The Storypreneur's Playbook: Journeys to an emerging startup destination

The Storypreneur’s Playbook

by Nitin Babel & Prateek Roy Chowdhury

Published by Penguin Business

248 pages ₹399

  Few things in the world can match the joy of building something special with a college or university friend. The shared experience of campus life, with its highs and lows, creates bonds that can last well into one’s professional life if they are nurtured with respect and love.

 

Nitin Babel and Prateek Roy Chowdhury befriended each other while studying at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. Mr Babel went on to become the cofounder of an artificial intelligence startup called Niki.ai. Mr Roy Chowdhury developed his interest in psychology and mentorship, and decided to guide entrepreneurs in their startup journey. During their years on campus, they had no idea that they would co-author a book someday. 

Titled The Storypreneur’s Playbook, its target audience is aspiring entrepreneurs. The authors want to “empower” readers with “the tools needed to take the entrepreneurial leap of faith”. They appear to pursue this goal with great sincerity, drawing inspiration from American scholar Joseph Campbell’s book  The Hero with A Thousand Faces (1949) and supplying readers with thoughtful prompts to reflect on the journeys that they are about to embark on. 

Mr Campbell shows that there is a similar underlying structure governing myths from around the world, so any hero’s journey involves the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, mentor’s aid, crossing the threshold, trials and temptations, and eventually transformation and return. Messrs Babel and Roy Chowdhury argue that entrepreneurs follow a path similar to the hero, so each of their six chapters is named after one of the stages in the hero’s journey. They offer a condensed version of the archetypal journey that Mr Campbell talks about. 

While discussing each stage, they use examples so that readers can learn from the struggles, achievements, and failures of entrepreneurs. Vijayananda Prabhu, for instance, was the cofounder of a hospitality startup called Linger. It scaled up quickly but Mr Prabhu and his cofounders were “not even drawing a sustenance salary”. Six years into the business, he quit.

In hindsight, Mr Prabhu thinks that not getting a mentor was among their top three mistakes. He believes that a good mentor could have helped them structure the business model correctly, set boundaries around costly experiments to ensure a healthy cash flow, and resolve conflicts. 

The authors also emphasise the need to find cofounders who are “complementary forces that come together to build a successful business”. When Alicia Souza left the lifestyle brand Chumbak to work as a freelance illustrator and set up her own business, she realised that she must partner with someone who could look into the business model, strategy, operations, marketing, scalability, and profit-making so that she could devote herself entirely to being creative. Her cofounder, Saurabh Sharma, turned out to be a good fit because he comes from a business background, with years of experience in manufacturing. 

Some of the other entrepreneurs featured in this book are Ankit Jain, Biswapati Sarkar, Devashish Chakravarty, Dharamveer Singh Chouhan, Mayank Jain, Mayur Sontakke, Mehul Jain, Nihal Ahmed, Phanindra Sama, Samarth Mahajan, Sangeeta Saxena, and Shishir Modi. The authors say that these individuals were selected because they are “relatable, to the extent that you can easily visualise them living in your neighbourhood”. This statement gives the impression that the book is for people who belong to a similar socio-economic background. 

When the authors claim that the featured entrepreneurs “hardly had anything given to them on a silver platter”, they underplay the importance of social and cultural capital, including caste-based networks that play a significant role in shaping the success of business ventures.

 

The book’s title comes across as gimmicky, especially because the authors make no effort to define who a “storypreneur” is or clarify what makes one different from an “entrepreneur”. 

A more serious issue with the book is the sheer lack of women’s voices. Of the 15 entrepreneurs in this book, only two—Ms Souza and Ms Saxena—are women. This is baffling since the authors state, “Women often experience imposter syndrome, which can undermine their confidence and hold them back from pursuing ambitious goals or taking on leadership roles.”

They claim that they spoke to women entrepreneurs of various age groups, from metros and small towns, and across industries. It is, therefore, difficult to comprehend why these women’s stories are missing from the book.  Learning about how they confronted challenges would have been inspiring and useful for aspiring women entrepreneurs reading this book.

 

The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic. Instagram/X: @chintanwriting