Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice, it’s a passion and obsession.” Sushil & Abhishek of ExtraAEdge.com

This Entrepreneurial Story is about Sushil & Abhishek who Founded ‘ExtraAEdge.com’ located in  Pune.

About founders  etraaedge-founders

  • Sushil Mundada, Co-Founder

A graduate in E&TC Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology and PGDBM from University of Pune. He has rich industry experience of more than nine years with multinational financial institution in areas of business intelligence and analysis in internet banking channels and CRM. He is man of varied interests including teaching, counseling, entrepreneurship, social responsibility, reading, discussions & debates and continuously acquiring new skills. At ExtraAEdge he leads the Sales & Marketing, Relationship & Project Management areas.

  •  Abhishek Ballabh, Co-Founder

A thorough knowledge worker, he has been dabbling with startups and business models for the past five years. He has a diverse work experience spread across six years in the areas of Banking, Finance, Software Architecture, Data Analytics & Financial Modeling. His true love is education and empowerment it brings in people’s lives. At ExtraAEdge he leads Conceptualization, Design & Development areas.

When Started: May ‘ 2012

What motivated you to start your Business?

We always wanted to do contribute in the area of Education. We believe that both of us are students for life…

Being Engineers, we were close to our alma mater and were in constant touch with our faculty & juniors. We wanted to address needs of students face before, during & after college. And we wanted to solve the complete problem not just one aspect of it.

With our education, experience, expertise, passion and inclination we were in a unique position where we could make a difference in lives of students and in process build something very valuable.

Tell us about your Business

ExtraAEdge.com was established with a mission to provide an integrated academic platform containing key resources, products, opportunities & connections to students for enriching their academic avenues.

Our products address the needs of colleges, students, faculty & corporate – all who are part of the large academic community which works towards making life of a student simpler and experience enriching. We compliment this by our website which is an online content portal for collaboration & sharing, helping students secure internships, project assignments campus placements, open recruitment, further studies, etc. All the online services are free of charge for the students while colleges and corporates pay for the products they use. Moreover we have a discussion board where these topics can be taken up with other students and even professors.

What is a Day in a life of you like?

  • A quick meet in morning to discuss the action items for the day.
  • Talking to our customers i.e. colleges / corporates & feedback from the sales team.
  • Addressing Website & User Experience related issues & feedback from our users.
  • Finally brainstorming on our Product Roadmap – to keep working on the next product in our pipeline.

One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.

We have a single approach of focused Customer Development Methodology wherein we have been investing our time into iteratively building products to meet the needs of our early adopters.

This has helped us reduce the market risks and the need for large amounts of initial funding or expensive product launches and failures.

What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far?

Prioritizing what to build – as needs of student community is diverse.

Implementing this Customer Development Methodology helped us a lot, because as entrepreneurs you fall in love with your idea / products. This can be counter-productive at times. We have been relentlessly trying to search our customers and distinguishing them from our users and address one need at a time. This has also given us enough time to test our hypothesis.

How did you overcome these challenges?

We think the market tells you their needs & problems, You have to listen carefully and ask some questions.

This allows you to test your hypothesis & validate ideas.

Talking to our faculty, administrators and hundreds of students which we do on a regular basis brings us closer to prioritize our product road-map and distill what features to build & importantly when.

What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?

Right now we are leveraging our personal contacts we have built over the years. But customer referral is single most effective way to get new clients. Academic community is a close knit unit so this can be greatly leveraged.

What advice do you give to other business owners?

Have a scientific approach towards building great products. Search your users, identify your customers, establish a constant dialog, and validate your understanding of the needs & problems.

This would help you build products which are closer to your customer needs & generate true value rather than something you personally believe is right.

For a startup avoiding waste and staying lean is the best thing that can help them evolve.

How did you keep motivated through difficult times?

The life at a startup is unpredictable. Long hours, failures, constant prioritizing, difficult times is something we consciously sign up for. Saying that, we believe you need to have objectivity towards things in life. Do things which de-stress you. For example for us its family, friends, sports & music. We also read a lot of stuff on entrepreneurs and their stories really motivates you. It also helps you determine when to persevere & when to pivot.

What are your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy?

We have been doing a lot of personal visits to our early adopters i.e. colleges & corporates, giving demos. We have found a two minute product video demo works wonders to communicate your value & offering, rather than lot of conventional marketing wisdom.

  • We are completely bootstrapped.
  • We are a lean team. So just 6 crazy driven folks.
  • A team of two co-founders and 4 associates.
  • We hire based on potential and not on credentials.

Your Achievements?

  • Our biggest achievements we think has been our ‘validated learning’ from our first product launch “MT-CET Cut-off analysis & College / Branch predictor” launched in May’ 2013. We started small with an experiment, the results i.e. 25000+ page views, 100+ students counseled, featured in 6 national newspapers just in 2 months taught us a lot.
  • Finalist at the prestigious Power of Ideas 2012.
  • Ability to gather customer feedback through our academic contacts has been one of the key achievements for us during these initial days.

Whats your favorite quote?

“You need to ask yourself, ‘Where do you want to work: startups, mid-size or large companies?’ …If you find yourself debating the ‘startup versus large company’ choice you’ve already chosen the big company. Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice it’s a passion and obsession.”  — Steve Blank – Entrepreneur, Mentor, and Author

Who inspires you?

Personally for Abhishek the inspiration are Rahul Dravid & Dalai Lama and for Sushil the source of inspiration is his life guru Manish Gupta. Also those hundreds/thousands of brave entrepreneurs who are slogging & grinding it out every day to build great products are real inspiration.

Do you have a Business Philosophy?

Understand your customers & users | Think Value not Feature | Keep close tab on financial | Be fair & upfront on any transaction.

Contact links

Facebook | Website | Blog

aballabh@theextraaedge.com

sushilm@theextraaedge.com

More Info

https://www.startupfreak.com/extraaedge-com/

Startup Freak wishes you both All the Best!

About StartupFreak

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