The story of a start-up : Evolution after Chaos

Once we decided upon the name of the brand for our green products, and were happy with the sleek and unique name, we invited couple of our friends over momos and coffee to share our ideas and get their feedback as potential consumers. In the meantime, D had designed a brilliant logo for our brand, which further enhanced the name. M & L were our sounding board for the evening over yummy roadside momos [bootstrapping has its own unique flavors], we talked at length about our branding exercise over GreenFlip. We even talked about some tag lines, and L came up with ‘Fashion Flip to Green’, which won by 4:1 vote then and there, and we accepted and adopted the tag line. We finally had a cool brand name, brilliant logo and an excellent and tasteful tagline, all in sync.

In the next few days, we finalised the flagship product to start with. However, A was in discussion with another social enterprise making several other green products and was interested in marketing their products through our platform. Initially we discussed the products that we can market. We did a contract for promoting their green products that were not in direct collusion with our planned products.

Right from the beginning we understood clearly that an effective web presence is an absolute must for any modern business. Simply posting a website is not enough. In fact, uploading a website without marketing it is like posting ad copy only in your own living room — if your target market doesn’t see it, it might as well not exist. D & me developed the social media marketing strategy for GreenFlip, and we started to implement it over a variety of channels and started pushing the brand. We were using the regular networking sites along with blogs, and not so propular ones as well. Our web 2.0 enabled website started to get increasing traction, and our hard work was paying off with more queries pouring in from all over about our products. This also helped us in empanelling more GreenFlip Buddies to further develop the sales channel [http://www.greenflip.in/flip/greenflip-buddies/].

But soon differences among the founding team started to build our marketing ‘gag’ (the other SE) products, as D & I felt that the main idea behind GreenFlip is pushed on the back burner and we are moving towards becoming a marketing company for others products. We wanted to build and promote our brand. Our original visions for this start-up were moving in different directions.

The team had started to move towards the point where all members had differences in opinions and ideas for the start-up, right from product selection to marketing to design, and even website! It was the dark times for the start-up, and Chaos prevailed over any potential development. And eventually the team had a split in the 5th month of its existence, with A deciding to drop out of the start-up. The differences had grown so big that it didn’t seem possible to bridge it. I think that the founding team for any start-up needs to have similar personal values and professional vision beyond complimentary professional accumen. Asymmetrical teams do eventually have issues that restrict the growth of the venture.

In December 2009, we incorporated the company as GreenFlip Eco Solutions Pvt. Ltd in order to create a win-win ecosystem with matching goals and vision for the company [Read why it’s important to incorporate your start-up, http://www.stratessence.com/blog/get-incorporated-and-get-busy/]. We did a complete makeover of our website, started a green blog, did extensive business development, created a pipeline for future innovative products, recruited a smart BD & Sales head to lead the business development efforts of the start-up. In past four months we have done well, gone beyond our quarterly sales target, and do hope to keep going and innovating in coming future. Do visit us at http://greenflip.in and read more about the start-up.

Thanks for reading our story! If you want to share your start-up story, write to us at contact@stratessence.com