Travails of Entrepreneurship Part 1

I have been an entrepreneur for more than two decades now. And it has not always been smooth sailing. I have had a fair share of stumbling and bumbling along the way.

My first business idea was way back in 1987, when I was still in college. I was playing Donkey Kong on my Nintendo hand-held game unit, when I wondered why these units were not available in India. Because the Indian government back then was anti-imports, that's why. And the volumes that could be sold in India did not justify manufacturing them here. But what if I imported a small consignment, say 500 units and test the waters out? Well it turned out that there was no category under which I obtain an import license for these LCD games. It was possible, however to import components under an open general license (OGL) if I wished to assemble these units in India.

I borrowed some money from my dad, and traveled to Hong Kong with a friend to try and find someone who would be willing to sell me kits for these LCD games. We checked into a hotel near the Kai Tak airport; the hotels on Hong Kong island and in Tsim Sha Tsui were way too expensive; and started with the yellow pages. I called a few of smaller electronic toys manufacturers and set up appointments to meet with them across the next couple of days.

Not one was willing to sell kits unless I was willing to buy 10,000 kits or more. I tried arguing that we could look at higher volumes after we had tried the market out with 100 units. They saw the logic of that, but told me I would have to buy complete units if I only wanted a couple of hundred. This was turning out to be a bit of a problem.

On the fourth day, we took the MTR to the electronics market in Wan Chai to buy a set of watchmakers screwdrivers. Then we went back to one of the manufacturer and bought 200 game units. Across the next day, we sat in our hotel room and dis-assembled the units into kits. We placed all the LCD displays in one stack, all the Printed Circuit Boards in another stack and the plastic body components in a third. Then we packaged these three stacks into separate boxes and shipped them by air freight back to India.

We flew back to India, cleared the consignment through customs after paying the customs duty and then sat down to assemble the kits all over again.

We had started with 200, but we ended up with only about 180 sell-able units. Some of the LCD screens were damaged in transit and some of the units would not work after we had assembled them.
And, embarrassingly, we also had some parts lying around after we had finished assembly, that did not seem to go anywhere.  Rap's law of inanimate reproduction states, "If you take something apart and put it back together enough times, eventually you will have two of them."

I did not make money on that first business idea, but I did learn Rap's Law first hand.