iNM Magazine Volume 7 | August 2015
Cover Story
THE AKOSHA STORY
Ankur Singla
found that “Kosha” meant something in Sanskrit – and
since we were too lazy to change it, it stuck (though the
flexibility did come in handy later)
The early days – a small start
We started off in September 2009 with a very different
idea. e plan was to sell legal documents online (a bit
like LegalZoom in the USA, which is apparently IPOing
this year). We started with Wills first (wasiyat.com). I
asked my father for a small space in his office in
Chandigarh and started off with an MCA graduation
from Delhi University.
Around this time, someone suggested us that we also
offer consumer complaint help for Indian consumers.
ough I was skeptical because I thought it was all too
complex (didn't have the simplicity of computer
generated documents), I still decided to add it because
we weren't making much revenue anyway. We got a few
customers for this but we still had no clue about what lay
ahead.
We closed ourselves in a room and started working.
Everything was fun and exciting. I read blogs of major
startups around the world and tried to understand what
went on behind them. We wanted to build for scale and
used to ask ourselves questions – “Will our website be
able to handle all the traffic and 10000 Wills at the same
time?” We obviously hadn't heard of minimum viable
product concept and continued to build new features.
Serendipity
Around this time, two lucky things happened. First, I had
a really bad customer experience with Airtel and I so
wished that someone could have handled that whole
experience for me – calling, waiting, speaking with an
incompetent agent, trying to escalate but unable to, call
dropped in the middle, and start again from the
beginning. I thought “Wouldn't it be great if someone
could handle such a thing for me? Man, I would even pay
for it.”
“We kept working and built the product in about 6
months and then launched it by sending it to 20-30
friends. ey all said that it looked like crap and that no
one would buy a will online in India anyway. Around this
time, Bhuvan left and joined a bigger company but not
before helping me understand a lot of technology –
which came in handy later. We also spoke to some
potential customers but a lot of people wanted a lot of
customization with their Wills”.
e second stroke of luck was when Rediff reached out to
us saying that they liked what we were doing and wanted
to write about us. ey wrote a really nice story on us
titled “How this startup simplifies law for the common
man” We got a LOT of traffic in a single day.
Moving on and nding a new name
I had been meeting Sameer from Morpheus off and on
and he had been pushing me to do a bigger idea and
market. Since the Wills idea hadn't really worked out, we
thought that may be it was time to try out a few other
documents focusing on consumers and small
businesses. We also did some Google search keyword
analysis and came up with 5 documents like wills, rent
agreements, power of attorneys, employment
agreement.
Guess what? Everyone clicked on the consumer
complaint help button and we knew that it was time to
change our focus again.
Around this time, I moved from Chandigarh to Delhi
since I thought it would be easier to build a team in Delhi.
So now, Akosha was running out of a rented 1.5 BHK in
Kalkaji in New Delhi.
Sameer, Nandini and I were sitting in a cafe and going
through a list of 400 names I had come up with the help of
a few friends but nothing was really sticking. Suddenly,
Sameer came up with Akosha (we had by then started
thinking about names of Indian kings! Yes, we were
desperate). It was an empty name “Akosha” – though
Nandini and I didn't like it much, we decided to use it till
we found a better name. We googled Akosha up and
Hustle
After the initial press coverage, the traffic dropped again
and we were back to thinking of how to get our next set of
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