In today’s internet world, we observe many people’s life journeys especially their career paths. In that way, One of the people, I observing for a long time is Prashanth Rangaswamy, famously called ItisPrashanth. He is a famous movie reviewer turned Entrepreneur from Tamilnadu, India. By observing his journey, I found some good business lessons. Let’s Discuss that!
1. Don’t afraid to be a Pioneer to deliver service in new ways.
In 2012, the Internet was not a big deal in TamilNadu. Especially the audience for video content is very low because the cost of the internet is very high. In this time, Prashanth started to review movies in the Tamil language on youtube. Till that time, movie review was restricted to Newspapers & Television channels. Especially, From the cinema fanatics point of view, Publicly reviewing a movie was only restricted to certain privileged people only. So he was heavily trolled and threatened by fanatics. In spite of all these odds, he continuously made movie review videos. And now he earned a top place in the Tamil digital movie reviewing community. After the Jio digital revolution in India, many started to become movie reviewers from Tamilnadu. But the credibility and recall value earned by Prashanth for movie reviewing is very high. One of the primary reasons for this credibility is, he was one of the earliest people to deliver this service (movie reviewing). Trust me, things will not be easy if you are the first one to explore new field/new market/new service, but once you gain stability, you can enjoy greater credibility.
2. Learning from Mistakes, Being Customer-Centric!
When I see Prashanth’s old videos, I can observe that he just honestly sharing his opinion about the movie. But, when I see his new videos, he is not only sharing his opinion, and also He is sharing what kind of audience can watch one particular movie, what kind of entertainment movie offers the audience. This clearly indicates that he understood why his subscribers viewing his video “They don’t want to hear about Prashant’s personal opinion and artistic sense about the movie. They only want to know, what kind of movie it is, whether the movie offers great entertainment”. Sometimes his judgment can be wrong, but the intention to share details which the audience will expect is the thing really being customer-centric. This helpful for more inflow of customers in any business.
3.Networking and Influencing
Prashanth started as the random guy who just posts a movie review videos on youtube, now he is in acting on movies. It indicates that he clearly understood his business and its stakeholders. He must have started to do network with them. Once, he shared a screenshot of his chat with the son of a superstar in Tamil cinema. I really amazed about how well he did networking with his stakeholder community. The good thing is he done great networking with his end-customer. Recently, he confessed that using his influence he collected nearly around 95lakhs for welfare funds. These figures strongly indicating how well he made networking. His networking with viewers helps him to make customer-centric decisions like what movie he should review first when many movies release on the same day. He also uses his social media to share job opportunities personally verified by him.
4. Continuous Exploring and Experimenting.
Just before 6 months, I saw his tweet mentioning that he is learning about stock markets. After a few weeks, he started to do trading in stock markets. Recently, When lockdown started to due to covid19. He entered into the entrepreneurship creating masks with a small group of women, recently he is planning to make and sell trousers with the same team. He also using networking to ask suggestions and estimate prices, find experts for his business. Without having a growth mindset, the ability to learn to explore and experiment is not possible. I feel these qualities are very essential for being an entrepreneur.
These are the things, I found from observing Prashanth Rangaswamy. I don’t know him personally. But we can learn anything from anyone, it is not compulsory to learn business only from silicon valley biggies.
You can follow Prashanth on Twitter: https://twitter.com/itisprashanth