The Great Ganesha

After a slight delay, I continue talking with Nikhil Roychowdhury, Founder-CEO and President of The Simple Leaf, an online start-up that sells tea.

For those of you just joining in, this is the third and final part of an interview in three parts. Part One can be found here. This part continues from Part Two, here.

In this, the final part of the interview, we get up close and personal with Nikhil and he gives some advice to the young ‘uns out there, talks openly about some of the mistakes he’s made along the way, and ends by telling us a little bit about tea itself.

Nikhil has made heavy use of Web 2.0 in his start-up, and apart from del.icio.us, Squidoo and Fanpop, he also has his own blog (of course!) on which he posts interesting tea-specific factoids.

So let’s get right to it.

Do you have any advice for young Indians, and young consultants in general out there who have been playing around with the idea of starting their own business?
Five basic lessons:

a. Think long term. Make sure your business idea is something you can picture yourself doing for the rest of your life. If you’re not totally committed, it just won’t work.

b. Don’t go it alone. Starting your own business can be lonely at times (trust me!) and you’ve just got to find a way to stay motivated. If you don’t have partners, talk to as many people as you can so you can bounce ideas off them. Even better, talk to potential or existing customers. It can be a difficult transition to go from working in an office with hundreds of people to working alone. Remember, you can’t call Barb over in Accounting to get the financial projections for your product, because now you’re Barb from Accounting. And Larry from Marketing. And Matt from IT. You’re going to wear multiple hats – so get used it quick.

c. Make your business easy to understand. You may think that adding a particular feature to your awesome new product is going to be the “killer app”, but whether you’re selling airplanes or tea, if your customers don’t understand it, they won’t buy it. This is why marketing is so important.

d. Personalize your market research. While the internet, census data, trade journals and books play an important role in market research, there’s simply no substitute for face-to-face interaction. I can’t emphasize enough how valuable it was for me to conduct that little “tea tasting” event in Urbana. I got the chance to chat with over 200 people (some of whom are now loyal customers) and learned a lot about what they liked and what they didn’t. Real insights from real people will teach you much more than any book or website. The internet can be such an anonymous place – so we plan on doing many more tasting events every year, so we can talk to our customers in person. There will be one coming up in Urbana, Illinois this winter, so stay tuned for more details on that.

e. Get a mentor. As an entrepreneur, you’re full of ideas. If your mentor doesn’t have the guts to tell you that your ideas suck (and why), get a new one.

There’s nothing new or earth-shattering about any of these lessons – every entrepreneurship book or article tells you essentially the same things in a different way. I’d be lying if I told you that I follow each of these to the tee (pun intended!). As simple as these suggestions sound, they’re surprisingly hard to execute. If it were that easy, we’d all be millionaires.

What are the biggest obstacles you have faced so far, and what obstacles do you foresee in the near-term?
Money and marketing.

You need marketing to get customers and you need money for marketing. It’s a bit like a like the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Everyone knows you need to spend money to make money. And when there’s not that much money to begin with…then what? That’s something I struggle with every day.

That being said, I try to focus on the marketing aspect of it more, and I remain optimistic that the money will follow! In the near term, if we are to meet our growth projections, I will need to seek external sources of funding.

Did you make any mistakes in the handling of the business so far? Is there anything you would have done differently?
Of course. Plenty of them. Big ones. Small ones. Medium ones. And there will definitely be many more to come. I think mistakes are part and parcel of this whole process. I keep telling myself that I’m trying to do something for which there’s no blueprint for success, so I’m going to stumble and fall along the way.

To answer your question – I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was spending too much time over-analyzing my business model. Don’t get me wrong – analysis is (almost) always a good thing. But nothing happens without execution, and I think I delayed execution because I was so convinced that if I just tweaked my spreadsheet a little more, I would nail down this perfect business model. Of courLse, it’s never that easy.

It’s a tough balancing act, and I think this is something all companies probably struggle with at some point. As a consultant, I learned that sometimes decisions have to be made even if you have only 70% of the information you need. I wanted 100%. Feeling comfortable operating with imperfect information is something I’m constantly trying to improve on.

Your lessons and experiences should be extremely useful for anyone who’s interested in starting their own business. Thanks for the openness.

But now let’s shift the conversation towards some tea-specific stuff. The tag line on your blog is “tea. Uncomplicated”. Your online store claims to make the process of buying tea “simpler”. How so?
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re a tea connoisseur and you’re looking for a Second Flush Goomtee Estate SFTGFOP1 (that’s the kind of lingo you speak if you really know your tea). Well, because you know what you want, you can probably find what you’re looking for pretty quickly.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think most people buy tea this way.

There’s an overwhelming variety of tea out there – some of it is good, most of it is well…not-so-good. There are probably many people out there who settle for sub-par tea because they don’t necessarily know, to take one example, what SFTGFOP1 means. I want to make high quality tea available to them, but without all the unnecessary jargon. I want our customers to be faced with a solid, but manageable variety of choices with easy to understand descriptions. That’s one of the premises behind The Simple Leaf and our mantra, “tea. uncomplicated”.

And finally, what do you think are the top 5 things a non tea drinker should know about tea?
1. Tea is the most popular drink in the world after water. I love that one because it shows us that it really is a simple, every-day drink. And who says every day tea shouldn’t be gourmet tea?

2. Like wine, or coffee, there’s a wonderful range of flavors in pure tea. Different regions and processing methods yield distinct flavors which add to the allure of this drink.

3. All tea comes from the same basic plant, called Camellia sinensis (which means “of China”).

4. Tea is good for you.

5. You can use incorporate tea into all kinds of other things – like your favorite cocktail, or even use it as a marinade in cooking.

Well, Nikhil, it’s been fun and enlightening. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
My pleasure.

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