Being an entrepreneur is crazy in itself.
Every day is a grind as they relentlessly strive to improve your products or services. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs or BDMs dump the burden of their ideas on others.
One of the unproductive things you find in some product companies – is a researcher on the Product Development team. The product never leaves the door, as the researcher or the company is never satisfied with the product.
- Then you find companies who are working on multiple ideas or products. What they fail to appreciate is that focus on one product at a time is the key to success. You cannot build an Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft or Google by creating road-maps for multiple products.
- If multiple products are one company’s Achilles heel, changing specifications to a product is another company’s hell. What such Product Gurus don’t understand is that every time you change the design or an idea, it kills the enthusiasm of the development team as well as the investors. This way, you will literally burn money in no time, with no result in the end.
- Towards the end of 2015, I was associated with an entrepreneur who changed the model/idea every day. The product idea was revamped all the time. The frustration on the faces of people working on the product was quite apparent to outsiders too.
Between the end of 2015 and the middle of 2016, I worked as a Freelancer (without pay!!) where I had the opportunity to come in contact with the following types of frauds. What is described below is still an understatement of the way they operated.
- Fraudster Type 1: The ‘Visionary’:
The self-described visionary came from Silicon Valley to change (or screw-up) the healthcare industry. He aimed at garnering unbelievable market-share by beating all the healthcare bigwigs. During day, his focus was attracting funding while at night, it was his crazy product ideas. He wanted to build a cloud-based system to run clinical trials for pharma companies, with utmost data security. A 25-member team and a decent office space with the burn rate of 25 lakhs INR per month (~44K USD) was setup. Few years had gone by, yet there was no clear revenue generation model. It turns out the product was meant to be a beta version only. One fine day, after having borrowed a few crores from every investor, he vanished into thin air.
2. Fraudster Type 2: The ‘Contract’ Guy
Folks wisdom warns us of people who will take your own stick to beat you or borrow your own watch to tell you the time. I had a chance to see this happen in business. Here was a guy had no funding, just some savings, but a vague idea of what he wanted to build. He used a detailed contract to attract his victims. He would seek your ideas, have the product built and validated by you, and while it’s still in the beta stage, he would vanish into thin air, without paying a penny.
3. Fraudster Type 3: The ‘Quick Payout’ Fraud
The BPO and IT Sector is replete with stories of people who have a vague idea or a fake one for a product or service They demand money for introducing you to prospective clients, create a lot of fake documentation and send email confirmations on the project signing to their next set of victims. In some cases, they push you to bid for projects that have expired. And at every stage, they elicit clear advances, payments, and commissions, without providing much clarity or value-add to the product. Once their kitty is full, they either abandon the product or vanish into thin air.
4.Fraudster Type 4: The ‘Well-connected Tycoon’
This type of fraud is a high-flyer. His/her designation on LinkedIn usually reads as "serial entrepreneur" (reminds you of ‘serial killer’) whose spouse/sibling/parent/in-laws/best buddy is a best buddy of Bill Gates/Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison/Elon Musk…..etc. The guy has ‘offices’ all over the world. The design is done out of Germany, development out of Maldives (integration in his garage?). Not sure what is the kind of product he is building! The way it is projected, he appears to be working on the next "Google”? Oh, forgot to mention, he once dated the daughter of a mayor of New York! With his Ivy League business school degree and his slick Yankee accent, he had managed to become the CEO & MD of the company after ousting the original founders. One fine day, he goes missing. Hey, check with the NY mayor’s daughter!
5.Fraudster Type 5: The ‘Hot air balloon’
Business Development Managers have a reputation for getting things done. However, this precise skill of their tribe is exploited by fraudulent ones to promise a meeting with "Finland’s Prime Minister", Robert de Niro or the Saudi king, in a matter of days! Only precondition is you must sponsor his son's iPad.
Trust you get an idea of what I am saying! The screw-up economy, oops sorry, the startup economy may be driving innovation to a certain extent. But more often than not, it has become a highway for cheats and fraudsters to work boldly in the open, swindling business houses, banks and investors of gazillion amounts of money. As more and more investors and governments around the world wake up to this real menace, it becomes imperative to create checks and measures through legislation. This will rein in such fraudsters and boost the confidence of genuine innovators, and their investors, who are required to drive the future.
Reference : My linkedin article
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