Mentor Speak: How biz nous takes new tech into the market
Saxena has been an entrepreneur for a long time and is still passionate about businesses succeeding. Last year he organised an event on driverless cars where he met Nisarg Pandya of DriveBuddy.
DriveBuddyai is a tool aimed at making driving safe using artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT. It installs cameras and uses AI that captures data as well as guides drivers. It is targeted at fleet owners and insurance companies to ensure that driving is safe and smart, but before this startup reached this stage it came across Sandeep Saxena who took it upon the role of mentor.
Saxena has been an entrepreneur for a long time and is still passionate about businesses succeeding. Last year he organised an event on driverless cars where he met Nisarg Pandya of DriveBuddy.
“Nisarg was one of the presenters. He is a total tech guy who is deep into programming, coding, software, hardware, raspberry pie and so on. While the work he was doing was very impressive, I thought he was like a typical techie who is good at his work, but knows little about marketing. I asked him when he would launch his product? He told me in three months, so I marked it on my calendar.
“Three months later I asked him about his product and he told me he was in a bad shape. He was thinking of shutting shop. That is when I offered him some advice. I told him that his product needs to go out of his office and into the market. Randomly, I picked out five car-fleet owners’ numbers from Google. I told him that I will call them. Three out of five will not respond. One will not be able to take the discussion forward and one will take it on.”
Which is what happened. One of the calls went forward. Saxena advised Pandya to give DriveBuddy to him for free. “It is important that you get your product out. Aditya Makheria, owner of Maksons fleet of cars was his beta customer. After three months when Pandya went to take back his product and Makheria asked if he could use it for a fee.”
Says Pandya, founder of DriveBuddy, “I met Saxena when I was struggling last year with my business. He was very keen to take this technology to the market. He showed me actually how to make cold calls. It was something I knew nothing about. He called people up and out of those we got our first beta customer.”
What Pandya gained from his mentor is not just a demonstration of how to make cold calls, but the need to understand the need to put your product in the market. “He told me how important it is to network, to be seen in the right places, how to position my product in the market, how to write a business plan. How to price my product. He advises me on almost everything related to my business,” says Pandya.
Saxena feels that most techies need some support in terms of marketing. “These people are very good engineers and often I have noticed that they know little or nothing about marketing, whereas business is first and foremost about markets and then about everything else. I feel mentoring has some limitations. I took it forward by giving him a demonstration of how to make cold calls.”
DriveBuddy now has two paying customers with three more fleet owners and two insurance companies in the pipeline. Cold calling could never get hotter.