Startup Showcase – MyMuneemji

Delighted to announce that The Hub of Startups by Prajakt Raut of India Angels Publishes the MyMuneemji story.

http://bit.ly/1kzHo6L

Here’s the story of MyMuneemji– We offer shared services accounting, compliance and reporting services to Start-ups.

Catch them on – www.MyMuneemji.com 

In conversation with Mitesh Katira, Founder of MyMuneemji – 

• Tell us about the story of your startup - Why did you start this, how did you start, when did you startup?

Run a mid-sized Chartered Accountancy firm for the last ten years, having start ups and small businesses as clients. While working with these companies, we felt the need to be able to provide a reliable, efficient and cost effective solution to these client segments which need quality accounting, compliance and reporting support. We felt the need to service existing and prospective customers using IT as an enabler. MyMuneemji was formally launched 6 months back.

• How did the co founders come together?

Harshal and I know each other for the last 30 years, we went to school together. I joined a mid-sized Chartered Accountancy firm as a partner and helped them grow the practice and more importantly bring in a process orientation in the way we managed our audits. We increasingly started using IT tools which helped us deliver more at one third the time to our customers. Deepak Pasad joined the CA firm and was the man behind the executing process improvements and the IT tools.

My interaction with Venkat and Deepak started in the early to mid 2000 when we knew each other as family friends and the bond just got stronger when WealthTree was set up in late 2006. My firm used to work very closely with WealthTree on matters that required support on Accounting, Compliance, Audits, Tax filing for WealthTree’s customers. We started discussing ideas and ways to improve customer experience. MyMuneemji is the outcome

• What challenges did you face and how did you deal with them?

We wanted to leverage technology to deliver MyMuneemji to the customers. Venkat put me in touch with one of his colleagues who was the CTO of the company where Venkat worked. Sabyasachi came with excellent credentials having been CTO with large corporations and he helped us get through the initial bit by building version 1 of MyMuneemji.

Unfortunately, Sabyasachi had to go back to Kolkata due to personal reasons and we started driving the process ourselves.

• What is your aspiration for the venture?

We want start ups, pre – revenue ventures, Non Profit Organizations (NGO), co – operative societies and small businesses to try the MyMuneemji model. We are currently in the process of migrating all our existing customers (around 350 in number) from a manual mode to a ‘shared services’ online mode. We want to sign up with 5,000 new companies in the next 12 months.

• What did you learn from the journey so far?

We believe there is a huge gap on the demand and supply side. While entrepreneurs require high quality accounting support, the quality of accountants/ accounting support available is below par. In a majority of cases, it is not reliable and stable. MyMuneemji exists to bridge this gap. One of the biggest gains to come out so far has been our own evolution in thinking on looking at things ‘from a customer standpoint’. What works and what may not work. As an established CA firm, we never felt the need to think through this aspect. Viewing this from a customer standpoint and bringing the customer at the center has been our biggest learning.

Boot strapping is another aspect of a start up. We have constantly tried to keep our costs to a minimum while at the same time doing what it requires to be done to be able to get the service off the ground. Partnerships and tie ups with key business stakeholders has been the key. Leveraging on the impact of social media and getting the team to being the brand ambassadors of MyMuneemji were also huge learnings.

• If you had to start all over again, what would you do differently?

I am currently reading a book called “The Lean startup”. I was able to establish the correlation between “Build - measure – Learn”. I realize that we could have saved at least 50% of time and effort had I read this a year ago.