TheRodinhoods – The light when the future looks dark…

It’s the journey and not the destination which shapes up who we become in life.

Exactly 3 years back I left my job at KPMG, and started my journey of entrepreneurship with no idea about how to go about it. I decided the best way to learn swimming was to take a dip. (Metaphorically of course, because I don’t know how to swim in real life)

Taking the dip means different things to different people. To the neutral it’s valour, to the fellow entrepreneurs it’s passion, and for your loved ones it’s stupidity.

Whatever it means to others, it’s a critical part of the journey. Because till you have to hang to your venture for dear life, you would not be able to achieve anything at all.

When I started, for the first six months I had no idea what I was doing. I just had a thought and friends who shared my vision. But what I dearly missed was a Sherpa or a guide who would tell me what I should be careful about and what I should or should not do.

One year later, the grim reality hit me that we weren’t moving anywhere. Desperation kicked in. It was a feeling of drowning. Panic followed. We started hiring and firing. There was no easy way out. Around that time, I read an article on things we should focus on when starting a business. I just glanced at the source. It said therodinhoods.wpengine.com.

I had no idea what Rodinhoods meant, who ran it, how it functioned. But that one article helped me connect the dots.

I read more and more and starting discovering gems. Almost all stories were from entrepreneurs and each of them on key topics which were affecting us directly. I was surprised at how many people had gone through the same challenges we had.

I felt it would have been great had I known about Rodinhoods when I started a year back.

All of these learnings had greatly improved our efficiency and we were out with a good prototype in 6 months.We received great feedback. That’s when I decided to become an active contributor to The Rodinhoods, and pass on our learnings however small they were, in the hope that some entrepreneur somewhere would find it helpful and doesn’t have to go through what we did. That’s when I wrote this, my first article on The Rodinhoods. The amazing response I received from the community stunned me. I had friends in what was supposed to be a very lonely community.

Soon after reading our first article, Kanchan invited us to the TiE Bootcamp, where we got to connect with great mentors, who kept pushing and helping us. We were soon in the top 4 at the bootcamp. But during bootcamp, we had already started with My Cute Office. It was a simple concept on being able to share office spaces. Our mentors suggested we start working on it and we came up with a small prototype.

We put a post for feedback on the concept on The Rodinhoods here. The feedback was very important to help us validate what we were doing. It also helped us understand the market.

Soon we were going in full flow on My Cute Office. We presented My Cute Office at the Open House and received a tremendous response from everyone including Alok. It was one of the key events in our startup life. You can read the story of our launch here.

All this along with the co-operation we received helped us grow very fast and soon we had close an angel round.

We now have around 2000 workstations available in 250 locations in the country and requirement for over 5000 workstations in the last 6 months.

A huge part of the credit goes out to all you Rodinhoods, Alok and Asha. The community was our light when our future looked very dark.

You guys supported us to do what we thought! For that I and my team at Qpeka and My Cute Office owe you a big thanks! 🙂

We started My Cute Office because we went through a lot of pain when looking for our first office (you can read about here). If you find what we do as valuable, please do share it with your friends

In case you guys want to reach out to me, you can reach me on Twitter @AbhishekBarari