Inder Phull of KRPT tells us his startup tale

by Startacus Admin

We love Startacus members telling us their tale, so step up Inder Phull a previous Self Starter of the Week who tells us his post graduation tale of starting a business, all the ups and downs along the way, and his current platform KRPT...

Starting a business can be one of the most rewarding yet challenging tasks you could face as a young entrepreneur. A common theme across all new entrepreneurs is that they will fail with their business in their first year of operation usually due to common factors such as lack of experience, internal skills and motivation to name a few.

This doesn't mean it is impossible though, tons of young entrepreneurs see their vision through every year with support from a good team, mentors and their network. This article will go over my experience so far as a graduate entrepreneur and my top tips for others working on their own businesses.

I graduated from the University of Birmingham (Economics) in July 2013 but have been working on my own projects for over 3 years now. My first project was a tech-based startup that was aimed at helping students find jobs abroad through a more rewarding and interactive application process. This was a huge challenge because it required me to understand a new language and it wasn't location based, this was programming and internet talk comprendes?

Aside from the gruelling development task we were faced with, the daily tasks involved networking with industry experts and potential customers as well as working on business plans and presentations to gain acceptance onto business incubators. This was almost as difficult as developing the product because to be accepted onto an incubator you usually need a strong team, prototypes and a good idea; developing all of these whilst managing a university degree was not easy to say the least.

It was a typical day for me being up til 3am working on a presentation or business plan for next day deadlines. Months passed and surely but slowly we got accepted onto our first incubator known as B-SEEN. This was a great experience because it provided us with mentors and business coaches that would drill the basics and the intricates into us as well as the initial funding you would need. If you haven't heard of NLP, you might want to do some reading now (insert link here).

In the end the idea didn't work out, it had a lot of flaws as a business that was commercially viable and I had already invested the funding on development of a beta product. I wasn't ready to dedicate another year on getting the product market ready when the key reason I started the business was for the experience. I felt like I had gained the understanding I needed by learning about the web and startups, the next step was going to be interesting..

A few months later we ended up looking at our skills and interests in more detail and started planning a project that would be fun to work on but would teach us a lot about more about our own career choices and develop chosen skills.

KRPT is a platform we developed to explore our interests in more detail, we took our 2 core focusses of music and skateboarding and decided to develop online & video content. This was more in line with our skills and interests as a team (graphic designers, marketers and videographers). Once we developed the brand, we started planning our video series and networking with people that could help us. This included meeting up with music retailers and our network of creative individuals.

The primary purpose of KRPT was to provide a platform for us to explore our industry specific interests and give our network a chance to benefit from our approach to forming a community. The next plans for KRPT include launching the first publication, Crossover - a music blog with our own series of music related videos featuring some of the best new producers and artists.

Working on KRPT has been our first insight into the tools you can use to make your business operate more efficiently, we started working with free tools such as Podio to manage our projects and Hootsuite to control our social media. We also started experimenting with Google AdWords and Facebook Exchange to traffic adverts across different platforms to drive engagement and test ways to get our content seen and brand seen.

As you can imagine the experience we have been through developed our skills by a large factor, we gained a lot of confidence that we are on the right track when we started working with large musicians and organisations.

Next week Inder returns with some of his top tips for entrepreneurs starting out...

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Published on: 25th January 2014