This week we invited yet another passionate entrepreneur Pinaki Chatterjee for an interview with us to understand more about his entrepreneurial journey. Pinaki is the Founder and CEO of AADONA COMMUNICATION Pvt. Ltd. He has held various senior leadership roles with leading organisations and has over 25 years of experience in establishing businesses in India. He comes as a veteran in the IT network technology domain. Let’s learn more about his exciting journey, his background and his advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Pinaki:
Where did the idea to start something like this come from? Talk us through the journey so far, please;
AADONA was founded in June 2018 under Start-up India Initiative by 4 passionate technology enthusiasts who believe India has great potential and must have a premium networking technology brand of its own, AADONA is registered under Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Govt. Of India, MSME, Udyam Akanksha, GeM Market Place and is ISO9001-2015 certified brand, we got our first round of funding as a startup by mid of 2019, Until now most of the IT infrastructure and projects uses different popular MNC brand or cheap imports, but we at AADONA determined to change that, we worked hard to create an Indian brand that can deliver smart and cost-efficient solutions for IT Infrastructure requirements of SMB or Enterprise.
We are an Indian MNC in making. We’re based in select Indian regions and are expanding continuously. Inspired from Start-up India and Make In India we believe an Indian IT brand can unlock value and help drive business growth.
At AADONA we create a symphony of cutting edge hardware and software which is a combination that translates to business success, every single time.
The core team consists of domain experts with years of national and international experience in some of the world’s best institutions. We currently have a presence in major cities across India like Andhra & Telengana, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, New Delhi, Gujrat, Chhattisgarh and Orissa and plan to expand in other important locations by end of 2020.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
Over the last 20 years, I have worked with many multi-national companies and helped them establish their brands in India and the subcontinent. While working with them I realized for some reason its unfortunate that India does not have its premium networking brand that can compete with MNC’s and cheap Asian imports, India got a huge potential and most of the biggest brands are lead by Indian, you name it and you’ll find Indians playing a key role, be it NASA or Google.
Yet it’s strange to learn that in India, we are completely dependent on International brands and OEM, that is when I decided to establish an Indian premium networking brand that is channel and customer-friendly, we dream of creating a brand that goes from India and sells worldwide.
We know it’s not easy but If your dreams and aspirations are not big enough its not worth choosing entrepreneurship over a regular job.”
How do you find the industry/niche that you’re in?
Now in this modern era, there is nothing like niche as such (at least it does not remain niche for long and soon becomes common). It’s a wide market with wide customer demand, which makes us niche or little exclusive than other popular MNC’s are:
1) We are Startup India brand registered under DPIIT
2) We are Indian premium networking brand that can offer end to end products and solutions right from Active Networking, Passive Network and IoT.
3) We are preferred by our partners as we only work through registered partners and strictly follow ethics and channel-friendly policies
4) We never sell directly to end customer or sell online at any circumstances.
5) We have zero-tolerance for corruption which has now become very common in most of the brands and their partners have to feel the heat due to this.
6) We consider our team members as the most important asset for our brand followed by our customers. We believe people who are happy inside can deliver a great customer experience.
7) We do not follow the bureaucratic hierarchy, means we are easily accessible to our customers and partners, that makes doing business with us easy.
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e. what’s your source of motivation?
Good Question. the dream of making our brand as Indian MNC and most preferred brand for Indian customers is big dream enough that keep us always motivated right from jumping out of our bed to going back to bed.
If your dream is worth your time and effort, it will always drive you and not let you stop. We do face good and bad times during this process but what we follow is walk at least one step each day if you are going through a bad phase, every night is followed by a good and fresh morning.
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
Building a brand itself is a challenging task, that too we believed in the idea of Startup-India and Make in India when most of us believed that MNCs can only offer great product and services and Indian brand may be worthless, but we were determined to change this trend. We registered In India and struggled through setting up and convincing customers around, the biggest challenge was to convince a local investor to invest under the concept of venture funding, but as our intentions were strong and efforts were in the right direction, we got our first round of funding within the first year of establishment, yet our challenges are not over and we keep coming up one after another but with our determined founding team, we overcome them one by one.
Now we are working as a team to best utilize COVID-19 lockdown by scheduling online training and awareness sessions for our customers.”
What comes first for you – money or emotions?
For us, emotions come first – when I just had an idea, no product, no money, no resource. All I had was a dream/idea and driven by the vision 3 more founding team member joined one by one when they had enough options available rather than investing their time with no promised income to start with, this emotion towards our common goal kept us strongly bonded.
We face new challenges every day and every day we formulate strategies to fight it out and to prepare for the next. Money related challenges came much later when it was the time to take our first commercial step, that is when we started talking to different investors and looking at our passion/emotion we found our first VC soon who was quick enough to fund first round. Even today we are driven by our dream/passion/emotions. This keeps us moving forward without stopping.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
In last 20 years, I had worked for 4 brands that I joined as the first employee and had seen everything while working with them that is possible to see in a job, appreciation, success, failures, petty politics, internal corruption, competition, cheating employees, cheating employer and whatnot, but with strong determination, I fight back day to day basis to ensure I can deliver what I had committed to my employer as well as customers and was successful to a great extent and all credit goes to my team and the customers who kept their trust on me and stood by me to make it successful. Having witnessed everything closely nothing surprises me anymore and the best part is we have got a great team and the same customers who are still keeping trust and extending their support.
Business or a job without pressure or stress is not going to exist but what makes it easy is how you manage and how good is your team. Even then sometimes I do feel stressed out and I resort to meditation or visit temples and that gives me immense power to fight back.
What is one strategy that you believe has helped you grow as a person/startup?
Just be grounded, appreciate others for their effort and contribution, recognize them and give them their due credit. You cannot buy loyalty with money, money comes at the last, everything else except money matters the most.
In your opinion what are the keys to success?
Your team is the key to success. If you got a great idea but a bad team. it’s going to be a disaster, but if you have a great team but a bad idea, you can still hope to make it work, with great teamwork you can always achieve.
What advice would you give to someone starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
I always work on a tag line ‘add value to get value’. Don’t focus primarily on money or investments but keep your focus on creating a sustainable venture & value creation.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
