Making Something From Nothing: Adi Patil Of Start It Up NYC & Rriter On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
A team is made up of talent, but each talent has a different personality. You need to make sure you are getting the right personalities together to create a formidable team. A team that is passionate about the goals of the company, and works and enjoys together, creating an amazing culture that defines your company and workplace.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Adi Patil.
Adi is a seasoned digital marketing and software development executive, frequent key-note speaker, and prominent figure in the US tech-marketing ecosystem.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I was born in the US, in Shady Grove, Maryland, and grew up partially in India. Some of my schooling took place in Russia. Growing up with kids from diverse backgrounds around me really helped me understand more of the world at an early stage in my life. I would credit my childhood fully for the multicultural and social person I am today.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”– Lyndon B. Johnson
I have faced a lot of hardships in my life, from my parents getting divorced to losing both of them pretty early. I think focusing on today and tomorrow has helped me look at life positively. Maintaining good intent every single day is extremely crucial to getting over the constant pain points in your life. Especially, if you have lost near and dear ones. Loss is personal and permanent.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Well, I have probably mentioned this in multiple interviews, but Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is my favorite book. The writer coined the phrase Catch-22. I truly believe that life is full of Catch-22 situations and once you learn to solve these, you can truly overcome anything.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
I think ideation should be given only as much attention as it deserves. “A good idea” is fairly subjective. In business, once you have an idea, you do have to conduct market research and financial analysis pretty comprehensively to determine whether the idea is worth executing. You also have to define the point of success for an idea and find the best path to get there. Time is money, so you’d rather execute one feasible idea a year, than try 10 and depend on chance.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
It doesn’t matter if someone else thought of it before. Someone else thought of Facebook before, Myspace had ample time to establish itself. Facebook got it right and published the most simple social media platform when it launched. Users were drawn towards the simplicity of facebook’s interface initially as compared to Myspace’s UI with the music on profiles, the top friends section, and whatnot!
The point is, think about how you can do something better, even if it’s already done!
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
First of all, the product has to be top-notch, so start with making sure your idea is really original, so you can file a patent. You must look into what type of patent you want to file. For example, a utility or design patent. Do your research, look at competitors, and apply for a patent you have the best chance of getting. You should get a good lawyer for your filing process. Connect with and get any queries you have answered from the United States Patent and Trademark Office — https://www.uspto.gov/.
In terms of sourcing a manufacturer, find one that can develop your product exactly how you want it, and in fact, help you enhance it. Make sure their manufacturing facility is highly-scalable, for whenever your idea takes off.
Retailers and distributors are really important. Take the tabasco factory in Louisianna, for example. That little bottle of sauce is in every restaurant in every country today, all thanks to the amazing distributor they found in New York, ages ago! Make sure your retailers have great traffic and distributors have great reach.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
- Do not undercharge for your services, just because you are a new company.
When we launched Start It Up NYC, we were both excited and desperate for clients. We ended up getting a lot of those pretty soon, but for a price that would cost us an unreasonable amount of time. Not only that, we got categorized in a fairly low price bracket for our services. So, when people recommended us, they definitely advertised our pricing. It took us a long time to price our services fairly, and start making a significant amount of profit. Luckily, today, we are 4 years into the business, and going strong. But, we did make the mistake of undercharging for our services early on.
2. Smart networking can save you time.
It sounds cliche to discuss ‘smart networking’, but when we launched, we would take any and all meetings, in person. Especially, since this was in the pre-pandemic era, human interaction in person was on a high.
It is really important to spend your time networking with individuals that you can benefit from and vice-versa. You cannot spend time networking at events or meetings, when what you do and what other people do is completely unrelated and irrelevant. In most cases, you can assess this, before you plan on meeting anyone or attending any event.
3. Communicate as much as you need to.
Communication with clients or customers should be clear and concise, but you also need to make sure you communicate more if needed. When I was new to the business, leading Start It Up, I would often feel weird about ‘disturbing’ my clients too much. Which would in turn cause a little bit of miscommunication or my deliverables would end up being unsatisfactory at times. Then I realized that I had to build a rapport with my clients, well enough, so that they didn’t feel like my over-communicating when necessary would bother or disturb them.
Eventually, I caught up to speed with my communication skills when I was managing a client, and today it’s like smooth sailing for me.
4. Get all of your management tools and technology together before you start leading a team.
This is technical but critical. I wish someone had told me that I should have my project and task management dashboards, social media dashboards, CRM and sales dashboards, email, and team communication platforms set up and settled right from the beginning.
Your entire management infrastructure being smooth can help you save so much time, and make decisions way faster based on various KPIs and metrics that you identify. You can easily keep track of everything going on on any particular day in a matter of minutes.
5. Hire the right people, and this is not just professional, it’s also personal.
A team is made up of talent, but each talent has a different personality. You need to make sure you are getting the right personalities together to create a formidable team. A team that is passionate about the goals of the company, and works and enjoys together, creating an amazing culture that defines your company and workplace.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Research — Analysis — Goals — Financial Planning — Team Building — Product Building — Q&A- Branding — — Marketing Plans — Launch — Marketing Execution — Achieve Product-Market Fit — Scale — Continuity in Retention and New Acquisition. This is the journey. Plan and envision each step in the journey with a lot of attention to detail before you decide to execute your idea fully.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
You always need a second opinion, whether it’s a co-founder or advisor. If you are launching a product in a field you are not well-worsed with, I would definitely recommend getting a consultant that has a proven track record.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
It really depends on the product or service you are offering. Service-based businesses can generally be bootstrapped for starters. Product-based businesses generally need funding. But again, this also depends on your personal financial situation. So there are a lot of things to consider before making a decision as to how to financially plan your process.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Well, probably not as much as I’d like to. But I guess that’s a good thing, it means I will continue to do more and won’t get complacent. I try to give back as much as a can. Pay my employees more whenever I can. Donate to food and education drives. I am doing my bit, but yes, I’d definitely like to do more.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I think in the grand scheme of things, education is key. The world is full of people not getting a proper education. I’d like to encourage people to create more free programs, and sponsor any kids they can through college. We all know we can’t only depend on the government, we need to constantly give back to lift everyone’s lifestyle and facilitate growth.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I think I would love to grab lunch or coffee with Elon Musk. I am curious to see what he is like in person. His business decisions are so unpredictable, yet always correct. I would love to know how he makes it all happen. I will make sure to tweet a picture with him if this does happen. Haha.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Adi Patil Of Start It Up NYC & Rriter On How To Go From Idea To L was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
