what is The Goodfellow Startup?

 

                                           Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

"Companionship Company", a start-up for the elderly to accompany them in their time of need.

In today's time you can pay for rent grandkid, yeah, you heard it right. Goodfellows is a startup company that focuses majorly on elderly people. The company recognized that almost half of the aged people are lonely at this stage time of their life, and for this, there could be any reasons, their kids could be busy with their work or they have gone to states for better opportunities, etc, so living without their kids to talk to or to support them in their 70s, become very difficult, this leads, Shantanu Naidu the idea of creating something which solves this issue of loneliness among elderly people.

Shantanu Naidu works as a business assistant to Mr. Ratan Tata, the Goodfellows startup got high praise from Ratan Tata for its idea of Intergenerational Friendship. According to the census from recent years almost 14 million senior citizens live alone in India or they are not properly taken care of, they have to live an isolated life, they lack emotional support, and relationship bonds, and they don't have anybody who could possibly care them at least spend time with, understand their needs and amenities for their own, and it doesn't mean that this issue can be solved simply by assisting them with caretakers, as it could never replace the bonds, this could hinder their mental as well as physical life.

This startup will deploy only young graduates from the age of 20 up to 30 to build the relationship between both so as to rejuvenate the happiness they lost and to eradicate the isolated life. These goodfellows members who are going to take care of the elderly pals will be given proper training, and more than that the whole point is taking care of them wholeheartedly, there is a process for paring with the grandpals, they will be together only if both are a good fit for each other. Goodfellow drives to do the things that grandparents wanted to do with their kids, like for instance going to the park with them, helping them with their tasks and spending time with them, not only for the elderly but for the Goodfellow member also a great experience, in today's time it's difficult to manage without technology, goodfellows can assist you in that also, they can schedule according to the timings preferred by grandpals. Not only that they even take care of doctor’s appointments and other homely tasks, just like how grandkids take care of their grandparents.

There are many other platforms similar to this idea but the factor which distinguishes them is the empathetic understanding, we may never be able to produce some called true companionship, Shantanu Naidu says the startup is not focused to generate profits, besides the only reason why the company runs for profit is just to pay for the graduates for their services besides with a paid employees there will trust due to this they will take this sincerely also, the reason why most of the NGOs failed, due to the uncertainty among the service providers.

The company is in the beta stage, once it is completed then they officially launch in the subscription form, As with safety, the company is fully concerned and they have worked on this aspect by making introductory meetings for trust in one of the major factors despite background checks the company is also focusing on many other steps to make safety very tight.

  

Market leader

           HOW CAN WE DOMINATE THE MARKET 

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

If we talk about motor vehicles then Ford Motors used to be the market leader at the beginning then Toyota overtook general motors and then Volkswagen. If you observe, market leaders are continuously are changing. Why is this happening?

In telecom, airtel used to be the leader but with the entry of the jio market got disrupted and by now they are competing among themself. In the computer chip market, Intel is the lead as we have heard about i3, i7, i9 but if we research more then we see that AMD is also giving a tough competition to intel maybe in coming years AMD could dominate the computer chip,

One thing is clear that if you want to become a market leader then you must have to be passionate about your company. if you aren't then your strategies would fail so let's see how can we become a market leader. 

In this, there are  three types for to capture the market, first one is we took the market leader as our competitor and starts to compete with,

The second one is we took our level of competitor and took their share of the market to our advantage slowly to grow our market by beating others 

The last one is we took the small market leaders, competing against them all to become a market leader. 

In India Flipkart and amazon used to be the leader but Walmart has acquired Flipkart to become a leader here Walmart has a lot of purchasing power. Recently, the trade and union of India have disapproved Walmart to acquire Flipkart they claimed that it would lead to market disruption. And this there are two to three types of it first one is we took the market leader as our competitor and started competing with them the second one is we took our level of competitor and took their share of the market to our advantage and slowly to grow the market by beating others and the last one is by taking the small market leaders and acquiring them all to become a market leader

There are  4 major attacking strategies that could get the product into inside the market and can acquire the already existing market, are general attacking strategies 

The first one is frontal attacking strategies

 Meaning attacking from face to face, basically attacking straight forward, here you need to invest more capital, so to market your products, need to have less price than your competitor, even in loss also you need to have more marketing budget than competitors. We need to be ahead in each and every front than our competitors if you want to do a frontal attack then you must have a huge budget. 

Airtel and jio are the best examples. Jio used a frontal attack strategy by providing free data in the market. jio disrupted the market, Mukesh Ambani, incurred a lot of money into the market to beat airtel in the telecom sector therefore airtel was unable to compete with jio and a lot of potential customers shifted toward jio most of the customers have both jio and airtel but now customer got used of free service. jio is not free now, the price is almost the same for all operators but still, jio has positioned in our mind that it provides free telecoms because earlier it was known for its free services and automatically now whenever we need to choose between the telecom services our first thought would be,jio services would be cheaper than other telecoms even though it isn't the case now.

 The next one is a flank attack 

Meaning identifying the market gap of a particular product, which competitors aren't targeting, because it enables us to innovate besides we can introduce unique products in the market. 

The next one is encirclement attack

Hope you heard about sun microsystem if not then you might have used java. It is founded by sun microsystems their competitor was Microsoft. So what they did to beat Microsoft was they sold their license to small firms as a result, java was used by many developers, and when the digital era kicked in, java became the market leader as most of the developers know about it and used java, so here you did not attack at the front, you attacked at the back. Here you did not let your competitor know about your attack you need to let know them when you are fully prepared and the time is over for them now, you need to think about how you would use these strategies to your advantage. 

The next one is bypass attack

 It simply means, fulfill all the requirements to go beyond what is already done by the companies which you think could lead to your product meaning improving or updating so, that consumers don't have to change their products consumers did not have any alternative in buying my product. Let's take an example google and yahoo, so google introduced a perfect search engine algorithm which yahoo doesn't handle take the example of android,

Before Android, Symbian used to be the market leader and at that point, google offered Nokia to operate under android but they refused, today all Nokia phones are on android but Nokia lost its market leadership. 

At that point if Nokia had bought the android then there would have been a different scene if we see, almost all phones are of the same design we look past Nokia phones then all the models are of different designs they used to work on innovation now Nokia does not have any more leadership.

So, what can we learn, 

In Most above cases are that in order to dominate the market, the product or the service which you provide should have something new and unique which distinguish your product from the others in the same market, and once you achieved that then no one can stop you from becoming the market leader, and even if the competitors come with their strategy then also it might take  8 months or longer to come back and in that time you can analyze the market and can improve the product so that there's no chance anyone getting into your market share.