Abishek Baskaran

Delegate ownership rather than delegating tasks and micro-managing. If you have read this book “The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey”, a good manager doesn’t keep all the monkeys in his room!

Your Name & Designation

Abishek Baskaran.Co-founder of CakeBee.in and LogBase.

While CakeBee.in is live, we are still trying out stuff with LogBase. For the remainder of this interview, I’ll just represent CakeBee.in

Your Company name and Area of business

CakeBee.in, Online Cake Shop.

Your Website

www.cakebee.in

Industry of Business

Full-stack food tech start-up.

Where you are operating from?

Coimbatore, Tamilnadu – India

How long you are in this business?

4 months.

What was the driving force for you to start your business?

To me cakes are very special, they teach us to celebrate, to surprise, to care, and to share. When some of our friends get together and wanted to celebrate, it wasn’t easy to get a cake of our choice at the time we wanted. So we thought, “Let’s make buying a cake a piece of cake!”.

Is the business running as successfully as you thought it would? Please comment.

It’s still very early days for us. But the feedback from our customers has been excellent and we are receiving consistent repeat orders even in such a short time span.

Who is your target audience?

Well, if you plot all cake buyers into a normal distribution, at one end of the curve you will have people who just want a cheaper cake. At the other end of the curve, you’ll find discerning foodies with unique preferences. The average cake buyer fills the rest of the area and they are our target audience.

What is the most challenging aspect of your business?

There is no room for error, a messed up or a delayed party cake is an irreversible embarrassment for both customer and us.

If you are given a chance to start any business other than the one you are currently into, which one would it be and why?

I would love to be an auto manufacturer like Tesla! I know this is dreaming too much!

Your Suggestion to start-up companies and entrepreneurs.

Put yourself into your customer’s shoes and make sure you love your product. This is super awesome for me and I keep doing it! I just have to eat the cakes we bake and I love it

What is a success according to you?

Setting a goal and achieving it. And don’t let others define your goal, you do it!

List a few of the most challenging situations you have faced in your entrepreneurial journey.

I started my entrepreneurial journey by building a few Sass products – the product-market fit was not there and it was pretty frustrating not having customers. We continued to pivot and keep trying different things. Going through this period of uncertainty was pretty challenging.

Who/What is your greatest inspiration and why?

Lewis Hamilton is my favorite F1 racer and my greatest inspiration – a boy next door hailing from a small town now at the pinnacle of motorsport. Love him for his hard work, mental toughness, his lifestyle, and of course his fiery driving!

What is your leadership/management style?

I prefer to delegate ownership rather than delegating tasks and micro-managing. If you have read this book “The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey”, a good manager doesn’t keep all the monkeys in his room!