An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
… I don’t believe you need success to make the world a better place, you just need purpose. With that, I’ve always felt a strong purpose to work with women and children that have been victims of abuse or need education or special assistance due to their circumstances. I have been involved with such causes and centers for nearly 14 years now. I also feel a similar purpose towards animal rescue and rehabilitation and therefore have worked with a few of those centers in Southeast Asia as well.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ridhima Kalani, Founder and CEO of The Scene.
Ridhima Kalani grew up between India and Singapore and immigrated to the states for college and later a master’s at NYU. As Ridhima began exploring ‘the city that never sleeps’, she quickly became the lifestyle curator for her entire circle and sorority. Before long, even perfect strangers who had been told about her talents as the ‘experience planning guru’ began contacting her to plan their perfect outings. Thus, The Scene was born. The Scene is the first platform to seamlessly combine both specialized recommendations and reservations into one. No longer do you need to search and consult various ‘Best of’ websites to then use another website for your reservation bookings. The Scene is your one stop shop for your perfect outing start to finish.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I grew up in a small town in India, not really knowing what I wanted to do. I grew up playing national level squash and at 12 I went to boarding school in Singapore. There, I continued playing squash seriously and found a passion for volunteering across Southeast Asia at women’s and children’s rescue projects, educational centers and some animal rescue projects. I guess my childhood has very little to do, at least on paper, with my current profession, but what I can say is that it involved three key elements that helped me build very strong muscle to become an entrepreneur: Risk, Passion, and Hard Work.
Lastly, it just so happens that my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were also all entrepreneurs. Although after I graduated from college, I took on a PR job for almost two years, perhaps coming from a long lineage of entrepreneurs gave me confidence in this journey when I finally found my true calling.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You don’t need to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” — Martin Luther King Jr.
This is relevant literally to every stage of my life. I started playing squash not really knowing where things would go and I had a lot of pressure on me because a large part of my family plays professional squash, but I just took the first step, by showing up to my very first squash lesson at the age of 8. I didn’t know how I’d fare at boarding school or if I’d get lonely, but I just took the first step by showing up to my school in Singapore and moving into the dorm. The same goes for NYU. And when it comes to The Scene — I literally had no idea where to even start or what the “staircase,” so to speak, even looked like, but I just took the first step by learning thoroughly about the tech industry and the current software products that exist within the lifestyle place through doing my own research on Google. With something like starting a business, it’s very likely that each step in the staircase is broken down into many mini steps — and that’s totally okay! It’s just important to figure out what your mini step is, stay the course and keep doing the work (that “work” includes the inner work you need to do to show up and that “work” also includes learning to rest).
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I listen to On Purpose by Jay Shetty daily. It is a mental health podcast but it’s also so much more than that. The episode I listened to most recently is about overcoming fear as an entrepreneur and it made me feel confident, elevated, and excited for my next steps to raise funding because I genuinely found the guidance in the podcast actionable, motivating and extremely relevant to everything I was feeling. There are so many gems within the On Purpose archives and Jay is an incredible mentor/coach — he has an extremely positive aura about him that’s sure to lift you up in the moment as well, just when you need it.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
- The first step is to ask yourself are you fired up about this 24/7? Would you feel like you are missing out if you did not bring this to fruition?
- If the answer to the first question is yes, then the second step is to learn and conduct research super thoroughly. As I mentioned, I used Google to do that research. The goal is to learn about your competitors and your market as much as possible. Conduct research on your customers by putting out surveys (I highly recommend using Typeform for your surveys, by the way), or by asking your friends for their feedback (putting out survey polls and questions on Instagram stories worked for me) — do what you have to do to feel like you have a really good sense of your market, your industry, your competitor, and your customer. It’ll come in handy in so many ways down the line as you start your business.
- The final step is to create some type of plan (a series of next steps), based on your insights and based on what you think you need to do next to launch your business. For me this was literally “reaching out to X friend”, who I knew had a contact at a software development company (and no surprise, that this ended up being the very company I used to build The Scene’s software) and signing up for an entrepreneurial coaching program because I felt like I needed that (and no surprise there either that this ended up being the same platform that helped me raise my initial funding to build out the software). My point here is to come up with actionable next steps that you feel you can execute. It doesn’t matter if these seem small at the moment — because I can attest that the small steps turn into big steps in a relatively quick timeline if you have your eye on the prize and are willing to put in the work.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
Google it and google your competitors / companies in your industry. You can also talk to your friends / network about your idea — in my experience, when you discuss your idea, people always respond with “oh, do you know X company, they do something similar” — which is a great way to learn about whether your idea has already been created. But that said, I have to add that whether or not it’s been created before isn’t really the point, in my opinion. Sure, that information is important to know before you move ahead with it, but it shouldn’t stop you from pursuing it if you really feel fired up about it. I say this because, only you can do what you can do — aka — you have a unique take on this, you have different resources (both tangible and intangible, including your own entrepreneurial spirit) and you can bring something really different to what you want to create. It’s important to know whether your idea has been pursued before, but once you come to know that, it’s so much more important to figure out what exactly you bring to the idea that is unique and really have faith in that unique ability of yours.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
Here are the early steps:
Step 1: getting clear about your idea and unique value proposition
Step 2: conducting extensive industry, competitor, customer, and market research
Step 3: finding leads, sources, mentors within the industry you can go to with questions about next steps or for support for your next steps
Step 4: creating a plan that works for you as a founder with steps on how to build the product/service, how to build the team, who to bring onto your team and how to allocate for funding
Step 5: Execution of step 4
To get into your specific questions about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it, my advice is as follows:
How to file a patent:
- First, it’s important to understand whether your idea can be patented. In The Scene’s case we don’t have a unique algorithm which can be patented. But what does apply for us is securing copyrights and trademarks for the website content, code, design, logo, etc.
- From what I know about patenting it can be a bit complicated, so I’d recommend looking into whether your idea has already been patented before you do anything else. This is a good resource for that: https://patft.uspto.gov/
- Filing a provisional patent is also a useful next step — this is an extra layer of protection that helps you file faster as US patent law is a first to file not first to invent system.
- Getting a patent attorney makes the entire process easier as well. There are many patent agencies you can find by a simple Google search that will consult with you.
How to source a good manufacturer: In my experience, there are two good ways to do this (there could be more of course) — 1) Google 2) Use your network. Let’s get into Google first — assuming you know the specific type of manufacturer you want to work with, (if you don’t, you’ll figure it out relatively fast in the search process by realizing what you don’t want when you see it) you can find tons of helpful leads via Google. These manufacturing companies that you find through a basic search will have contact information and contact form submissions, I would recommend calling and emailing them and submitting these forms to get in touch with them. In my experience from reaching out to software companies and reaching out to clothing manufacturers for a new project I have coming up, they get back to you relatively quickly (2–3 business days at the most). Next, here’s how you can use your network to find manufacturing leads — make a list of people that come to mind within your network who might know (even by a longshot) someone who can help you with a lead, and then contact them. An additional tip I strongly recommend is to post your search for manufacturers on your Instagram stories, LinkedIn, and any other social networking platform that you have access to because you never know who might give you the right lead (I found my software developer by posting an Instagram story and six months into working with them, I couldn’t be happier).
How to find a retailer to distributor: The experience I currently have with this is within the tech industry with my software product. So, what I can say from the tech standpoint is, to figure out whether you want to be both iOS and Android friendly or choose any one of those distributors (if your product is consumer focused). Once you have that part figured out based on your target market, you’d want to get a sense of which outlets/ platforms offered by the distributor you’d want to use. For The Scene, I wanted to be exclusively iOS friendly and use the App Store to distribute my software product more widely.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
1: IT’S OKAY TO REST
As an entrepreneur, we’re used to going without rest or sleep. Without those two elements, we are also expected to do something quite challenging every day, which is to show up as your best self, lead, create and succeed. Stressing, working 25×7, not sleeping, working on weekends/ on vacations — behaviors are almost glorified in the entrepreneurial world. But it’s almost impossible to function that way in the long term and continue to deliver as an entrepreneur. More than that, it’s not healthy and likely will not lead to your happiness. Being a spiritual person, I do believe if you lose track of your happiness along the pursuit of your goals, you seriously need to question if it’s worth it. More so, if you show up to work drained, the project itself will start to weaken as well over time. Have I had phases where I have approached work in this very manner and lost track of my mental health? 100%, but I’ve learned to catch myself. Even if I do have to spend 2–3 weeks in this mindset (which I do not condone), I make sure that the 4th week, I am really doing what’s important, delegating more and taking out time to make sure my mental health is back on track. It’s almost like you have to put in extra effort to make up for the mental health you lost. For the month prior to The Scene’s launch, I was going a thousand beats per minute and literally working all day and night. It seemed like there was no other option. Although my sleep hours were reduced, I decided to do the one thing that made me happy — a couple of times a week I would just take a 20–30 min walk outside by the Hudson.
2: IT’S IMPORTANT TO TAKE YOUR TIME TO FEEL GOOD BEFORE YOU SHOW UP TO WORK
Feeling good is usually the last thing on our agenda. We wake up and show up to work in whatever state of mind we wake up in. If it’s a good day — great. If for some reason you feel off, tired, unmotivated, whatever it may be — we still show up in that weakened/off state and just do the work anyway. In my opinion, there isn’t enough awareness or faith in the belief that the energy you show up with makes all the difference. Recently, I went through something personally that completely threw me off. My mental state was extremely drained, my confidence was non–existent as was my ability to show up for myself, let alone for work. Instinctively what felt right was to get away from the city and take some time off, still work for a few hours a day but work from someplace else — some place that felt more inspiring and where I would feel better. However, I kept getting held back by the idea that it was really time to buckle down and work and that couldn’t be done from any place but New York. I was lucky enough to speak to mentors that reaffirmed my faith in protecting the energy we show up with, who said that even if I was doing 5 hours of work a day with a positive mindset, that would pay off more than 16 hours of work a day with a negative mindset or while feeling off. I flew to a beach town and every day I’d wake up and focus the first 5–6 hours of my day on feeling good — this entailed reading books, listening to podcasts, being by the water, staying away from alcohol, eating clean and healthy, working out — and then I’d log on work. In the first 7 days of this trip, I had accomplished more than I had in the last 7 months. I got deals and partnerships that were unimaginable — I had been trying to bring these to fruition in the past, but I never even got my foot in the door. Suddenly, here I was on calls with execs who finally wanted to partner. Point being, the energy you show up with is important so take the time to find the right headspace before you show up to work.
3: THINGS WILL GET DELAYED — SOMETIMES THAT WILL COME BY SURPRISE, BE OUT OF YOUR CONTROL AND MIGHT COME WITH A PERCEIVED REVENUE LOSS. THIS IS THE TIME TO FOCUS ON WHAT IS WORKING RATHER THAN ON WHAT IS NOT WORKING.
It’s natural to feel down about this type of situation if when it happens, and I am not here to talk you out of that feeling — but what I can say is, allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling and then let go of that and keep your head down and really focus on the areas on which you are still able to work on. My website launch was delayed by 2 months. This was unexpected but I had to take ownership of my part the delay and then also accept that it was out of my control to fast track the process. But what I could do in the meantime, was continue The Scene’s concierge services that we were already offering and try to attract new customers. I could also prepare more thoroughly for the launch now that it was a bit further away — this involved having a stellar marketing campaign in place and hiring a PR agency to host the launch event. I definitely felt low when I first heard the news and I needed to take 2–3 weeks to really process that defeat as an entrepreneur, but I eventually acknowledged the facts and focused on what was still working.
4: GET COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOUR FEARS ACTUALLY ARE AND CREATE A RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORST OUTCOME IN EACH FEAR
It’s natural to have certain fears based on the aspects of yourself that you aren’t super comfortable with as an entrepreneur. But the key is to really understand what the worst-case scenario for each fear is and get rational about it. For instance, if your fear is to talk to a certain person within the industry — it’s important to get rational about the worst–case scenario there. In this example, the worst case could be that the person doesn’t end up connecting with you or doesn’t end up liking you. To get rational about this scenario is to understand what this leads to, and what this leads to is that the potential partnership or the doors that that introduction was going to open, might not open. Then, it’s important to understand what you’d do with this worst-case scenario experience — chances are you will actually gain a whole lot of insight as to what to do the next time you want to connect with someone. So really, all you get from that worst–case scenario is insight and experience. One of my fears was pitching to my friends during my friends and family crowdfunding round and sounding too “salesy”. The worst-case scenario there was that some people would not give me money and maybe some people would stop being my friend because they felt my asking them to support my idea was wrong. I got clear about that worst case scenario and realized that if someone didn’t want to support my idea, that was totally fine and I would just network more, increase my circle and raise money in a different way. And as for people leaving my life because they felt that fundraising via friends was wrong, I’d likely come to the realization that they were never really people who I wanted to be in my circle anyway. It’s important to narrow down what your fear is about and make it a tangible, rational concept rather than an elusive, emotional one. That helps us wrap our heads around the worst-case scenario and how we could really come up from that.
5: SITUATIONS WILL OCCUR THAT WILL BE OUT OF YOUR CONTROL, YOU WILL FEEL DEFEATED. THAT’S THE TIME TO COME BACK TO YOURSELF AND YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS, RE–INVENT, RE–CREATE, PIVOT OR START SOMETHING ELSE
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. But for me, this “situation” was the pandemic. I started The Scene as an Instagram account in January 2020, and I was really hopeful to start building out the software within the next few months. But in March 2020, Covid hit the city. All my plans were put on hold indefinitely while we struggled through the loss of thousands of lives, not having a cure or vaccine (back then at least) and essentially seeing no end in sight. I felt defeated. But that’s the time that I took to go back to my family home, enroll into a bunch of courses that challenged me entrepreneurially and helped me build more entrepreneurial and creative muscle. I came across people that were reinventing their businesses and bringing creative ideas to the world to deal with covid. I decided to pivot The Scene into an Instagram account that helped people stay entertained while they were at home. This included self–care tips, at–home cocktail and food recipes, or learning how to make dishes just the way they’re made at popular restaurants in the city. Then I decided to add on to that by also working to support restaurants that needed additional funding in the city. We started creating marketing campaigns to help restaurants and reposting their funding needs, platforms, and content. Finally in summer 2020 some restaurants reopened. We launched our membership-only personalized concierge services where members would apply and pay a monthly fee to receive super personalized recommendations with reservations for restaurants with the best Covid safety measures in the city. We became a safe space for New Yorkers who wanted to go out but wanted a trusted source to account for the safety precautions and standards of restaurants that had chosen to stay open. Point being, I could not control Covid or launch my company in the way I had imagined, but I could control my own creative process, my entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to put in the work to reinvent and stay relevant in the restaurant space through an extremely tough year. One year later I was finally able to launch The Scene in the way I had imagined.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Step 1: Writing down your idea and getting clear about your unique value proposition. Putting everything you know already and a description of what it is you want to create into a deck/presentation would be helpful as well as chances are for all the next steps, you’ll be networking with a lot of people, and they’d want to know more about your idea. It’s great to have a deck ready to go for this purpose.
Step 2: Conducting industry, competitor, customer, and market research. It’s so important to know everything about these topics that are relevant to your idea. It’ll augment the deck you’ve created in Step 1 and will help you answer a lot of questions that come your way in Step 3 and beyond. Most importantly, it’ll give you the knowledge you need to proceed and plan for how to create and launch your idea.
Step 3: Finding good leads, sources, and mentors within the industry you can go to with questions about next steps or for support for your next steps. It’s hard to do everything on your own and chances are any help that you get in these early stages will be extremely useful and will help you develop lifelong relationships with people who can guide you. Use your network to find such people. Again, post on your Instagram story, LinkedIn, literally anywhere you think your network is, to search for such people. Ask to get on a Zoom call or meet them in person and pick their brain or ask specific questions you have, based on the stage you’re in.
Step 4: Creating a plan that works for you as a founder with steps on how to build the product/service, how and who to build the team with and how to allocate for funding. This can have 3 steps, if that’s as far as you can see right now, or it can have 50 — the point is to make a plan that feels actionable to you. If I recall, mine had 5–6 big steps and broke each step down into mini to-do lists that would make 1 complete step. My steps included action items such as “finding a software dev team”, and mini steps included where to begin my search, my search timeline, etc. Another step was to connect with X, Y & Z people in my network to learn more about how to launch a tech product and another step was to get coaching and learn about how to fundraise, which included its own mini to–do list.
Step 5: Execution of the plan you created in step 4 in a timeline and order that feels right to you. The key is not to rush anything and to be thorough. Know that you’ll be augmenting the plan and adding many more steps to your plan while executing — this is the whole point of having a plan — being able to build on it, correct it, make it more detailed, etc. and is demonstrative of life as a founder because you’ll always have a “next step” to be added on.
Step 6: Getting coaching/ help, taking classes, attending seminars (or Instagram Lives), learning skills that will be useful to you in your entrepreneurial journey, reading books that will help you with the same — it’s so crucial to keep learning. I would recommend trying to learn at least one new thing a day within your founder journey but if that’s hard to keep up with, start with learning one new thing a week — this can be attending an Instagram live that’s relevant to your industry/customer base or reading one chapter of a book that you think will be useful to your founder journey. In addition, it’s important to be self-aware and understand where specifically you need to learn skills and essentially learn how to do your job — for me that was very much in the financial space and with learning how to fundraise — I took finance classes at NYU and got coaching on IFUNDWOMEN to learn how to do this. I would strongly recommend taking classes and getting private coaching in the areas that you need help with if you can!
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
Number one, get clear on your idea and unique value proposition, write it down, put it in a deck where you can explain it. Second, definitely get a consultant (but search for the right one and know that that search can be tedious) and take them through your idea and your deck. Make sure they understand the crux of your idea and why you want to bring it to life. Welcome their feedback and inputs — in my experience these have been largely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding the best practices and other core issues of an industry that I am not an expert in, but simultaneously know that you are the lead and this is your idea and you get to vocalize and draw the line when feedback doesn’t apply or cannot be executed because it’s not in line with your vision.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
This depends on how much you need to raise plus the stage of your company. If you’re anywhere between ideation to pre revenue — you likely will be in the bootstrapping segment. I crowdfunded for The Scene on iFundWomen in the idea stage and raised for software development. Don’t be afraid to look at funding from friends and family or crowdfunding as your first step. It’s actually great practice for when you do have to go up in front of angels and VCs. If you are in the revenue stage, you can probably go up to angels and depending on how much revenue you are making you might even be able to go for VC funding. Raising funding is extremely hard and there isn’t enough awareness around how to do it, so I’d highly recommend either applying to incubators/ accelerators or finding coaching platforms, such as iFundWomen, to get yourself that additional support and preparation.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I don’t believe you need success to make the world a better place, you just need purpose. With that, I’ve always felt a strong purpose to work with women and children that have been victims of abuse or need education or special assistance due to their circumstances. I have been involved with such causes and centers for nearly 14 years now. I also feel a similar purpose towards animal rescue and rehabilitation and therefore have worked with a few of those centers in Southeast Asia as well.
That’s said, with my current platform and as the founder of The Scene I am now working on two new initiatives:
- Adding and promoting more POC-owned restaurants and establishments to our platform: we’ve been featuring such establishments since the very beginning but want to continue building onto our database for this purpose.
- Creating more awareness around entrepreneurial mental health: as readers can probably tell from my interview thus far, I do feel passionate about spreading the word around how important it is to take care of yourself in order to show up as your best self while being an entrepreneur. I intend to use my personal digital platforms to create more awareness on this topic and share tips, feedback, and advice to help fellow entrepreneurs and create a real community there for people who are seeking out this type of advice.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
It’s really hard to choose one but I can give you a top three.
First, I’d like to inspire everyone to sit alone with their thoughts for a couple of minutes a day (preferably in the mornings) and make the effort to cleanse mentally and choose your thoughts and the way you are showing up. Secondly, I’d like to inspire the focus on feeling good before showing up to whatever it is that you’re passionate about or do for a living. These two steps combined, in my opinion, would bring a massive positive shift in how people show up and what energy they bring to the world. Lastly, I’d like to inspire everyone to be kinder to everyone and everything they come across on a daily basis. I like to start my day by asking myself how I can be just 5% kinder today and then try to operate with that goal in mind in every interaction I have throughout the day. That 5% kinder mindset feels like such an actionable goal, that it helps you show up with love, positivity, and grace naturally.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I’d love to meet Payal Kadakia Pujji, the founder of ClassPass and now author of LifePass — she is an incredible tech founder. Her company was the first unicorn of 2020 and was just acquired by Mind Valley. Her entrepreneurial journey, spirit and her leadership style have always appealed to me, and I follow her work, her interviews, etc. She’s someone I’d love to be mentored by or just get breakfast with to pick her brain on how she built ClassPass and especially to know more about her early steps as an entrepreneur. In one interview she said, “Everyone loves ClassPass now, but nobody had heard of ClassPass in the first 5 years after we launched”. It’s her mentality of resilience and taking strides forward while taking her mental health seriously (which she discusses a lot in interviews as well) that I’d love to learn more about.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Thank you so much for speaking with me!
Making Something From Nothing: Ridhima Kalani Of The Scene On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
