Yoga Bar (Sprout Life Foods)

Why we built Yogababy:    It has been a year since we launched Yogababy. We do very little sales and we make significant losses.     Our mission is to help mothers have an alternative. We spend money on quality ingredients and our Gross Margin is 1/3 that of that large company recently in the news*. We also have extremely low shelf life as children don't need preservatives. It does make our business extremely hard but that is a choice we made.    I am a mother. When we create products, this is our checklist. - Can my kid eat this everyday - Is it clean labelled - Is it nutritionally superior to everything in the market - Is India better for this product?  That’s precisely why I started the Yogababy range which I developed using my grandmother's recipes and high-quality ancient grains like millets, and other nutritious ingredients like real saffron, fruits and nuts. Quality has always taken precedence for us. We would never compromise on the well-being of your kids. Just as I would never compromise with the care of my own child. I wish more companies had a “Is it good enough for my family approach” and less PL approach. I wish they spent less on getting actors to endorse their products and more on the quality of nutrition. I wish they truly understood “All lives are equal and their products should not discriminate”. I am sad to read the news about this MNC. But also a good day to tell ourselves "This is why we launched Yogababy. Proudly Indian. Soon to be in Dubai, Maldives and the US". Our gift from India to the world (traditional Indian food we always consume). Every single pack made exactly the same and made with 100% love and goodness. We wont have it any other way.

What can Kanye West teach you about business? Blame it on a fractured arm and leg but I got to spend my weekend watching Coodie & Chike's documentary of 20 years of Kanye West in the making. Three things had me thinking really hard. He’s never lacked confidence, he’s always been keen to push boundaries and he’s always been motivated by disproving his doubters. 1) His tremendous self belief “They say ‘overconfident’ like it’s a bad thing. How can you be overconfident? You should be overconfident. You should have more confidence in yourself. But they want people to fade into the gray. I’m going to tell you how I feel about myself. I am the greatest. And you should feel that way about you.” - Kanye West  2) His mum shines through the documentary - giving her son all the support he needs. We all need that one person who truly believes in us.  “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good… it’s gotta pay off. You can’t go over there and do nothing but blow up. The main thing is, you gotta do something that you really love to do.” — Donda West 3) He innovated with his genre and beats even while keeping his music extremely relatable to his audience. 4) He knocked on every single opportunity and the "no's" did not deter him. He created opportunities by pushing boundaries in his music, fashion and finding the big names who would give him 10min of their time. He had a vision for himself and had tosee his dreams coming to "fruition" (such a beautiful word). PS - Runaway Soundtrack - courtesy Kanye

ET reached out for this article and is a relevant take on our industry. There was a bit there on brands like ours exiting through strategic acquisitions. Aditya Anand and I have been working together on doing a series of posts about our experience: #1 Category share is the most critical metric. How much market share in all the categories you operate. One could easily confuse a brand sales to be large but what is equally (or maybe more) important is what are the categories you operate in and how much are you taking YOY. Strategics value depth over breadth. It is easy to keep gaining scale by launching categories every year but that rarely fits in a strategic's plan. A crude example here is a food company trying to sell personal care. Even if an FMCG company does sell both food and personal care acquisitions are done by business divisions and rarely by the entire company. This actually happened with us. An MNC was only interested in one part of our portfolio and valued us accordingly. Every single company asked us this. A few companies wanted to acquire just one part of our business. Obviously, that also means that we get valued like that and that is rarely OK. The more disparate the categories are the harder the exit process is. ——— Briefly talking about the others but might do a detailed post on each: #2 Omnichannel growth: Definitely very important. Strategics want to believe that their distribution will help the company scale their topline. Showing acceptability across all channels and multiple geographies is needed. #3 Actual cash collected: So important to show success offline (Success offline is measured by the cash you collect from trade and the inventory churn of your products and not just the sales you record). #4 Profitability and Gross Margins: At least a clear path to it. #5 Investment needed: Remember their total expense is not just the equity they're buying. It is also the investment needed to grow it and the losses incurred till the time the business stabilises. The fact that we raised only 60 crore till our acquisition* gave our strategic a lot of confidence that the revenues and brand love came from repeat consumers and we didn't just "buy sales". #7 Projections and Business Plans: While a VC spreadsheet can be ambitious and sometimes over optimistic... a strategic's business plan has to be as close to reality. The payouts are usually not paid all upfront (at the scale of most startups). The deal construct is often based on the reality of these topline and bottomline numbers of the achieved business plan numbers. #6 Comfort with the promoters: Acquisitions are also leaps of faith as much as they are about numbers. #7 Quality of Sales #8 Valuations #9 Value add that the strategic can bring in #10 Quality of team This is not to overwhelm. Remember, businesses are run by heart as much as they are by excel sheets. As they should. Especially when making healthy food :)