Serial entrepreneur K Ganesh’s is likely to place his next bet on the entertainment space. That too, offering it on the mobile.
GrowthStory, the entrepreneurship platform that Ganesh and his wife Meena have created, is seriously thinking about getting into this business, as entertainment fits in with GrowthStory’s overall theme of focussing on sectors with enormous growth opportunities.
“Entertainment is something new,” says Ganesh. His reasoning for wanting to enter the entertainment space is simple: the increasing smartphone sales and more people accessing internet on their mobile.
“People’s downtime is utilised in looking at it (the smartphone). Which was never the case earlier. When you were waiting, I am sure you would have checked it,” he adds. The last thing people do before going to bed is to check their mobile phone. And, the first thing they do on waking up is to again look at their phone. That was not the case with the desktop or the laptop. People even take the mobile with them to the toilet.
“No luck, still looking,” he says, when asked if he has made any progress on the entertainment front.
According to information on telecom regulator TRAI’s website, there are about 981 million mobile subscribes as on June 30 and about 300 million wireless internet subscribers (mobile and dongle). According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), 26.5 million smartphones were shipped to India in the second quarter of 2015, up 44 per cent from 18.4 million in the same period last year.
What GrowthStory typically does is identify a theme, put together a team including co-founders, invest in the venture, grow the business and raise funds from investors.
Focus areas So far, GrowthStory has focussed on education, healthcare and retail consumption. Entertainment, Ganesh feels, offers similar opportunities to grow, as in the other ventures – Portea Medical (home healthcare), BigBasket (online grocer), HomeLane (interior design), Avagmah (online education technology provider), AcadGild (online technology education) and FreshMenu (food ordering).
GrowthStory’s model is a unique one, says Ganesh, in a recent interaction at Portea Medical’s office in Domlur, Bengaluru. “It is a venture-builder model,” he explains. It identifies the sectors where it thinks there is enormous growth potential over a 5-10 horizon and sees whether it can create market leaders in those sectors. It then looks around for entrepreneurs who are passionate about the idea and the theme and kicks off the business.
According to Ganesh, GrowthStory looks for sectors where the growth opportunity is large, where the ventures fulfil everyday needs and where there is a pain-point that the ventures can address. It is large sectors and not niche sectors, because the chances of succeeding and building a large business are higher in large sectors rather than in niche sectors.
It is also must have versus nice to have, because it is difficult to get consumers to pay for something that is good to have than in the must-have category, he adds.