Buchuk: Discovering the Future of Automatic Cooking

Abstract

A young entrepreneur Amarnath, the case protagonist, in discovering the future of automatic cooking developed Buchuk, cookware that automatically cooked south Indian cuisine. The design of the cookware was iterated many times to get the perfect prototype to go to market with. In spite of many efforts, funding was a major constraint to launch the cookware. To sustain rather than pouring in huge investments into the delayed launch of the cookware, Amarnath ventured into launching another product: a battery operated water leveler used in water pumps in homes and other water storage tanks called Novel. The leveler was a compact sized product the size of an iPhone that needed only to be dropped in the water tank to operate. Piggybacking on the water leveler which was a necessity in ever construction, Amarnath hoped to strategize on the ideal market mix for Buchuk. The case defines the various marketing avenues he chose to promote both the products. The case focuses on how Amarnath can simultaneously market two vastly diverse and different products, both in its nascent stages, understand the range of choices he faces as a start-up in terms of scaling and pivoting along with the trade-offs involved: what would be his likely chances of succeeding, especially considering his target in a two year window to be 150 cookware units?