designs are put to vote on a scale of 1 to 5. The design that receives most votes 'wins', gets printed and is put for sale. The member whose design is selected gets paid a winning amount.

Hence, this not only allows your businesses to get several new ideas constantly, but also interact and grow with the crowd. And crowdsourcing, creates a lot of productive capacity that didn't previously exist.

Learn more:


Cambrian house- Case Study


Business and Crowdsourcing