akosha
TURNING ADVERSITY INTO OPPORTUNITY | ANKUR SINGLA | CEO AKOSHA
Turning adversity into opportunity Ankur Singla CEO, Akosha
Akosha is an online consumer forum platform for consumers to lodge their complaints against any brand in India. It takes up the consumer complaints with the escalation departments at leading brands. If a consumer does not get a resolution to their complaint and insists on approaching a consumer forum, then Akosha helps the consumer in approaching consumer court across India by providing them the required assistance.
I started my professional career with Linklaters in London as a corporate law advisor after I graduated from NLS, Bangalore. The work was decent and life was cushy but there was still something that was missing – I was never in the thick of the action; always at the fringes. After a point, the long-
ing to do something on my own got too much to contain and I quit three months before the end of my contract. I came back to India and asked my father for a room in his office where we, I and an MCA grad from Delhi University, could work from. We started off in
September 2009 with a very different idea. The plan was to sell legal documents online which was a bit similar to LegalZoom in the USA but we decided to start with wills in the beginning and called our venture wasiyat.com. We just closed ourselves in a room and
“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” ― Lou Holtz
started working. In the early days, we hadn’t heard of the minimum viable product concept and continued to build features. I collected information on major startups from blogs around the world and tried to understand what went on behind them. We wanted to build for scale and used to ask ourselves questions about the robustness of our website. We kept working and built the product in about 6 months and then launched it by sending it to 20-30 friends. The responses were that it did not appear too good and chances of anyone buying a will online were very low in India. Since the wills idea had not really worked out, we thought that maybe it was time to try out a few other documents focusing on consumers and small businesses. We also did some Google search keyword analysis and came up with 4 documents like wills, rent agreements, power of attorneys and employment agreements. As all this was happening, someone suggested us that we should also offer consumer complaint help for Indian consumers. Though there was skepticism in the beginning because I thought it was all too complex as the simplicity of computer generated documents wasn’t available then. However, we still decided to add it because we weren’t making much revenue anyway. We got complaints from few customers but we still had no clue about what lay ahead. Around this time, two lucky things happened. First, I had a really bad customer experience with Airtel and I so wished that someone could have handled that whole experience of calling, waiting, speaking with an incompetent agent, trying to escalate but unable to, call dropped in the middle, and the starting again from the beginning for me. The thought that came was that I wouldn’t even mind paying for such a service. The second stroke of luck was when Rediff reached out to us saying that they liked what we were doing and wanted to write about us and they went on to write this really nice story titled ‘How this startup simplifies law for the common man’. We got a LOT of traffic in a single day. Everyone clicked on the consumer complaint help button and then we knew that it was time to change our focus again. So, it was only a lot lat-
er and after lots of iterations that the current model of Akosha came about. We started Akosha in its current form in October 2010 with an intention
of building India’s largest customer service platform. I needed to make sure that we are moving forward on the things that matter and that we are constantly improving and growing. I also needed to ensure that the team works together and that they have everything they need in order to make Akosha a long term success story. During this journey, the biggest obstacle I faced was getting a technical person on board. I wrote about it in detail in a blog entry titled – Saat Developer Maaf. After trying out seven developers, none of whom stayed for long, I got down to cold calling technical people who I felt could help me out. Finally, I was able to get my CTO after conducting 109 interviews! With some amount of luck and a lot of hard work, Akosha has come a long way. Starting with 10 customer service issues a day, we hit 100 daily issues in 2012, 600 in 2013 and today we get more than 2500 issues daily. From a single person in a 2 BHK in Kalkaji, Delhi, we have grown to 130 people with a nice office in Okhla, Delhi. Our vision for Akosha is to make it that singular
place where people facing all kinds of issues against all sorts of companies can come and file their complaint, with an assurance that something will be done about their problem. We want to
be a household name in that regard. My opinion about taking a step in the direction of entrepreneurship is that one should certainly go for it. Although as an entrepreneur, one always carries the risk of turning the prime years of your life into dust if the venture fails and a lot of effort is required in crafting a success story. Owing to the work that lay ahead, I couldn’t find the time to watch movies, meet friends, spend as much time with family or pay attention to my health. But these are things that you don’t even think about at that time because you are so absorbed in working for your true love – the venture. There is a lot of material already available related to startups. Go through them and you will be able to avoid the most common mistakes that young entrepreneurs make. Keeping at it and one will be able to break through most of the problems that most of us face. So, if you decide in the positive direction, then don’t hold back – give it your all and commit fully. You will regret it later if you don’t.
“When all is said and done, more is said than done.” ― Lou Holtzdan Belfort
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