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Letter 2.1 - A letter on History of Mirats Insights - Early Days, Story of Founder, Our Journey, Future Plans and more - By Mayank Patel

INTRODUCTION AND EARLY DAYS

Mirats Insights is an Indian market research and consumer experience management company, bootstrapped and profitable, turning 3 this year (officially). You might wonder, is it actually 3 years old? As a bootstrapped company, there isn’t a fixed start date. When my father and I started the business, there was no certain plan. We wanted to enhance the industry with technology and proper organization. My father has over 16 years of experience in this industry, working for companies like IMRB International (now Kantar IMRB), Gfk (now a NIQ company), Ipsos, and a startup named Quality Research & Promotions in Lucknow. His solid foundation and experience have shaped how things are going in this industry.

STORY OF OUR LEAD FOUNDER

Before I tell you about the company, it’s essential to know the backstory of our lead Founder, my father, Anupam Kumar. It’s because of him that the Mirats Group exists.

He started working as a freelancer in 2013, promoting “United Survey Solutions” when he took projects on behalf of them. Back then, registration and company compliances were more difficult than today, so he used a pseudo brand name. He took projects from IIM Ahmedabad, National Productive Council (Under Dept of Promotion of Industries and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce & Industry (GOI)), and Bare International, while also working with Quality Research & Promotions.

He worked on thousands of projects, ranging from qualitative, quantitative, and audits. He has experience in cost analysis, competition analysis, brand consumption, promotions, and advertisements ROI analysis to IDI, Focus groups, and many more. He worked on-field as well as managed a team remotely. When he realized the potential in this industry, he started around 2007/2008. Market Research and Consumer Insights were not booming industries like IT and Manufacturing, but he worked and acquired versatile experience in this industry.

Projects He Worked On (A glimpse)

  • He worked on a BBC, London project for consumer awareness and to check how many people know the timing of shows coming on the BBC channel in India. He worked on this project with Quality Research and Promotions on a regional level.
  • He worked on multiple ITC projects on competition analysis and consumption habits on a regional level in Quality Research & Promotions and in IMRB (now Kantar IMRB) as well.
  • He worked on the Max Vijay project with Max New York Life Insurance, in multiple roles ranging from Sales, Promotion, Research, Event planning, and management and also managed the opening event in Agra, India.
  • He worked on Airtel projects on consumption habits, data charges awareness, promotion visibility, and mystery audits on Airtel authorized stores. He managed this project in the UP and UK region when he was in IMRB.
  • He worked on Parle Krack Jack, Parle G, Easy Day (Meerut), Tata Steel, Moment (VST Industries Ltd), Rajnigandha, and many more.

The works of our founders and our current clients deserve a special blog. We plan to work on it as well ;)

CONTINUING EARLY DAYS AT MIRATS INSIGHTS

To keep it simple, Unitech Survey Solutions started in 2013 as a one-person company taking projects from IIM Ahmedabad and government bodies. It later started online operations in 2016, working only with field operations or, in better terms, sample management. I began understanding the dynamic nature of Market Research from 2015, and later, I decided to work in this industry around 2019. I learned from the experiences my father shared with me about each project. I got the idea of how I could utilize my computer science and software engineering knowledge into real actionable software. I planned to work in 2020 early when the lockdown hit in India. I worked on building a routing system which could enhance productivity and have a perfectly organized database.

INITIAL TECH

The initial tech I used was Express.js and Node.js in my backend, and Firebase as the database (“we are currently restructuring our architecture and redefining to make it more scalable”). We started working with a few of the good players in the market research. We were new at that time and wanted an advantage while building a sustainable and scalable business. Technology played a big role in building Mirats Insights Core business. I created a lot of solutions in mid-2020 (some are still in production, but mostly we deprecated) for our organization’s better resource utilization and tracking of the projects properly. I always faced the problem of low traffic and received complaints about providing low feasibilities in the projects from our clients. That was because we didn’t have good supplier relations with us at that time.

BEGINNING OF PANEL SOLUTION

After analyzing the problem, I created a panel from my knowledge. It was a simple solution for our vast database (which we’ve collected in the past from our lead founder’s experience). The technology I used was also pretty simple - I used Node.js, Vanilla Javascript, AWS for cloud computing, AWS SES for transactional email invitations, Firebase Firestore (as primary database), Firebase Authentication (for email/password, Google, Apple, and mobile auth), and Google Analytics for analyzing the website’s traffic. I was stunned to see the positive response of the early projects we sent to our users. We just launched the beta version for the Indian market only. We haven’t launched for other markets as our offline database was limited to the Indian subcontinent only. Later on, with the help of suppliers and integrations, we got panelists from multiple countries.

THE FIRST TEAM AND FEW BIG CHALLENGES

As Mirats was growing slowly but positively, we needed more resources to build and grow our organization. We hired Ayaan Ali, our first employee at Mirats Insights in our Sales and Business Development. Later on, we added Janhavi R., Moin A, and Janhavi D. to our operations team. The team was young and new to the industry. They needed some time to figure out the core concepts of Market Research, but in some time, they were live in production. Although, I made a lot of mistakes while training the team, as I wasn’t able to get the proper time when the projects were live, and we were catering to some good clients. I needed to be present almost 14-15 hours every day to make sure it was running properly. The main challenge I faced was not being able to communicate properly with the team, as due to lockdown we all were working from home. For a new company, it’s very hard to communicate the vision and progress of the company remotely. But even in this tough time, Ayaan helped me a lot managing a lot of things. Although we were not completely right in what we were doing, we were doing it (such as HR policies, Finance, and Billing) as we needed to work on it and build Mirats Insights. Although the consequences, which our company faced were in terms of irregularities in government regulations and directives for the private limited companies happened in 2020-2021, and 2021-2022 (which obviously later on in the next financial year we fixed and corrected everything with the help of the right people).

GOOD LEARNINGS

After making a lot of mistakes, whether they were Financial irregularities (for example, in GSTR1 and GST3B, the amount was not matching, also the invoices amount value was gone in USD in some invoices, due to a glitch in a Billing and Compliance software, which we used in 2020 and 2021), or Compliance irregularities. We learned that Mirats Insights needs to be a process-driven and fully compliant company. After doing some hiring we found Amit Sharma, who helped us in building the Finance department and told the right measures we can take to improve our company Finances. Later on, in the same year, we hired Saumil Shah, who helped us streamline the Human Resource policies and built the Human Resource department. Although, we did not stop making mistakes, we continuously kept doing mistakes (obviously unintentionally) but we improved every time. It’s just that we never made the same mistake again and that’s how we started building the core of Mirats Insights.

CONTINUOUS PROCESS OF LEARNING AND UNLEARNING

In 2022, we learned a lot of things, which worked in 2022 but as we grew into a big team, those things did not make the same impact as they used to and were not aligning with our goals, we removed those things and resources, and moved ahead with new things. In 2022, we removed a lot of members even from the first team, as our visions diverted and things were not working out. Although, it was a tough decision for us, but we had to do it as things changed.

IMPACTFUL JOININGS - THE BEST TEAM

The most impactful joining in the sales team of 2022 was Sparsh Jain from Philomath Research. He had worked in the European company DataDiggers and started his career in Market Research from the Internet Research Bureau. Technically (by his position), he was our first Business Development Person in our team, now he is our Principal, Client Servicing Executive. Although Sparsh’s main roles and responsibilities lie in Client Servicing, Sales, Client Retention, and New Business Development, he helps me in managing Supply Chain and Operations as well. Sparsh is a very criticized personality in our organization, but he is one of the most dedicated people for the organization. Although, working with him is fun, but only when you’re workaholic - like him!

Another one of the most dedicated people of our team, Charmi Patel, joined in May 2022. In the early days, Charmi used to report to Amit, our Finance Manager in 2022, and not me. So, I didn’t have much insight into the work of Charmi, but Amit used to share reports on Charmi as well as Ashwin Gopalkrishnan (our another Finance team member), and then I realized that Charmi could be a very good resource for us. Looking at today, she is our Global Finance Manager, handling 5 private limited companies (under our group), managing all the accounts, and compliances without fail. Charmi made the Finance department a process-driven department and Finance is the one department where we achieved full compliance and process-driven architecture with a little bit of automation by the help of Avinash Kumar and guidance of Charmi. (A fun fact - Charmi helps our developers to test the finance application and gives valuable feedback to improve it.)

Saumil Shah also joined our Human Resources, Peoples team in 2022 only, and worked on to build the Human Resource department and taken care of our Atomos Technologies, Mumbai office. Although, Human Resource is the department where we failed to achieve the process-driven department style, and the recruitment is something where we lacked, but Saumil made sure all the tasks related to Admin Division were well implemented and managed properly. Saumil left our organization last month, but we always value the contributions of Saumil and the impact he made in the organization. Our Lucknow office of Mirats Insights is managed by Shubhangi Srivastava, one of our dedicated (and compliant too) person in HR team.

In our Operations team, Shashank Mishra joined Mirats Insights in 2022 and showed amazing project management and handling skills, which later on, we promoted him as Project Operations Alignment & Strategy Manager, to manage the projects strategically and distribute them in our Supply Chain. Shashank is one of our dedicated people who bonds with the team and leads his team in an amazing way! Shashank, along with Sparsh, worked closely with me and we built automation in the Operations team in such a way, that we are able to manage our Operations with such a small team with high impact. (I’ll talk about the Operational Automations in some other posts :))

OUR JOURNEY IN 2023

The journey in 2023 of Mirats Insights is filled with ups and downs, but we did a great job and had YoY growth of +33.14% (un-audited). Rest of the details you can get from our #MiratsEnveloped 2023 Enveloped Post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/miratsinsights_mirats-insights-2023-enveloped-activity-7148667725693739008-g9QH/

FUTURE PLANS

The year 2024 started off with positive energy, as we finalized our Operations Manager for Client Services, Pratik Shelar, who comes with a very versatile experience of Cross-Tab Marketing Services (now Course 5i), where he worked as Senior Project Manager for more than 4 years, and then at Pure Profile, he worked as Project Consultant for almost 5 years and 2 years as Senior Project Consultant, and then he worked in IntelliSurvey. After that, he joined Mirats Insights having cumulative experience of 15 years. With Pratik, we aim to achieve more and serve our clients with better services. Along with it, we are slowly and gradually starting our Audit Division once again, with the guidance of our Lead Founder, Anupam Kumar.

If you ask me, as a CEO and CTO, what are your plans for Mirats Insights? I would love to sum up my answer in one line — To build the technology that anyone can access and get insights with our innovative software and services, from any corner of the world to bring change. And yes, this is our Mission Statement as well.

But honestly, I want to build products in Mirats Insights which can simplify the research for our clients, and we are constantly working on it. Good things take time, but in the meantime, I am making every department fully compliant and process-driven, so that the department itself can be scalable.

MY THOUGHTS

In my organization, my thoughts are sometimes criticized (and I love the criticism), maybe it’s just that I do something which is out of the box, or a unique way to do things, which is obviously very non-conventional to the industry/corporate standards. But, I want to do things uniquely. I accept this too that I might fail when I try to do things uniquely, and it’s not just that I haven’t failed before, I made mistakes, I failed a lot, but along with the failures, I learned a lot too. I don’t want to build Mirats Insights as a traditional company or traditional market research/consumer insights/panel company. It’s more than that, we are finding new ways, exploring new things, and making a difference in how market research helps brands to grow. I also know, that whatever Mirats Insights is doing, across any department, this is not our best, we can do it better, and we are doing it better than every previous day.

I would like to conclude now and I am very excited about what reaction we are going to get on this post after knowing the brief history of Mirats Insights and to the future plans.

Let’s make Mirats Insights a better place by

  • By building amazing products
  • By servicing brands and providing the best insights
  • By improving the transparency and oversight on what we are doing within our org.
  • By building a great team and bringing on-board more dedicated people.

I’ll be back soon with amazing and insightful news about our organization.

~ Mayank Patel, CEO & CTO, Mirats Group

15th April, 2024