By God's grace, from a small place, my little village Tangra in the heart of North India, currently I am running my two business ventures Simbacart (www.simbacart.com) - an online shopping website and SimbaQuartz (www.simbaQuartz.com) - an IT venture. Along with my husband, with no money from bank ever, we have always bootstrapped our ventures and grew it organically believing in slow growth with no loans. Started my journey with Simbacart - an online shopping website selling ethnic footwear in 2013, the venture did nearly one crore of sales in the very first year. Being a passionate entrepreneur I projected the sales, double in the very next year and pooled in two local investors too. I mistook, by increasing my fixed assets to a greater extent even before my actual sales grew up. As a woman with just a startup venture in 2015 and husband staying abroad, no bank helped for unsecured loans. Things went haywire, and a major loss to the venture. I was working with around 20 employees and I left with just one due to scaling up failure of the venture. We lost the major portion of our money and even came under heavy debt. By the year 2016, I moved to my roots, my village Tangra from City Chandigarh, where I initially started my business along with my husband and later he moved to the USA for his regular job.
When everybody was saying NO and was asking me to shift to the USA, because there is a major loss, I believed in myself and ignored all the negative and restrategized our business. The best part of Simbacart is from day one, the venture has its own developers, engineers who framed its own self-sustaining back end with all the modules such as order management system, warehousing, accounting, cataloguing etc. My husband is an IT professional, he played a major role. From 2016, we came out with another venture SimbaQuartz an IT venture based on the work we did in IT wing of our parent venture Simbacart. We started customising backends for other businesses and e-commerce ventures. We pushed our IT product to the USA market too. Our strategy clicked in a very positive way, SimbaQuartz has been a profitable venture since its first Quarter. Not only it sustained itself, it also helped to bring the Simbacart back on track with its funding. Simbacart also won "Upcoming Startup Of The Year" Award by ASSOCHAM then. Without any outside loan, we repaid all our debts and even supported both the ventures further, made it even healthier.
Bootstrapped ventures, having growth trajectory month to month is very motivating.Time changed after almost five years of my roller coaster journey.It has become better. Today, not only my ventures, I also run "Mandeep Kaur Tangra Foundation" (www.mandeepkaurtangra.org) along with my ventures, wherein we contribute funds for the foundation as a corporate and support its free education and health mission. I feel lucky to have many other donors and supporters along who believe in uplifting the underprivileged.
My entrepreneurial journey took me to the renowned platforms multiple timesincluding TEDx, prestigious institutes such as IITs and IIMsfor the guest talks on my motivational journey as a woman entrepreneur, from a simple rural location where my father runs a small flour mill in the village Tangra. I still remember I was thetopperof my "Masters in Business Administration"but how tough it was to pay my university fee.My parents become completely helpless. It took months to pay all my fee, even after completion of my education.
My businesses, especially the IT business SimbaQuartz is a reward to the hard work, to the dedication, to the patience and the sacrifice of husband-wife who chose to stay in two different countries for five years and the passion is never-ending. The journey is long, challenging However rewarding. It's lovely.
We have nearly team of 30 champions, running all our ventures together like a family today. I dream of a Giving venture... Giving to our team, their families and yes definitely the neediest. To all the entrepreneurs, all the startup founders and teams, it's my suggestion to please have patience and do not give up even when you feel there is no way ahead, halt but never look back. You never know, your one venture is giving birth to the new one and even the healthier one. Learn, Learn and Learn.
My Honest Writings
Mandeep Kaur Tangra
www.mandeepkaurtangra.com