Didn’t get funded

Hello Rodinhoods,

Again an awfully long time since my last post since I’ve been going through a lot of ups and downs in my start up journey. For those who don’t know me, I run a gaming company by the name ‘GameEon’. I think there is one phase which almost all of us have gone through, rejection in getting funded. I would like to share our company’s story and how it affected us as well as how to tackle this problem and move ahead so that the grief doesn’t consume you. I really wish that after you complete reading this article your views would change and you’ll continue your business with passion and not passion for getting funded 🙂

Oh and before proceeding any further, this article is aimed to help young entrepreneurs who are really new on the scenario and not for the experienced ones who know what they’re doing.

So I bet at some point of time you must have decided to go for getting funded. At this point of time, you must have done a LOT of research on what type of companies get funded, which are the best venture capital funds nearby and a ton of other stuff. Countless number of hours spent on making spreadsheets with year wise calculations of operation costs, profit/loss statements, future plans for expansion of the company and between all this ignored the ground realities. I’ve also been there done that and before I proceed any further let me tell you that we’ve pitched almost 5 times to investors now and have got rejected. Now here comes the part of acceptance. Our business is too young to get funded. No matter how hard we try, at this stage it is impossible to get funded for us. And you know what? Thats the BEST part for us! We’re all 20-23 year olds trying to do what we love to do, make games. To give away any equity at such an early stage wherein we don’t have to worry about much its a really bad move to go for funding. We realized this pretty quick in our lives and I feel really good that we started out at such an early age in our life wherein we don’t have much responsibilities on ourselves. Anyways, so here I am, wanting to give you some insight on the world of investing and a mindset that young entrepreneurs like me have which is so wrong in itself.

We young entrepreneurs are of the mindset that we’ve to grow fast. We want it all at once and we want it NOW. There is this interesting piece of advice that my Dad gave me just a few months ago through an example. He told me to look at a tree and asked me what do you think has made this tree so strong? Now the answer to this I always knew, it was a result of years and years of patience and strengthening its roots deep within the ground. He gave me analogy between a tree and success. To be successful you need to have your roots strengthened. Only if your roots are strong, you can grow.

Now this was a conversation I was having with him during all the rejections and let me tell you, I was personally very very upset because of the same yet I never showed him this side of mine. But the timing of this conversation was very precise because I really needed some strong advice. This, and a series of events really changed my mindset. I took out some time alone, and I looked back to see the infinite number of hours we invested in “preparing” ourselves to get funded and suddenly it started to seem like a BIG waste of time. Of course this wasn’t a spontaneous decision and it was triggered slowly through a series of events as mentioned earlier but it was this moment of realization that really struck me. It reminded me of what we really started out for and what we were becoming. At the time that we started out we were really excited about games and over time that excitement got reduced and we were starting to become this boring “IT” company offering all the IT services that you could think of which included website development, android applications(yes, apps NOT games), social media services, etc. Our focus was completely shifted from games to almost everything under the sun that could earn us that few extra bucks. At a time when we paid market salaries to people working under us, we founders personally took very little salaries for ourselves. Next to negligible. Alok Sir knows the exact figure.

Somewhere deep within I did realize that we were shifting but I kept saying to myself that we’ll do this just for 1 year and then once we’ve got enough capital we’ll come back to make games. So 1 year was over and we were still stuck in offering IT services. And then snap to the time when we were looking out for investors because by this time we really wanted to come back to games. But our past experience had established us as this IT company which had no real focus on games. Now this was really good in a way for us because this enabled us to hire some really good people and get experience in the business world. We learnt how to deal with people and all these experiences really taught us how to do business. However, suddenly we observed that we were almost doing this 9 to 5 “job” and let me tell you it was really difficult to quit this. The worst thing that can ever happen to you is to see your passion turning into a chore for you. Lack of focus is what causes companies to fail. 

Next part I’d like to touch upon is the same. Lack of focus. So this was the time when we first pitched to a potential investing firm and got rejected. The first time is the most difficult one to gulp down your throat and digest the fact that you need to work out stuff to get it. The evening when we got rejected I called up Alok Sir and he picked up the phone. I was at loss of words and we had just met him a few months back for the time when our game “Cricket Tap 20” was featured on Google PlayStore along with Games2Win’s Turbo Cricket and Kursi Cricket. So the first thing he said to me was, “Hello Nikhil, I dont usually pick up unknown numbers but I picked yours.” It was almost like Universe had conspired for Alok Sir to pick up our call and an invisible SOS signal from my sadness had reached out to him. May be some divine connection? To make a long story short, Alok Sir gave us an amazing opportunity to work with Games2Win and develop 50 cricket games for them. But at the time our mindset was very unfocused and let me bring one more awesome thing about Alok Sir. We were sitting in his office discussing about these 50 games when I was mentally somewhere else and suddenly Alok Sir looked at me and said, “Focus”. It was THAT moment which really told me that our focus was shifted and I’ll be grateful to Alok Sir for the rest of my life for having said that 🙂 So we didnt really get to develop those 50 games because of our own lack of focus but the experience gained from this incident was invaluable

All these valuable experiences added to my realization that we need to change ourselves in order to survive and so we did some drastic changes. Here’s what we did:

1. We stopped offering IT services and started focusing ONLY on games. Even if we offered services that would be only game development services.

2. We stopped running behind getting funded. This helped us focus more on our business rather than just intellectually fantasizing about where we could take the company after getting funded.

3. We cut down expenses. A LOT. This helped us get more revenue in the bank and use it only when really required rather than spending on salaries and other dependencies.

4. I personally started meditating, again. I used to meditate during my 10th to 12th std years and I’m a huge Buddhist meditative tunes fan. So whenever I get some free time I make it a point to relax my mind and focus on the meditative tunes.

5. We decided we will NOT make this business to sell or get funded but because we really love gaming.

One more important thing we realized was that all this running behind getting funded made us “talk more and do less”. I asked myself a simple question, “Do we really need to get funded to keep this going?”. And of course, the answer was no. We entrepreneurs are about the glory and not money as stated in Alok Sir’s post. On our scale, this has helped us a lot since we are very young and have got 1-2 year before our parents start grinding us to get jobs. 

The advantages:

Since we’ve decided to not get funded we are at liberty to do what we love without a VC telling us to do what he wants. We get to keep our shares in the company and don’t need to dilute them to make space for VCs. In future if we really need to get a VC on board we’ll be more experienced and would have a definite company strategy. So this was a story of us not getting funded and how it really affected us in a positive way. So I would like to end this post saying that don’t run behind getting funded. Do what you love to do and if you get a VC who’s interested in funding your company then think twice before giving away your equity. And if you don’t have a VC interested in you, BEST. You might have less money in your pocket at the moment but let me tell you you’ll be more relaxed in your product strategy because you are answerable only to yourself. Grow your company, there’s no need to rush anything. Take your time, its your baby. You’ll always want to keep your baby to yourself and never distribute it, right? Also notice that having said that we are really young and have a BIG advantage, our age. We realized we will NEVER EVER get a chance to do something that we love to do in order to establish ourselves and now is the best time to do that. This was told to me by one of my Sir whom I approached immediately when I was conflicted in my mind. His words were as follows:

“If i were you i would go by the heart and not by the brain bcos you have a long life ahead of you and not having any responsiobilities as of now..

you will NEVER get a chance to do what YOU really WANT, never EVER in your life AGAIN (please concentrate on the CAPITAL Letters) its a one shot thing”

Whats even more awesome is that I’ve got my friend Prasad Kajarekar as the Co-Founder who has always been there in all times and I am highly grateful for that. Saying that, I feel really good sharing this with you people and hope this helped in some way 🙂

I would like to end this post with a quote from Batman Begins movie:

“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

About me:

Find me on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/Nikhil.Malankar

Twitter handle : @nikhilking

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+NikhilMalankar/posts

Email: nikhil.malankar@gmail.com/nikhil@gameeon.in/me@nikhilmalankar.com