5 entrepreneurial lessons from Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF)

Books were in the air. Well, somewhat literally. The 10th Jaipur Literature Festival concluded last month and I had the pleasure of witnessing it from up close, and enjoy the intellectual ambience. But the entrepreneur/blogger in me cannot refrain from seeing JLF as a mature startup that can teach how to do something well. This is for all the entrepreneurs out there!

1. Speak the language of your customer

JLF in its tenth year has seem to mastered the art of event management. The festival when calling in stalwarts of Art/Lit fraternity such as Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Shashi Tharoor, Richard Flanagan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Prasoon Joshi, Devdutt Patnaik, Vikram Chandra, Sadhguru and so on, is expected to rise itself to meet the standards of its guests. Teamwork team led by Sunjoy Roy, when coming to execute the event of such a fame and scale, had but one choice - make the festival itself a piece of art. Be it a funky decorated scooter or tuk-tuk providing intravenue commute or the elegant tent designs or the kulhad chai, the festival radiates Rajasthan, Indian culture, art and more art. So that when the literary youths wearing a turban with boots enter the ground, they mingle in rather than standing at odds. The aesthetics not only spoke and listened to the crowd in its own language, inspired it to funk up its crazy quotient. This is helped by the venue itself - Diggi Palace - a palace turned hotel reminding of the old architecture of Rajasthan. To keep the momentum going on for as long as possible, the day sessions were supplemented with music festivities at night - led by Indie artists and bands. Is your startup giving a holistic experience to your users? Are you looking the part?

2. What matters is the ground level execution

Catering to a crowd of 500,000+, keeping the toilets running and grounds clean can itself be cumbersome. With a team of 300 volunteers, the management never looked fazed - be it unexpected power cuts handling, last minute speaker cancellations or venue change management. When cashless transactions using the QRcodes on the entry passes did not work, refunds were issued. The volunteers kept running with bottomless enthusiasm (would love to know how Teamwork pulls it off) and managed to keep the crowd uncomplaining for most of the part. Any startup’s ops and customer service teams can get a humble lesson from the efficiency of rightly incentivized volunteering model of the JLF. 

3. Get the pricing right!

JLF is free for the public and one can register herself free online. However, as I entered the grounds on first day, regrettably late for Gulzar’s inaugural speech, my heart sank upon seeing the long queue at the registration desk. The desk was meant to issue the entry badges. While free entry is there, everyone needs a badge with a unique QRcode to enter. (These were scanned on entry and exits all days to do some number crunching I’m sure - bonus lesson: quantify and have a handle on your numbers!) Free registration means people and hell lot of them. Smartly, they had another desk for on-spot registrations with almost no queue. As I rushed in, they were collecting a nominal fee of Rs 200 for on-spot registrations that I was happy to pay to avoid the queues and not miss upon the inauguration. On first day, JLF must have made decent money from these. Talk about making the most of your opportunity. Instead of charging the public, by keeping the quality of food/goods high in the stalls inside, I’m sure they make good fee on stalls and sponsorships. This is typical advertisement model done right. Huge turnouts ensure that opportunistic freemium entry fee and trade listing fee can be milked. In case of food and shopping stalls, the prices were mostly high catering to the elite Indian and non-Indian tourists. Every talk was followed by author signing sessions which made fans buy the books from a nearby store at original prices even if they already had a copy at home! Upselling done extremely well. And then there were the 3 traditionally dressed rajasthani chaiwallahs serving tea in a kulhad for 30 bucks neighboring to diggipuri chaat stalls selling samosas and gond laddoos for nominal prices. I never saw these empty! Are you milking all your pricing channels yet? 

4. Ride the wave

Content is the king. Someone has rightly said, instead of creating the wave, try to ride the existing waves. The talks, panel discussions, speakers, topics of discussions were high in quality and relevant in current times. Inviting Shashi Tharoor after his hugely successful Oxford debate, Luke Harding who is the author of a book on Edward Snowden, Barkha Dutt to moderate a debate around Trump victory and Brexit, Rishi Kapoor for launching his book, Baahubali team for a book series on Baahubali characters, and economists on demonetization is a strategy that paid off handsomely in the end. Add to it, some classic topics such as Yoga, Shakespeare, popular poetry and you have content that is sure to keep everyone feel contented! At the same time, the content never lost its intellect or surrendered its artistry to the populism. This ensures that right crowd turns in and the festival looks coherent, feeding its own brand image in the process. If gone overboard, there is always a fear of inviting a trending celebrity that does not feel at home in a LitFest. Are you selling something that excites the user ‘today’? Are you getting into the biggest conversations out there?

5. Focus on the users and not investors

In the end, what I think has worked extremely well for JLF is that it has stayed true to its roots. Instead of luring in irrelevant investors or trying to go after everything, it has figured what works well for it - great content in a cultural venue in a perfect weather that makes it extremely attractive to global tourists (and the right ones at that) in addition to Indian art audience. Since they have managed to keep this audience happy, their participation numbers has steadily increased year over year. When Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje spoke of ‘we had to make sure that Jaipur was equipped to handle the people coming to this festival - that the home had to be cleaned and preened to welcome the visitors’, it was clear that the govt wants to associate itself to the festival rather than the other way around. When your customers are happy, investors follow. In collaboration with Zee, all the leading publishers and Rajasthan Tourism, JLF can boast of an enviable line of sponsors and strategic partners. It has the freedom to choose who it wants to associate with. Isn’t that what all startups aspire for?