In a country like India, where age is the gold standard of experience and wisdom, how do you win credibility for a new institution, university or school? How do you overcome the intimidating stature of traditional brick and mortar institutions that have stood the test of time. For Pramath Sinha, Founder & Chairman of Harappa Education and India’s ed-tech ambassador, the answer lies in employing an outcome driven approach. “Focus on ensuring outcomes in your initial years. This does more for your institution’s credibility, than your curriculum, faculty, or board.” Getting students the right jobs may help in the first phase, but what then? How do you sustain this credibility? How do you build institutions that last beyond you? Tune in to this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann to find out.

In a country like India where parting with your money is like a painful trip to the dentist, how do you scale lending? How do you forgo the traditional approach of extending loans, where meeting and accessing clients is second nature? “We’ve given out 70,000 loans across India, but 99% of my borrowers haven’t even seen me!” For Lendingkart’s Co-founder and CEO Harshvardhan Lunia, data was the ultimate answer to lending at scale. How did he overcome the historic red tape around loans? Especially in the non- collateralized space of MSME lending. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to find out how he revolutionized the FinTech industry with his trust-first approach.

“2 or 3 campaigns will not make your brand! You have to be consistently at it for years” Content marketing is critical, whether you’re chasing sales or website traffic. It isn’t as easy though, especially for a startup where change- across product, people and placement- is the only constant. And when you’re caught by these waves of change, you either sink or swim unless, of course, you’re smart enough to build a boat and turn a profit by offering rides. Influencer, content entrepreneur and internet sensation Tanmay Bhat did just that as he built India’s first viral content business. From engaging a room full of comedy enthusiasts to winning millions of subscribers on YouTube, Tanmay has literally defined the formula for user engagement and retention.  “Virality isn't science! It’s a product of experimentation," says Tanmay. With social media gaining more popularity by the day, your company’s valuation is definitely linked to customer validation. So if you want to scale your brand love, tune in to this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann to catch his definitive guide on creating viral content.

How do you thrive in low margin super competitive cohorts? What do you do when your startup is up against really established players -those that are really institutionalized or well-funded or have been in the business for a really long time? “2010 was the worst year ever for the broking industry. That’s when we started.” When Zerodha was started, no VCs had ever invested in a stockbroking firm. Yet, this did not stop the team from building India’s largest stockbroking firm, successfully navigating a market with poor financial knowledge and well-funded competition. They bootstrapped and built their product focusing on the customer rather than what will please the investors. All this with minimal spends on advertising and marketing. In a startup world obsessed with speed and growth hacking, co-founder Nithin Kamath believes that growing at their own pace helped them build a great product. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to find out how Zerodha built a massive business and lived up to the meaning of its name which literally means “zero barriers”.

What does it take to overcome regulatory hurdles, build a loyal community of 50 million users and scale-up the business to a billion dollars? It's grit, passion and focus. Starting-off as a fantasy sports platform, then accidentally evolving into a sports social network and then pivoting back into fantasy gaming, the journey of Harsh Jain and his team at Dream11 has been nothing but incredible. By turning couch captains into strategic game players and achieving product market fit within a year, the team has truly hit it out of the park. Curious about how Harsh navigated these critical decisions about business models and product offerings? Or how Dream11 manages to drive a 30% growth average while maintaining an ethos of experimentation? Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to hear Dream11’s ‘playbook’ on success.

“Leadership is a verb, not a noun!” Founder and CEO of Druva, Jaspreet Singh believes that leaders have to constantly evolve to stay relevant for their team and business. This agility has helped him guide his company through multiple pivots, which was almost like relaunching Druva as a Cloud SaaS company in 2013.    Having scaled their company to a billion, becoming India’s first SaaS unicorn, they now have to navigate the journey to an IPO. With prominent SaaS companies like Slack shunning the IPO route in favour of a direct listing, Pension Funds entering the Venture Capital market and the ever present unpredictability of market timing, how should a global SaaS company prepare to go Public? Tune in to Building It Up with Bertelsmann to know more.

“Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.” This could easily be the ixigo tagline with co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar having mastered the art of turning roadblocks into opportunities for growth. Post financial crisis of 2008, with zero dollar marketing budget, employees at half-salary and four well-funded competitors, ixigo founders share how they had their backs against the wall and how they came up with ingenious ways to scale-up and build consumer loyalty. From leveraging word of mouth, earning free traffic through SEO, and data scraping to enhance customer experience, innovation became their mantra for survival. But as a startup it's about thriving and not just surviving, which means taking hard decisions. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to hear how the entire team at ixigo inculcated full-stack thinking and frugal innovation to become one of India's most loved OTA platforms.

According to Harvard Business Review, only 7% of customers are online-only shoppers and 73% are omni-channel customers. Clearly, a good looking e-commerce site is not enough anymore.   Ambareesh Murty, Founder and CEO of Pepperfry, shares how he navigated through some of the most critical business decisions on omni-channel strategy, franchise model and advertising on television, etc. Why consumer categories like furniture, require a physical presence, not as a distribution channel but a way to build trust with customers.   Establishing India’s largest business-to-customer supply chain wasn't really easy for Ambareesh. It was the first furniture marketplace to build its own logistics network and managed to establish a niche category for itself in a very crowded unorganized market. In today's world where differentiation is key to success and multiple factors have to be considered to achieve any foothold in competitive markets, Pepperfry continued to build for scale while keeping its inventory light.   On this episode, listen to Ambareesh's definitive guide on what it takes to put-together a winning omnichannel retail strategy and how customers look at the other established horizontal players such as Amazon or Flipkart when it comes to vertical e-commerce. Time range    Topic of discussion 1:05               What got you into the furniture category? 2:12               What made you realize that online was not the only thing that the                        customer needed? 4:29               How did you figure out that opening a physical store was the right thing              for your business? 6:40               The pure reason to have physical stores was to build trust 8:06               What got you to consider a marketplace model? 10:34             Why did you decide not to go custom? 12:08             How do you look at established horizontal players like Amazon                        having a furniture category as well? 15:23             Any advice to entrepreneurs who are thinking about taking their                        vertical business to the next level? 16:59             Your view on profitability versus growth? 18:29             How did you adopt to the franchise model so well?

“Why is there so much spam in the world!?”  In the process of answering this question, CleverTap grew from being a group of engineers tinkering code, to a global SaaS company. Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Clevertap, Anand Jain, believes that the first step to building a global company is to “remind yourself that the problems you are solving are universal”. If you are building your product keeping the customer in mind, then no borders can constrain your company’s reach. But with no sales team until 2018 and having monetized the product only after their Series A funding, going global wasn’t an easy feat for them. Building a global company requires one to ask tough questions – How do you hire for a global company? When and how do you monetize your product? How big a role does your sales team play in establishing the early reach of your company? How low does your churn rate need to be? Catch this episode of  #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann, to find answers to these plaguing questions as SaaS maven Anand Jain, shares how he charted CleverTap’s journey beyond Indian borders. Time range    Topic of discussion 1:03                Why B2B SaaS? 1:47                What were the main challenges in building a B2B SaaS company? 3:51                Was going global always the plan? 5:02                 Initial strategy: small ticket size model vs large ticket size model 9:08                As an entrepreneur what kept you going? 10:24              Why monetizing your product is important?  11:30              How do you price your product?  13:02              Does every market has a different pricing strategy?   13:54              How an entrepreneur in B2B SaaS think of unit economics? 15:12              Is it important to be close to your customers geographically? 16:28              Why building a sales organisation with locals having sales                         expertise is crucial? 17:25              Would you advice entrepreneurs to have a professional sales org                         much earlier once they have a product? 18:51              Partnership: Should we take a collaborative approach for sales? 20:09              How did you win over in a crowded market? 22:02              Is churn really an important metric and how frequently did you                        track churn?

Revelations from the other side of the table. As season one comes to an end Ankur Warikoo, our host and the Co-Founder & CEO of nearbuy.com, shares his top takeaways from the extremely insightful and brutally honest conversations with some of the finest leaders from across the world.  From building great products that sell themselves to using storytelling to engage with stakeholders and founding the right culture, Ankur shares how implementing some of these learnings at his company has generated some spectacular results.  With 26,000+ listens and over 2.5 million audiences reached, Building It Up with Bertelsmann has been appreciated not only in India but around the world and ranked as the best business podcast in India by Apple.  Hear Ankur Warikoo give the entrepreneur's perspective on season one on this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann