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Circles (A): The Birth of an Entrepreneu...

Mendonca, Valerie,...

Case

Circles (A): The Birth of an Entrepreneurial Initiative

Mendonca, Valerie; Karna, Amit; Mukherjee, Saral

IIMA-CIIE0025(A) | Published December 3, 2021 | 14 pages Case

Collection: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

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Learning Objectives

This case describes the entrepreneurial journey of two college friends — Anchal Taatya and Abhiram Nukalapati. While studying at IIM Ahmedabad, they saw an opportunity for aggregating credit card discounts and launched a pilot in February 2019 under the name Circles. Circles helped discount seekers and credit card holders to connect and make transactions. Case A outlines their journey until the launch, where they faced the dilemma of choosing between a B2B and a B2C business model. Case B outlines their struggles in launching a B2C product and eventual shutdown of the venture. The key objective of this case is to understand the business formation stage of a college start-up, and how they arrived at opportunity identification. The case is aimed at enabling classroom discussions on the role of trust in platform businesses and how regulations — or lack thereof — can shape the destiny of new ventures.

This case is useful in learning about early stages of the entrepreneurship process, especially from idea to Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage. It also helps in understanding how entrepreneurial teams cope with the challenges of launching a venture and ground realities of validating hypotheses in a real-market setting. The case provides a good basis for discussion on the role of experimentation in business model formation. The case is ideal for a core entrepreneurship management course in a graduate class or in executive education programmes focused on early-stage entrepreneurship. It can also be used in accelerator programmes and boot camps for start-ups in the early commercialisation stage. This case is apt for discussion in a session on Opportunity Identification and Learning from Minimum Viable Products within Entrepreneurship courses. Through a discussion of the case, students will be able to understand the entrepreneurial journey of college start-ups, appreciate the role of experimentation in launching new businesses, and understand the struggles in early stage of venture scaling.