90 days.
By: Jatan Bawa
Tags: Oral Health, Entrepreneurship, Brands, Knowledge, Consumer Goods

This write-up is long, long due.

I hate to admit but I really wanted to publish this on 15th November, 2021. I have procrastinated this for almost 40 days primarily because I’ve been super occupied building Perfora (www.perforacare.com) and getting a few things moving.

Now, you might be wondering why is the write up titled 90 days. Well, I want to share a little about how has the journey been for us over the last 90 days of building Perfora and what are my key learnings/realisations so far.

3 months is an important timeline because one gets a basic idea on how are things shaping up. Also, as a young professional, whenever I joined an organisation, I used to evaluate after 90 days if things are looking positive or not and then decide the next course of action.

Last 3 months have been an exciting journey with a few hits and lots of misses. And we’re learning everyday.

It isn’t easy to start something - get the basic framework in place, create brand awareness, get consumers to try out the product, get people to join you in this journey, etc. Like so many other brands/start-ups, we went through our own set of challenges and have accumulated some learnings so that we are better prepared as we go about building Perfora into one of the most loved and iconic oral care brands.

Key Learnings:

Patience: This is a super important quality/trait to possess when you are building something interesting/unique to an extent. When you launch a brand, most people assume (at least we did) that on day 1, consumers will come (flock)to our website and right away make the purchase. In reality, unless you have Kendall Jenner (or someone equivalent) as your business partner/investor, this is quite unlikely to happen. It’s not at all delusional to fall in love with your brand or product and have such expectations however it’s important to understand a consumer who hasn’t really heard of the brand, will take a while to finally make the purchase. It really is about developing that trust with the potential customer. Delays: There are things that are in your control and some things that you can’t really do much about. Irrespective, in the early days, with limited resources, you have to accept that the estimated timelines might go for a toss. To give you some more context, there can be a delay in getting the right person on-board that pushes the timeline for a certain deliverable. If the manufacturing is outsourced, there can be delays in the production runs due to one or the other reasons, resulting in delaying the product launch. Experiment: The only way to get your product, communication, channel strategy, etc. right is to keep experimenting unless you start seeing an uptick/high level of resonance from the consumers. At so many different levels you can experiment to understand what works/doesn’t work. For instance, one can test out if on the website, product-features led communication works better or benefit led or lifestyle oriented, etc. Similarly, what content type or format is working better on social media. One has to keep experimenting because nobody knows it all, at least for your brand. Feedback: To put it simply, the honest way to know whether your brand/product is adding value and if consumers are loving the experience is to speak with your consumers either over phone or whatsapp or email or any other medium that exists. If your early adopters aren’t raving about the product, it implies something is definitely broken and you need to fix that ASAP. Despite everything (communication, branding, supply chain, etc.) going haywire, if you are able to get unbiased positive feedback from customers, that implies you are onto something. Numbers: The harsh reality is that this world functions on numbers and for any brand/company, numbers play an important as it acts as a proof that there exists a demand for the product/service. The first & foremost focus should be on getting as much as revenue as possible and one should explore all possible ways to accomplish this objective. It really doesn’t matter if you are selling D2C or e-commerce marketplaces or offline retail or exporting, or multi level marketing, etc. People: If you are ambitious and intend to build a large organisation/brand, one of the truths you need to realise early on is that you won’t be able to build it alone and will need a stellar team to support and help you out. Early team plays a super, super important role in shaping up your brand and hence, it is critical that you are spending time while hiring and only getting those people on board who are driven and hungry to make a difference.

For us at Perfora, though it is still early days, we definitely have got two things right in the journey so far - people and product. The scale is relatively small but we like celebrating small wins.

I’m very fortunate to be building this with a set of people I look upto and they inspire me to do a lot better. In addition, the consumer feedback on our products is really amazing and it really motivates us to keep doing better & better. Absolutely love reading customer feedback emails!

A few things that we are in the process of figuring out is our brand & social media communication, supply chain, channel strategy, customer retention strategy, new product timelines, etc. The list is long and the picture is far from perfect. We have goofed up on these parts of the business in the past and are trying to streamline and improve ourselves.

I’m confident we will figure out a some of these critical things over the next couple of months and hopefully, keep elevating everyday oral care!

In case, you would like to chat and know more about our brand/journey, I’m at jatan@perforacare.com, and if you are keen to join an early stage consumer brand, please drop me a note. We’re always looking for rockstars.

Cheers.