Srikant Krishnan: We Are a Global Product With Local Nuances

Srikant Krishnan of Snouters.

Tell us about yourself?

I am a hardcore BD and operations person.

I come with an experience of 10+ building marketplace business for both early stage startups and large tech companies.

I have worked across sectors like Hospitality, real estate, fin tech, food tech and grocery delivery.

What lessons has being an entrepreneur taught you? 

Being an entrepreneur requires one to unlearn a lot of the pre conditions of corporate world wile at the same time be able to go back to them as a guidance if needed.

It requires one to be a strong generalist who understands on all areas from finance and marketing.

If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

That don’t rush it. Building great things takes time, patience and lots of failures. The key thing is to be persistent and stick it out no matter what.

A lot of entrepreneurs find it difficult to balance their work and personal lives. How have you found that?

I have always considered life as a balancing game. It is not about work vs health or work vs relationships.

A healthy mind and body with fulfilling relationships around me empowers me to do incredibly during my day hours.

As an entrepreneur you get stuck in this zone of trying to squeeze out more work with every free hour. I look at it differently.

Where you set out a plan for the day, execute it and then take a step back and let things happen. It is a marathon not a sprint.

Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?

Snouters came into existence from a very personal problem. When my co founder Vinod adopted a pet and struggled to come to terms with the realities of everyday effort it takes we decided to solve the problem for the larger pet parent communities.,

What do you think is your magic sauce? What sets you apart from the competitors?

We are India’s fastest growing ‘Pet boarding and grooming services startup’ (link here to https://snouters.com).

Having built a scalable model to solve for all key services, we are on track to build the most trusted petcare brand in India.

How have you found sales so far? Do you have any lessons you could pass on to other founders in the same market as you just starting out?

Yes and we have been growing at a very exciting pace. Only advice would be to do unscalable things and then find ways to scale them.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced so far in your business, and how did you overcome it?

Building trust with pet parents has been probably the biggest challenge.

We have been able to do it by focussing on the core value proposition and doubling down on it.

Delivering on customer promise has been the biggest trust builder and word of mouth builder for us.

What do you consider are the main strengths of operating your business in India and the specific state you are in over other states in India?

We are a global product with local nuances.

We understand the customer sentiment and needs really well in India and helps us solve for that.

What (if any) are some weaknesses of operating your business within India and your state?

Indian customer probably is the most demanding customer globally.

Having access to some of the best tech apps in the world, the benchmark of tech intervention in any business is very high in India.

If you could operate your business in another state in India rather than the State you are in, which state would it be and why?

We would love to scale all metro cities and tier 2 cities primarily.

Tier 2 cities are majorly lacking in infrastructure when it comes to pet services

India has an incredibly diverse population. How has the affected your consumer base and business?

We fundamentally believe despite of the diversity core needs of the audience is the same.

As long as the product appeals to the core value prop it will work across cultures and states.

Infrastructure is really important to businesses. How have you seen India’s infrastructure improve recently? Do you see new opportunities opening up?

India in the last 10 years has seen a dramatic shift of gears across sectors, with a major disruption being caused by new startups coming into play.

What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 years with your business?

We want to become India’s most trusted petcare brand.

We want to become a one stop solution for everything pet care for pet parents in India.

And finally, if people want to get involved and learn more about your business, how should they do that?

This does not directly impact our business.

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