This week we invited another passionate entrepreneur – Subhashis Ghatak, co-founder at Zamosh Services Pvt Ltd, for an interview with us to share his journey and his experience with our community. Subhashish has an entrepreneurial bent of mind since his college days. His very own long-unsolved problem of getting laundry done and the untapped market in this space, led to the founding of Zamosh Services Pvt Ltd.
Zamosh provides best laundry, dry clean and tailoring services in Kolkata. Its technology-integrated infrastructure ensures the best quality with pick -n-drop service from the comfort of your home or office.
Lets read more about his journey, way forward and his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs !
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Subhashish:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your startup please;
I am Subhashis Ghatak, Co-Founder of Zamosh Services Private Limited, a three-year-old startup in the laundry sector. Despite hailing from a no business background, love for creating products to solve life’s problem has been the fuel driving me. During my school days, I used to sell game CDs. In college, I was associated with a small restaurant owner and tried to reshape his business. During my last two years in engineering, I worked with him closely and turned his venture into a profitable business model. I joined Tata Consultancy Services after completing my engineering and my corporate career took off. While I was in Hyderabad during my training in TCS, I faced a lot of problems in doing my laundry and that kept me occupied over weekends also. During the next few months, I discovered the huge untapped market opportunity and I started to look for a viable solution that could turn the mundane chore of doing laundry into a lucrative and sustainable business.
Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
I always have an entrepreneurial spirit in me. The ambiguity in startup space has always attracted me. Exploring new ideas and new aspects always motivate me to push my boundaries. The unpredictability and uncertainty help me to think differently and work towards a bigger picture.
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e. what’s your source of motivation?
In an entrepreneurial journey, every day is a new day, every challenge is an opportunity. You need to change your product and service to fit in customer’s requirements.
“A lot of time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – Steve Jobs
Understanding customer requirements and changing the product as per customer needs are very essential to run a startup. These aspects trigger my mind to get up and try harder every single day.
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
We are one of the early organized player in the online laundry sector in Kolkata. During our market analysis, we understood that organized players do exist but they were charging an exorbitant price to customers. So clearly there was a huge gap between supply and demand. We decided to start Zamosh. Our biggest challenge was to maintain premium quality at a very nominal price. Quality plays the most crucial role because clothes are very close to people’s heart and issues with even a single cloth can ruin your business in no time. As the Laundry sector was much unorganized at that time, finding the right resource was very difficult. Initially, an e-commerce marketplace aggregator model seemed very lucrative but that never worked for us. There was a scarcity of quality and standardized backend vendors and aggregating with such vendors can impact our quality and turnaround time which two are the pillars of Zamosh. So setting up one 24/7 centralized warehouse with a minimum fund and optimum throughput was one of the most challenging parts. So building a product from scratch using the product-market fit and create a seamless user experience was the key.
Tell our audience more about your failures? How should one bounce back?
I always cherish my journey, not my destination. Even today we are facing uncertainty in every passing day. Being a good company is non-essential when things are going well. But things always go wrong and being a good company at that time can be the difference between life and death. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, be boring. Even businesses with great products and hungry markets can fail.
If you don’t take care of the “boring” stuff, your company won’t last long enough to deliver on all the promises you made to your customers. It’s a marathon, but not a 100-meter sprint! It’s a long-haul game; you need to be slow and steady to win the race.
How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
That is the most fun part of an entrepreneurial journey. Zamosh is my brainchild and taking care of my baby was never a pressure or stress for me. Whatever comes to my way I accept it as an opportunity and that is the key.
What advice would you give to someone starting out, particularly to aspiring entrepreneurs?
A startup is not that glamorous as it sounds. It is very hard to become affluent with name and fame is no time instead people should start reading failure stories to understand the real struggle of an entrepreneurial journey starting from developing business models, creating a website to distributing pamphlets.
“Life is a struggle “-Karl Marx
“Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through ‘The Struggle’ and they did, so you are not alone. Having said that, it does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.” – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
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.
