PersonalMBACoach wrote:
Thank you for posting your profile details. Overall this is a pretty strong profile for these schools! I am really interested in learning more about your startup. What kind of business?
While things look good, the quant is a bit low for your competitive set. It will all come down to how well you execute on your story. Have you started drafting materials or would you like help putting everything together?
Feel free to reach out and learn more about how we can help.
Best,
Scott
Thanks for the review Scott!
Here's a brief snapshot of my startup:
1) It was a consumer internet venture, think of it like a Craigslist but for college students only. Overall, we were trying to bridge the communication and networking gap in college communities, one of its manifestation was the need for a marketplace which connects students for their day-to-day needs of books etc and other academic and non-academic stuff (notes, electronics, carpooling, apartments etc)
2) I built the team and product from scratch, hiring interns/full-time employees
3) I supervised almost every function - product, engineering, marketing, finance etc
4) We're in the market to raise venture capital - investors were pretty interested in our idea, and we were extremely close to raising our seed round, until things collapsed at the eleventh hour - that is when we had to shut it down
5) We grew the product from zero to 10k registered users, 40k monthly visits, GMV of $20k uploaded on our website, with 10+ weekly transactions, average order size of $10 (ignore the dollar-rupee parlance, its just to give you info, our metrics were pretty decent from a India/rupee standpoint). All this we did with less an budget of less than $1000. And we never spent a dime on marketing, it was all hustling, and guerrilla marketing techniques.
5) Ignoring the end-result, this was a tremendous 13 months for me, I learned and did things out of my skin - coding, product management, marketing, hiring, motivating people to believe in our vision and to work for free, pitching at accelerators, to seasoned investors.
6) These 13 months changed my life - and when I look back, the thing that I enjoyed the most? Learning new things, seeing them getting applied, looking at the results, iterating, improving and hustling all the time.
My startup experience influenced me to seek a career in product management, probably the closest role to being a CEO. Its a role which involves immense leadership skills, people management, influence without authority, and cross-functional business/technical knowledge.
The bottomline for my career choices has always been to learn new sectors/industries/functions, think out of the box, apply analytical solutions to complex problems, and keep challenging yourself to move out of your comfort zone.
And this is what leads me to make a move to strategy consulting as well, for which I consider an MBA an important stepping stone.
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29 Apr 2017, 00:37
