Lawania is a prolific investor with connections spanning across India, China, Japan and the US. For his latest venture, WeeTracker, he has set his eyes on Africa, the land of untapped opportunities. Leveraging his expansive network across some of the world’s most developed tech economies, Rishabh Lawania is now looking to help up-and-coming African startups to build sustainable businesses that have the potential to scale up.
During a candid interaction with Inc42, Rishabh Lawania shared interesting anecdotes from his unusual journey as a serial entrepreneur and investor. As part of our hour-long conversation, he also offered some valuable insights into the lessons learned from the failure of his second entrepreneurial venture as well as his plans for the future.
The Formative Years: Failing 12th Grade Exams, Starting A Company At 17
While everyone around him was dreaming about qualifying engineering entrance exams, Rishabh knew he wanted to do something beyond the usual i.e. start a business. However, the major hurdle was not having any guiding hands, since he came from a non-business family. “So, nobody expected that I would start a business, much less a technology startup because I have no technical background whatsoever,” he uttered.
Undeterred by this obstacle, Lawania started his first venture the year after he flunked the 12th grade. In fact, during the gap year immediately after his 12th board exams, he launched Red Carpets Events. Conceived in 2010, the event management company helped organised/co-organised 70+ promotional, corporate events across Delhi-NCR and Jaipur.
Although not a technology startup per se, the venture taught Rishabh Lawania the power of networking.
“The inspiration to launch a tech startup came to me during my early years as an independent event organiser. During this phase of my life, I understood the power of networking. At the time, my focus was on connecting with as many entrepreneurs, VCs and investors as I could and understanding from them how to start a business,” he explained.
Unlike most entrepreneurs who are driven by the allure of starting and owning billion dollar companies, Rishabh Lawania has been a realist through most of his career. Instead of focussing on building companies of the same scale as Apple or Microsoft, he wanted to create something that was profitable, while also offering an easy exit to its founders.
From JusGetIT To Xeler8: A Failed Attempt To An Remarkable Exit
From this desire was born JusGetIT, a last mile logistics startup that specialised in doorstep delivery of groceries, in 2013. The startup, according to Lawania, was operational for around six to seven months, during which it had partnered with 30+ vendors and shopkeepers. Additionally, it helped maximise the revenues of offlines kirana stores by offering its tech solutions to them.
The venture, however, failed to take off the way Rishabh had envisioned. He believes that the main reason behind the startup’s untimely shutdown was the lack of right understanding of the market. Although JusGetIT was one of the early movers in the space, it failed to raise sufficient funding.
“That was the time when the entire hyperlocal thing was just starting up in India. Back in 2013-14, Grofers and Bigbasket were at a pretty nascent stage. We figured out that we did not have a cost-effective model,” Lawania added.
Given that the B2C business was not cost-effective, the team at JusGetIT needed to scale the technology into a very asset-light model. He went on to state, “Although funding was available to Indian startups at the time, we were not able to figure out the right way to do it. However, we learned a lot. We had reached out to a lot of investors and through that, eventually, learned how to raise funding.”
Remarkably, the failure of JusGetIT didn’t stop Rishabh Lawania and this time, he focussed on creating a sustainable B2B tech platform that was at the same time scalable. In 2015, when he was in the US, Rishabh teamed up with techie Keshu Dubey to launch Xeler8, his most successful venture to date.
A deal-sourcing and research platform, Xeler8 offered a modernised approach to prospecting, tracking and analysing startups with an initial focus on Indian startups. As stated by Rishabh Lawania, the idea behind Xeler8 came to him when, as an entrepreneur, he tried to learn more about his competitors. He said,
“Back then, there was Bloomberg and similar platforms, which had databases of big corporate companies. However, there were not many platforms that focussed on startups. Even the ones that existed back then did not have good coverage when it came to startups. This was pretty much a good product-market fit.”
Essentially, Xeler8 offered a database of Indian startups, covering about 47 industries. The data were singularly curated information of the startup’s business model, funding, founder details and more. The startup tracker also acted as a lead generation platform for corporates and a market research tool.
Convinced of the product’s marketability, the Xeler8 team in the US started building a beta product and launched it exclusively for certain invite-only angel investors, startups and VCs. Within four months, the company was ready with its first product, following which it was launched officially in India.
In addition to basic details such as the name of the startup, founders and investors, the platform had metrics to predict how likely it was for a particular investor to back the startup. Rishabh Lawania added, “And we also provided an estimated valuation of the company. This was a very tricky part because you don’t really know how the startup will be valued in the future. Although this was kind of tricky, we backed everything with data.”
The process was largely dependent on machine learning crawlers that were built in-house. Additionally, Xeler8 hired a separate team of analysts. According to Rishabh, the entire process of evaluation was based on around 16 to 17 parameters.
Source - INC 24