Always Strive to Find Fit: Interview with Rishabh Kewalramani, Founder and CEO of BackBar
I recently went one on one with Rishabh Kewalramani, founder and CEO of BackBar.
Adam: What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Rishabh: I think there are a myriad of challenges that have been instrumental to my growth, but I think all of them have helped me further internalize what’s become a really important ideology/theme for me: your back is never as close to the wall as you think it is. I think the power of this idea was instilled in me from a fairly young age. Coming as millions of others do from a broken home, your tolerance for nonideal circumstances and situations naturally increases. As the founder of a hardware company that was entering the hospitality market during the peak of a global pandemic only accelerated my ability to contextualize setbacks and keep moving forward. Growing up in the situation I did, you learn pretty quickly what “bad” actually looks like. It turns out that when you think your back is really against the wall, that’s usually when the wall just came into view. In life, there are very few times where you don’t still have the opportunity to change an outcome as long as you're willing to keep showing up and trying. To me, that’s what success looks like and it’s very much informed by my challenges and setbacks: did I continue showing up and bringing whatever best I could muster?
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Rishabh: The idea for the modern beverage dispenser was a fairly natural evolution of certain relationships and experiences. I have a group of best friends who I’ve known since 5th grade, and since we’ve met, we were the kids in the back of the classroom building random things. Being entrepreneurs, innovating, and trying hypotheses have been something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. After college, I was working at another hospitality tech company, Gather Technologies (event management software). At the same time, me and one of the aforementioned friends (Brian) got really into bartending - we went to bartending school, got certified, and everything! As a result, Brian and one of my other co-founders, Adam, started building a cocktail dispenser for their apartment. I saw these guys building and had heard from a bunch of restaurant owners how hard it was to staff good bartenders during certain shifts. So I asked Adam and Brian if it would be ok for me to start pitching a commercial version of what they were building. We got enough positive feedback and started building our first prototype out of a hollowed-out garage cabinet. Six months later, we installed that machine in an Atlanta restaurant, and the rest is history.
See my answer below for advice about ideas. But at the core; people are more important than ideas and have it be something you won’t grow tired of. Other than that, go build.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Rishabh: I think most people, especially those who haven’t worked at or tried a startup before, put way too much importance on ideas. There is a vast gap between the number of people who have had “good” startup ideas and the number of “good” startups or companies. Google wasn’t the first search engine, Microsoft didn’t develop the first personal computer, and Backbar isn’t the first beverage dispenser. Not only are we not the first, but the funnel of the number of people who've had the idea is far greater than the number of people that tried executing on it, and that number is even greater than the number of people who successfully executed. Use whatever platitude you want, the 80/20 rule or “the devil’s in the details” but they’re all true. You know what’s a lot more important than ideas? Showing up every day even though you’re getting punched in the face. Being open to listening to your market and constantly iterating and asking questions. Making the fastest feedback loops possible so you end up selling products or services that people want and keep using. To sum up, I think the best course of action is to choose an idea that you genuinely care about (something that you won’t get bored of in year 3 or 5) and then follow the scientific method we all learn in middle school. Find the hypotheses core to that idea and test, iterate, and test until you have something people want or you don’t. And don’t take it too seriously at the same time - hypotheses should be at best 50/50 propositions! That’s the only way we get genuinely innovative ideas/products/services.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Rishabh: We have a framework for taking risks that allows us to maximize our return on effort. A couple of theses I have is that people are generally bad at estimating risk and overestimating risk and that startups, when they first start, have very little expectation. If you take genuinely great builders and engineers like my co-founders, free them from any expectation of traditional success, and then increase your tolerance for risk to what’s more accurate, you can have asymmetric returns on effort, capital, etc. This framework is adaptable as you continue to grow. When you have no customers and no money, the downside to taking massive swings/risks is almost nothing. There’s nothing to lose. As you grow, you start to update those risks, but always lean toward being a little riskier than what feels comfortable (humans are really pessimistic with gut risk assessments). At the end of the day, startups who are comfortable with risk and can accurately match risk to the company stage have the best returns.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Rishabh: Everything that’s cliche is generally right so coming up with sales and marketing advice worth sharing is genuinely difficult these days. I think one that seems a little counterintuitive is that quantity is often more important than quality, especially when in competition with each other. I used to work on political campaigns, and we ran an A/B test on two separate campaigns where we wrote high-quality fundraising emails but sent them less often vs. mediocre fundraising emails but sent them more often. The campaign with more touchpoints raised more money. What does that mean? If you’re ever debating between crafting the perfect email or writing the best call script, biasing toward more touches and more action is almost always going to be more important than finding the perfect wording.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Rishabh: For me personally, I try to be empathetic in concrete ways for my team. This is a lens or mindset that can be applied to all sorts of situations. For example, it can be something as simple as trying out a new process yourself first. Recently, we’ve iterated our onboarding process that our onboarding team uses. I tested and onboarded a customer using the new process myself so I knew what it felt like before launching to the team. I think in general, if you’ve hired amazing people who care a healthy amount, you earn their employment day in and day out. In many ways, acting empathetically is a bare minimum to continue to earn that employment.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Rishabh: I think my one piece of advice across all is to always strive to find fit. This is sort of derived from the idea of product market fit but I think also applies really well to team building. When you’re first hiring a person for a role, we try not to see qualifications in a vacuum but try to understand how those qualifications fit the role. I think the same idea goes to leading and managing - you almost want to be constantly iterating on a person and their responsibilities based on fit. Especially when you’re early, there can be some ambiguity between role and responsibilities. We try to see what we have to accomplish and put the right people to the right responsibilities irrespective of job title. For example, our former senior mechanical engineer now leads our field service team - it was a better fit for his interests and it’s how he could see what he’s capable of (see below).
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Rishabh: These are sort of combinations of other ideas in this interview: Earn employment, votes, customers, day in and day out. Time is often the most important thing we have to give. People giving you 8 hours per day is something you have to consistently earn.
Seek Discomfort: This is the only way to learn what you’re capable of and at a macro level.
Show up and be consistent: Especially in entrepreneurship with its ups and downs, just showing up and following through in the face of uncertainty and adversity is so much of the battle. Show up and bring whatever that day’s best looks like.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Rishabh: I can’t narrow it down to just one so I have two: First, this is actually an old T.S. Eliot quote: “If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” I love this because it asks something of you that most people don’t ask of themselves. It asks you to be uncomfortable. The goal is to find out what we’re capable of as a business but more importantly what every person working at Backbar is capable of. This is something I share with our people all the time. It’s extremely rare in modern corporate America for you to even scratch the surface of what you’re capable of. That’s what I find so beautiful about startups: if you commit, you can find out what you’re capable of and you can push the boundaries of what’s possible in general. The other one is a common saying that “the velocity of decisions is far more important than the accuracy of them” You’re asked to make so many decisions from small to large every day. However, we often forget to analyze the difference in potential outcomes (is there a big enough difference in outcome where it actually matters?) and overestimate how good we are at predicting the outcome. I’ll give an example: let’s say you’ve developed a feature and you’re wondering if you can charge for it and if you can charge, how much to charge. You can attempt to build models and guess at consumer behavior to choose one of the options. OR you can just start trying stuff: offer it for free to some people, for one price to others, and for a different price to a third set. In almost every scenario, not only will you get to an answer faster but your answer will end up being more “accurate”. Humans are fairly bad predictors, but we’re really good observers.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
Follow Adam on Instagram and Twitter at @adammendler and on LinkedIn and listen and subscribe to Thirty Minute Mentors on your favorite podcasting app.