Five Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Aam Aadmi Party

Barely a year old, the Aam Aadmi Party (or better known as the AAP) has sent all the established political parties in Delhi into a tizzy and has managed to upset all the traditional political equations. Whether or not it will able to win a substantial number of seats in the Delhi Assembly elections is still a question, but its dramatic rise over the past one year is commendable. The way it has been able to capture the imagination of people, as well as its fair share of the limelight in the media, deserves appreciation.

I see the AAP as a start-up which came into existence a year ago. Not every new political party is able to garner the kind of support that the AAP has managed to get in such a short period. So there might be something that the AAP did right, which helped it climb up the popularity charts in the run-up to Delhi Assembly elections.

I have picked up five lessons which entrepreneurs can learn from the AAP.

1. Identify and leverage a ‘Mega Trend’: Many business ideas succeed because they get aligned to the ‘trends’ and the ‘mega trends’. Speaking in a layman’s language, a ‘trend’ is something which has a considerable chunk of (growing) audience. In a trend, a business enterprise can expect to find new customer segments wanting to be ‘serviced’. An entrepreneur, who aligns himself to a trend, has more chances of success than someone who is not ‘trending along’.

The AAP identified a common man’s ‘angst against corruption’ and ‘revolt against stagnation’ as a trend and aligned itself to it. It tried to build support on this public sentiment and managed to get a lot of ‘buyers’ for its ideas.

2. Ideate around a gap: Once you have aligned to a trend, you need to ‘position’ yourself. The ‘position’ of a service or product finds its roots in a gap in the existing ecosystem. For example, in the current trend of online retail, an entrepreneur might find a gap where the consumers are not getting their products/services from the existing e-retailers. That offers a very fertile ground to root your idea and position it accordingly.

The AAP found a gap – it found that the current political parties are not representing the ‘common man’. So it ideated around this gap and positioned itself as the representative of the Aam Aadmi or the common man.

3. Market your idea well: Just identifying an idea is not enough. The customers and your first employees have to be interested either in you or in your ‘story’. One has to market the idea well to get others along. This is because the first employees, as well as your first customers, take a leap of faith when they opt for you. Take a note – you don’t hire the first employees, you sell yourself to them. They ‘buy’ you. From there, you keep building on the audience. Thus, marketing your idea well is extremely important.

The AAP did a commendable job in getting its story to the world. It extensively used the social media and other channels to get its idea across. That, in turn, helped it getting in place the ‘core team’ and its initial customers. Once that was in place, the growth engine took off and kept the audience growing.

4. Get the right team: Once the idea is in place, you have the core team and the first customers are in line, you cannot afford to get the ‘execution’ wrong. For a perfect execution, get the perfect team in place. Many brilliant ideas have failed because they were not ‘executed’ well. Many simple ideas worked just fine because they were executed perfectly. However, not every start-up can get the perfect team in place and employees do make mistakes. But your team should ‘own up’ to their mistakes and be ready to try and remove all imperfections.

That’s exactly what the AAP did. It got members from all walks of life – inexperienced, but ready to toil it out.

5. Grow and evolve: Growth and evolution are two aspects of a start-up that should go hand in hand. No business plan works the way it was conceived. There will be changes in the plan. The start-up might have to completely overhaul its initial idea. It might have to pivot. Not once, not twice, but many times over. An entrepreneur needs to learn as he moves forward and incorporate the learning into the growth path of his venture and evolve from strength to strength.

The AAP started as a novice political outfit and had its fair share of pitfalls. But it evolved along the way and incorporated the same into its growth. The party went ahead and dropped a few candidates at the last moment when it found out there were criminal charges against those. Committing a mistake is not an issue. But not rectifying it, will lead to one.