Nearly two years after they founded My Sunny Balcony, the four founders of this Bengaluru start-up find themselves in a funny spot—somewhere between warm, life-affirming sunshine and that shadowy corner.

Doing good is great. But, this year, our biggest challenge is to ensure we stop being a passion project and become truly viable commercially,” asserts Shailesh Deshpande, the oldest of the quartet.

It’s not like business isn’t good. With an idea that is truly gifted, My Sunny Balcony (MSB) continues to leave its imprint on Bengaluru, helping urban households, and now even offices and restaurants, bring back the joy of green to their concrete, city lives. Every month, the company executes as many as 10 gardens, totting up monthly revenue of around 2 lakh. It is fast outgrowing its balcony days, with recent projects including larger terraces, surface gardens and open landscapes.

Its new range of colourful, quirky accessories, which can be used to build the dream garden, shows great promise. Even without a formal e-commerce platform, or a payment gateway in place, MSB receives up to four enquiries a day for its mosaic wall art decorations, wrought iron planters, and ceramic pots in all sizes and hues. 

Still, this almost-natural growth isn’t without prickly thorns. “Our stock is already worth a couple of lakhs, the basic monthly expenses have increased, and more money is locked in,” adds Deshpande. The founders know they urgently need growth capital—both human and financial—to nurture the seeds they have planted. Their wish list doesn’t sound impossible to achieve. An angel investment of 20 lakh to 35 lakh over a year should be enough to help them scale up, claim the quartet. “It’s not about making money. But, we are conscious that we must not fail in being able to exploit the potential we have created,” says Deshpande. “We don’t want to get stuck in a box. That is something we talk about.”

He elaborates further, “We can now see two clearly different paths. One, what happens if we get the money, and second, where we will be without money.” Theirs wasn’t a company built on business plans or growth metrics. They admit they haven’t really been available at the forums where one seeks funding. “We haven’t attracted venture capital interest, but then, we haven’t chased it either,” he adds.

It’s clear that they don’t have a road map to get there, and plans are still in the brainstorming stage. However, this team has a knack for improvisation, as evident from its line of garden accessories.

An e-commerce portal, where users could buy a ready-to-fit modular garden was must-do for 2010. However, execution proved to be a struggle; so they launched a line of accessories instead. Over two months starting November last year, Deshpande and his partners tested the market at flea bazaars and Christmas carnivals. “We found enough people who don’t mind transferring money electronically. It’s working very well,” the team says unanimously. Through the new Facebook page, MSB Store, they’ve booked orders from 100 customers in this time. However, deliveries are limited to Bengaluru for now. The team’s discussing selling at a store in Hyderabad, and eventually taking the store-in-store route to centres such as Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.

The accessories business could prove to be just what MSB needs to scale up. It’s much easier to provide multiple pieces of a single item than to start anew on each new garden project. Also, given that the price of accessories, starting at 250, is more competitive compared to that of adding a garden to a balcony, this new business vertical just might grow faster. “Customers no longer need to pay us to have their gardens designed. They now have an opportunity to design their own dream gardens,” says Deshpande. “We were restricting ourselves to executing gardens. But, we have to make ourselves redundant to grow.”

Of course, to be successful at retail, MSB needs stocks and inventory. It currently needs a lead time of two weeks to deliver products, even within Bengaluru. That, confesses the team, makes them lose customers, who don’t wish to wait.

It’s back to the earlier talk about the need for more resources—capital to build stock, and human resource to handle it. “It’s really a catch 22 situation. If we don’t hire, we can’t grow. Till we grow, we can’t hire,” adds Deshpande, exasperatedly. Their future plans—whether the lucrative annual maintenance contracts or the seasonal plants market—depend on those resources coming on board.

However, team strength is limited, and overworked. Of the four founders, only Sriram Aravamudan and Reena Chengappa continue to work full time. They are helped by three gardeners, of which one works part time, and a van driver. They tide over crunch time with enthusiastic volunteers sourced on MSB’s very active Facebook page. But, exuberant goodwill might not be enough.

“We urgently need somebody who can take over MSB Store,” says Deshpande. “Till we have more people, we will be working from crisis to crisis, instead of growing critically.” Like all start-ups, getting a person with domain expertise and the will to do a wide range of odd jobs, is tough. Similarly, building quicker access to cash is not easy. Clearly, it’s time the MSB team did for themselves what they do best for their clients—create spaces where sunshine likes to thrive.