Most of you know that we operate from Shimla. A small city by comparison with Silicon cities of India. Its very tough to find experienced or highly skilled people in these beautiful mountains. So we had no option but to build a powerful, aggressive and intense training system which can train freshers (with an aptitude) to be converted into marines.
These days we are training a new team. A team of freshers, from different educational backgrounds; commerce, science, MBA, mass-com etc. This team will be helping the content network move more aggressively. You might be surprised by our choice of team members, you might even argue on our decision of putting them in a single team. But we only hire on the basis of aptitude, not on experience or educational background. All of them might have different educational backgrounds; but they have lots of common things like hunger to learn, work under any pressure, no compromise for quality and a killer attitude.
All-Girls Marine
This new team is also an all-girls team. (We inducted few guys, but had to let them go in a week after failing to cope with the pressure). These girls from the day one, have been given tough assignments and a limited time to complete them. Yesterday, many of them felt that the tasks are very tough owing to the limited time. They required more time as they didn’t wanted to compromise on the quality.
Tough assignment is a sign of respect
My argument to the All-Girls Marine team was that the tough assignment is a sign of respect. I would never ask our office cook to do this assignment. Not because I don’t respect our cook, I respect him deeply for his contributions, but I don’t trust him doing content assignments. The toughness of the task is proportional to the respect you command. I don’t expect everyone to pass the training, and few might leave in between, which is actually fine, and I totally respect that. My father used to say, not every peak is a Mt.Everest. Every hill, mountain range has its own peak.
Flashback
One of the reasons, Instablogs has reached to this level (we still have miles to go), is that we had limited funds when we started. $1000 in cash and another $2000 in credit cards. Failure was not an option. We had extreme pressure to become profitable in next 3 months or go out of the business. I was a first time entrepreneur and had no knowledge of VC industry at that time. So to grow the business, the only option was to become profitable and nothing else.
Fortunately, we had limited funds.
This line of thinking may go against popular thoughts, but I feel that if we had good funds, lets say $50,000 or $100,000 at the time of start, we had a higher chance of going out of the business in few months. It was that pressure of limited resources, which forced us to think out of the box. I still remember the pilot team working at a stretch for 48 hours to launch the site on time. We were sleeping for 3-5 hours those days. One of the readers even suggested a new name for us– ROBN – Reverse Order Blog Network. We were anything but normal.
Fortunately, we had limited funds. Fortunately, we had limited time. Fortunately it was tough to do. If it was easy, everybody would have been doing it. Today I believe that limited funds at that time was a sign of respect by god to us, and one of the primary reason for whatever success we have today.
So next time you face a challenge, consider it as a sign of respect by god. A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure. Its only those who are fortunate enough are bestowed with pressure of tough times.
P.S.: New team is working with full throttle again. Why? Because, fortunately, this is tough to do. 🙂
Sanjay Nadkarni
Hi Folks,
1st let me acknowledge the fact that one of our care associates did indeed call Abhimanyu and request for the differential amount. Abhimanyu we owe you an apology and while the team isnt proud of our behaviour, all of us are committed to owning up and learning from the experience.
As an organisation our policy on price / price change is as follows: Consumers will always be billed at the lower the MRP and display price. Hence if the MRP on the item is lower than the display price our system takes care of this and in virtually every such case our customers have got a refund or similar compensation for the excess amount. In the event that the prices go up (like in your case), we invoice you at the display price and absorb the difference.
In the last few months given the kind of fluctuation that the dollar exchange rate has seen, price changes from brands have become quite common. There have been scenarios where we have the same product available at different price points across warehouses (we physically stock at Mum, Dlh & Blr). As a practice we dispatch the shipment from the warehouse that is closest to the recipient.
In your case we dispatched your order from our Delhi warehouse. The stock at the Delhi warehouse was fresh and we did have the same product at Mumbai at the lower MRP. Our warehouse team made a note of the discrepancy and updated the organisation. As a practice some customers do call and verify if prices on the product dont match the invoice. Our care team verifys the input and brings consumers up to speed.
In this case the information got picked by a new care associate, who made the call. We obviously goofed up in our induction and training. Being a little over a year old, I guess we still have some work to do on this front. Its unfortunate that the incident has happened, but we do acknowledge it and I truely believe that the team will learn from this.
Another point I will want to touch upon is our delay in giving you a response to your observation. Our system allows us to track orders basis ph nos, mail ID’s, order nos / shipment nos and names. While Rahul was corresponding with you folks earlier we were not able to track the order on any of the above variables. Thank you for having shared the shipment details, we were able to trace details on our CRM and play out the call over our IVR and share your experience with the entire organisation. I think we have reasonalbly good systems and will be glad to hear on ways in which we can improve. Our social team led by Rahul meanwhile kept the conversation going with you (personally I felt that we might have been a bit too passionate in some of the communication).
We are a young organisation with a single minded focus on making parenting easier. All of us are committed to creating relationships with our consumers and will be transparent in all our communication. Thanks once more for your patience,
asha chaudhry
happy b’day ankit!
where have you been and how have you been?
do update us on the last few years!!