Prem Sagar's blog

Snake and ladder

It’s been a couple of months since I had taken Tapprs seriously.

However, I know very well that I cannot sustain it on rentals alone and certainly cannot scale it up soon.

Naturally, the question is ‘what next for Tapprs?’.

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Run fast to reach late

I have started running recently.

It’s been 3 weeks now and makes me feel good.

In the last 2 weeks, I used to do 10 laps in the ground near my home in about 28 minutes usually, a distance of around 4.6Kms.

Yesterday, since I entered the 3rd week, I thought I will push myself a bit more. So I tried to run just a wee bit faster.

To my surprise, it took me longer than my usual sub-28 minutes.

It took 30 minutes.  I had slowed down during the latter part a bit.

That made me think.

• Slow and steady may be boring. But is still a good strategy.
• Fast growth is not the answer to building a good business / financial portfolio / lifestyle.
• Focus on quality. Maintain priorities. Focus on goals, not on reaching fast.
• Don’t sweep things under the carpet in your race to pace it out.
• Think long term though few of them may be counter productive in the short term.

It is especially important that I keep these things in mind given my current situation. Gave up my job, too many experiments, lot of ideas, lack of execution knowledge, what-next situation, etc.

A tale of two cooker companies

A few days back a guy knocked on my door.

‘Saar, Prestige cooker repair & service maadbeka?’, he asked. (Sir, do you want to repair / service Prestige cookers?).

We didn’t utilize his service. But it immediately struck me how strong a brand Prestige was. I forgot all about it soon.

After quitting my job, I’ve been thinking of restructuring my equity portfolio. I thought I will take a look at a few consumer oriented brands like Asian Paints. Immediately, Prestige came into mind. So I took a look at the cooker industry.

And here’s what I noted.

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Market size

I was looking at the performance of Tapprs in the last one month.

Tapprs did reasonably well in June for a 2 month old venture (actually a respectable 5 figure). July hasn’t been bad either. And I have a few advance bookings for August too.

So, I should rejoice. Right? Well, not exactly! (Read this post first).

Before I get into details, let us keep in mind the fact that Tapprs handles two different things. Travel rental & photography rental. So what I say needs to be taken in context with what category it is in.. travel or photography.

Photography rental is my core service. Travel rental (sleeping bags, tents, bicycle, etc) is just an add-on. (Also, I am finding it hard to handle them given that people take it on treks, wet & dirty the items, return it without bothering to clean them, etc. It’s a pain! I may remove it off.)

I was checking the statistics for Photography today.

• SEO traffic is bad. Conversion is decent.
• Facebook, readers of this blog and friends are my best referrers! Thank you guys .
• 10% business is repeat.
• User feedback is extremely good.

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How do you allocate ownership?

If you are thinking of starting on your own, partnering is probably one of the most important things that can make or break your venture.

And am pretty sure you have concerns and doubts about ownership and how do you allocate it fairly between the founders? And who exactly is a founder?

Tough question to answer. Joel Sposky has done a fabulous job of answering it in detail here. I tend to agree on most things including on that of not treating a non-full time partner as a founder.