Harsh Tiwari, Director, EMPBindi International

My biggest advice to entrepreneurs is this: listen closely to your communities. Watch, observe, and spend time understanding the core issue behind the problem you are trying to solve. Also, don’t lose your edge by chasing too many ideas. Focus on what you do best, and pay attention to what your communities are saying. Even if you are developing just one product, that single product will help you and the community much more than spreading yourself thin across many different ideas. At Bindi, we began by bringing solar electrification to areas without reliable access to electricity. But electricity itself was never our ultimate goal. We wanted to train women in this technology, not only as beneficiaries, but as solution providers for the future. And hence, we provided local women with the knowledge to manage these systems, turning them into solar engineers. 

At Bindi, our core focus has always been listening to the communities we serve, and that is how our programs have developed organically. Listening is one of the non-negotiable values we started with. That is how our first electrification projects happened, and later, how we pivoted into livelihood-supporting products. But this transition took nearly ten years, and it required deeper conversations with communities to truly understand their needs and what kind of product development would be meaningful.

When these models worked well, however, we fell into the trap of thinking we knew everything – that we could solve all problems. That’s when we heard mobility was becoming an issue. Instead of doing what we did best – understanding where the issue came from – we jumped onto the e-mobility bandwagon, drawn by the excitement around new technology. We developed an e-bike over the course of eight months. But when we piloted it in the communities, the bike was too heavy, culturally misfit, and not considered a reliable solution by the women themselves. It was rejected right away, both by the community and by our solar engineers.

This was a very humbling experience for our team, which had built its models on the core principle of listening. Over time, it is easy to forget the core principles that made you succeed in the first place. For us, this failure became a transformative learning experience.

Key takeaways

• When you stop listening, you risk building for trends, not people. That is when ideas can fail.

• Avoid chasing too many ideas or branching too far from what you’re great at.

• Don’t invest heavily in new ideas until you have captured honest customer feedback.