Online gaming start-up founder Alok Kejriwal’s <em>Getting Dressed and Parking Cars</em> is a deep dive into the world of start-ups, the red flags one must watch out for and the importance of asking the right questions
He has been a gaming entrepreneur all his life, says Alok Kejriwal, author of Getting Dressed and Parking Cars, about himself. “My high is to create companies from thin air—an idea or a concept is all that is needed—and then build value for it,” he says. The book is about his fourth start-up, Games2win.
“This is not a book about start-ups or entrepreneurship so much as it is about the spirit of creating something new and getting started,” Kejriwal says in the introduction of the book. He has liberally sprinkled interesting nuggets of wisdom, coming from his personal experiences, throughout the book. For instance, just because many people are doing a particular business, it does not mean that the business is worth doing; or never succumb to starting anything without thinking of the “why” first, he writes.
At one place, Kejriwal talks about his plan to start a ready-made jeans business and how his strategy of raising questions to check the viability of a business helped him.
Here is an excerpt:
As I visited factory after factory, I noted the cost of raw materials, labour, dyes, electricity, overheads etc., for each type of jeans being produced. I listed in my diary every unique unit I visited, with the sales price and associated costs of that product audited by myself.
After a long dreary day, I reached home, showered and was treated to a grand dinner. A while later, I whipped out my diary and began to deduct the costs of each of the jeans I had studied from their sales price that I had neatly noted.
I was shocked by my calculations. Most of the jeans I had studied barely earned a meagre five or seven per cent profit. Some, including the stone-washed range, lost money! I chuckled to myself when I thought about the cost of shooting bullets through jeans and how unprofitable that idea would have been!
Then why were these manufacturers still doing this business? I assumed the entrepreneurs had just resigned themselves to meagre profits and kept producing, hoping that ‘things will get better’ (a typical entrepreneur dream).
They might have started the business on an impulsive whim rather than a thorough analysis.
The answer to the third question in my MDP framework came swiftly: this was a perfect example of a hyped-up business with minimum or almost zero profitability. While the traders and intermediaries would make their margins, the manufacturer (which is what I was planning to become) would be the loser. By the time I hit the bed, I had ditched the idea of being a jeans manufacturer. My MDP framework had done a fabulous job!
Lessons Learnt
Kejriwal sounds philosophical when he talks about how close he had come to failing and closing down Games2win multiple times. “This inspired me to detail all the episodes and motivate the reader to remember that it ‘ain’t over till it’s over’,” he says.
“As a committed capitalist and spiritualist, I am driven to demonstrate that these diametrically opposite worlds can coexist happily. That is how I live my daily life,” Kejriwal adds. Through Getting Dressed…, he hopes to encourage more people to try becoming entrepreneurs. “Starting something is an amazing high that should be experienced by all,” he insists, adding that the book’s chapters and stories prove that it is always about the journey and seldom about the destination. Meanwhile, he is all set to write his next book, titled Common Business Mistakes in 2024.