Eight years ago Shachin Bharadwaj stayed in a matchbox-sized home-and-office for over two years. He even felt embarrassed to invite his Bengaluru-based parents over to Pune. This was when the food-delivery startup TastyKhana had just begun gaining traction in the city.

Constantly running low on money, he even sold his prized possession he had then, the Hero Honda Splendor, for a paltry amount of Rs. 13,000 to pay his monthly rent.

Gone are the Splendor days, Shachin today drives a gleaming brown BMW. He is a proud father of a one-month-old son, and he is all set for his second venture – Sminq!

Things changed quite significantly over the last few years. TastyKhana was acquired by Foodpanda for approximately Rs. 120 crore around November last year.

The not-so-smooth transition into Foodpanda

The talks for the acquisition started in August of the same year, and the conversation gathered momentum too soon. Before anyone had time to bat an eyelid, the deal was sealed.

Berlin-based food delivery startup Delivery Hero, which invested $5 million in 2011 and owned majority stakes in TastyKhana, agreed with the local team to go ahead with the deal. Shachin and Sheldon were happy with the final deal as they were able to give a 10X ROI to some of their angel investors and handsome returns to team members who backed them during the early days of TastyKhana.

A few months after the acquisition, things did not go as expected. There were major conflicts between the two management teams.

When I asked him for more details, he refused to discuss the issues and mentioned that the work culture of Foodpanda was very different from what the 100-odd member team of TastyKhana had built over the last seven years.

Shachin added that he didn’t have any comments on how Foodpanda runs or manages its business, and said “it would be naïve of me to think that only my way of working is right.”

He and the others from the management team of TastyKhana quit Foodpanda in early March. Sources say that the founding team forewent crores of rupees that were stuck as Foodpanda shares.

“For us ethics and principles at building the business the right way was a matter which we had zero compromise. I would prefer to grow slow than taking unethical shortcuts. I am the kind of person who has not even bribed a cop ever. I once had my license suspended for six months for a genuine mistake on my part, but I didn’t want to pay a bribe and go scot free,” added Shachin.

When we spoke more about the exit and what people got at the end of it, he said, “I am happy with whatever I have. I did not want anything more. As we had missed paper work on ESOPS for some employees, we [Sheldon and Shachin], in fact, paid them from our own pockets. Life is too short to cut corners and step on the people who made you what you are.”

How ‘See Me In No Queue’ was born

After the short stint at Foodpanda, Shachin was suddenly in the thick hitting another life milestone. He was going to enter fatherhood, and he recalls how his life was all about ultra sonographies and gynecologist’s appointments.

“We spent hours waiting at every one of these places, and as you obviously know from your own experience, these waits are the longest. I kept thinking about how to make this whole waiting process more efficient,” said Shachin.

Shachin and his wife tried sneaking in meals multiple times but lost their appointments many a times.

“Why can’t these people manage their queues better? Technology can definitely solve this problem,” he wondered.

Shachin along with Sheldon, his former Co-Founder, and Santhosh, TastyKhana’s Chief Sales Officer, had already launched Sminq (pronounced as smink) and tied up with eight clinics in Pune.

How does Sminq work?

Sminq is a mobile app that helps companies manage customers. It manages live queues and sends SMS notifications to customers whose turn has come/whose products are ready for pick up. It shows customers the live status of the queue and lets people join these queues remotely.

The app is already driving close to 1,000 remote bookings per month with the doctors that have signed up with them. They are also piloting with an HR firm to help them manage walk-in interviews.

According to Shachin, the scope of Sminq is vast. It can be used in a variety of verticals, from clinics and walk-in interviews to Government services, like RTOs and Passport Seva Kendras, to car or bike service stations.

For vendors, the app can work as a CRM that can handle all customer management processes that happen in the backend. The product costs about Rs. 2,000 per month depending on the size of the customer base.

Many startups across the globe are doing customer queue management for select verticals, some for clinics, some for restaurants, but only two other companies, MyTime and Q-Less, are into queue management for multiple verticals.

What’s in store for the future?

“I’ve been through a lot, but also I’ve learnt so much. I am very happy that the team and I built a successful business with TastyKhana, now I am ready to do it all over again for Sminq,” added Shachin.

Of course he did not mean sleeping in a tiny room, nor did he mean selling his bike, he means that for him the entrepreneurial journey will continue.

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At some point in time, we all go through a phase when we have that urge to do something special in life. Five years ago, Shobhit Arora got this feeling to make a difference in people’s lives. He continued his efforts to bring this change through artistic beauty and design.

For Shobhit, it was not an easy decision to quit his comfortable corporate job and venture into a new area. It took him almost a year of late nights and weekends to do some research and validate the hypothesis. He spent a lot of time studying international markets and existing trends, meeting artists and designers in person, and visiting exhibitions. On one hand, this was a globally proven sweet spot and on the other there was a strong need for the social commerce model in this country. After a year of research, he was confident of the phenomenal opportunity.

In December 2014, he launched Worldartcommunity, a peer-to-peer online marketplace for artistic creations across a wide range of mediums and materials. Based out of Gurgaon, the platform connects appreciators of art with creators of uniquely designed or handmade works that will enrich the living spaces and enlarge the sense of beauty and joy.

“It’s a peer-to-peer platform, which is used by both buyers and sellers. We follow a simple sign up process where artists and designers can register to sell online. This is followed by a due diligence by our design team. Once approved, the sellers control their space completely,” says Shobhit Arora, Founder and CEO, Worldartcommunity.

The platform operates in the zone of lifestyle creations, whether it’s fine art, fashion or décor. “There’s no cost levied on artists and designers for selling on our platform. This enables them access to the entire dashboard, which includes product upload, shop look and fix the products price. A seller can even link their online presence, including social media handles, with their shop at the Worldartcommunity platform. We also allow them to offer discounts, if they like to offer, to select customers. We cater to a wide range of price points. It’s more a matter of taste than pocket. The fact that we have artists and designers selling directly, customers get the benefit of direct pricing,” says Appachu SK, Co-Founder and COO, Worldartcommunity.

The revenue model of this platform is commission-based. It charges a flat 10 per cent commission on a successful transaction. The initiative was initially bootstrapped. It raised angel funding of USD 200,000 in April 2015. This round was led by Viraj Tyagi, a serial entrepreneur and an investor.

Market and competition

 India exports almost 5,000 million art and craft products annually. This gives us an understanding of the potential of this segment.

 Craftsvilla, IndianRoots, CBazaar, Utsav Fashion, and Namaste Craft, among others, are some of the direct competitors of Worldartcommunity. In addition, many e-commerce platforms are catering to this segment. Early this year, Flipkart tied up with multiple government ministries to help artisans shift towards online sales. Snapdeal has partnered with India Post to enable Varanasi artisans to sell their work on the online platform.

On competition, Shobhit says that the category holds a strong promise and there are many players at an early stage. He believes that there’s an opportunity for all as the segment at this stage is quite fragmented and unorganised with low online share.

He further adds, “Our vision is to strongly entrench ourselves in the art and design ecosystem, which would be a mix of online and offline presence. We would be looking at brand extension to empower artisans and craftsmen to sell directly on our platform.”

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In the contemporary startup ecosystem, it is not unusual for entrepreneurs to focus more on the products and services they offer. Limited budgets often lead them to outsource matters like finance and accounts to professionals, as setting up in-house teams for financial solutions can be expensive. Also, a lot of time, which could be better spent focussing on their core competencies, is wasted in understanding complex regulatory issues.

Incorporated in 2010, Aristotle Consultancy is a SSAE 16 Type II verified organisation that provides end-to-end accounting, financial, and advisory services, and often functions as an outsourced finance department for startups. Currently operating out of Delhi/NCR, Bengaluru and Chennai, Aristotle Consultancy offers services such as Accounts Outsourcing, Virtual CFO, Payroll Services, Advisory Services, and Services for MNCs across several verticals to startups, SMEs, MNCs entering India, and Equity Investors.

The Genesis

When Deepak Dhamija, an IIM Calcutta graduate, was working as an Investment Manager for VenturEast Tenet Fund II (VET), he interacted with many startup founders, most of whom were looking for someone to manage their company’s finances and accounts. Deepak, who has also completed the the venture capital development programme at ISB, Hyderabad, noticed that there was a huge gap with the kind of services CA firms provided and the support the startups were seeking.  He saw an opportunity to fill this gap.

Deepak, who previously led a team at Infosys, offering business solutions to Daimler Chrysler, says, “During my interactions with various founders, I found that startups faced a lot of problems when it came to basic financial and legal matters. At the same time, startups can’t afford costly services, at least in the initial stages.”

Sanjeev Lamba, who is the co-founder of Aristotle Consultancy, heads the accounting and finance services at the firm.

Started with a seed capital of Rs.3 lakh, Aristotle Consultancy has been bootstrapped so far. The initial capital has been utilised to set up a delivery office in Delhi and hire manpower. Deepak says that they have been cash positive since their inception, and are therefore not looking to participate in the fundraising race.

Highlighting the challenges they faced in the initial days, Deepak says,

Companies are not very sure when it comes to sharing financials and outsourcing bookkeeping. So building trust with the client is quite important. Also, companies often face issues related to bad bookkeeping through ad hoc accounting practices. So it’s challenging to clean the backlog and historical data, not only from a statutory perspective, but also from the point of view of getting visibility on internal business performances.

21-day Mobilisation Process

Startups need experienced people and correct advisory, but these services are either not available or are very costly. The founders of most startups generally end up wasting a lot of their valuable time managing such services and fire-fighting regulatory, taxation, and compliance issues.

Deepak says,

Aristotle brings to the table its vast experience in handling and nurturing startups. The ’21-day mobilisation process’ is a special activity carried out by Aristotle during client on-boarding, where an expert team rigorously studies the client’s existing processes.

Packages for Startups

Aristotle offers a comprehensive package named Virtual CFO, which takes care of finance and accounting needs of a company.

Hiring a full-time professional CFO and maintaining an in-house finance team may not be in the budget of a small enterprise. Deepak points out that startups and SMEs often don’t even need a full-time finance team, but they do need quality service. Today, there is no dearth of demand for such services, but there is a dearth of talent.

Often, it is arduous for startups to get a quality CA who understands their needs and matches their speed. Mentoring at a value-for -money price is something startup founders always scout for.

Aristotle works on a shared resource model, where the cost-saving benefits are passed on to clients. One can save 25-30 per cent of operational expenses incurred by clients by leveraging their services. Costs vary from Rs. 40,000 per month to Rs. 15 lakh per month depending on the volume and complexity of work.

Deepak says,

The idea behind the Aristotle model is that the large corporates should not be the only companies that benefit from experienced finance professionals. Current market offerings in the finance and accounting domain are either geared towards servicing corporates and are very expensive, or offerings are in the form of one-time solutions without any ongoing advice and support. Aristotle is here to fill that gap.

Client Acquisition

Initially, Aristotle Consultancy started off with Royal Bank of Scotland and India Hospitality Corporation. Today, they have expanded operations to geographies like Delhi-NCR, Bangalore and Chennai, handling 40 clients including Jabong, Fabfurnish, FoodPanda, Tolexo (IndiaMart), GoJavas, Printvenue, and Xerox. It also has a couple of overseas clients, mostly in the Middle East.

Currently, Aristotle has a team of around 100 people, 20 per cent of whom are CAs. They also have in-house team for Payroll and Secretarial services, who operate from Aristotle’s office. For Finance and Accounts, based on client requirements and specifications, they build an in-house team that works from the client location.

Deepak says, “We charge the client strictly basis the resources deployed against the assignments. We have very competitive rack-rates and clients are billed accordingly. We recently introduced a “Start Up Booster” pack for non-funded startups. The purpose is to make our Services affordable to new startups so that they can focus on their core business.”

Growth Plans

According to Deepak, over the last three quarters, Aristotle Consultancy has been doubling their revenue and witnessing a sharp rise in business by bagging quite a few fresh tech startups. In the last fiscal year, the company achieved a revenue of Rs. 4 crore. They are targeting revenues of Rs. 6 crore in the next fiscal.

Aristotle Consultancy

As an avid sports enthusiast, Bimlesh Gundurao, was no stranger to injuries. Once, having sustained a severe ankle sprain that left him immobile for close to two weeks, he lost the prescription after his first visit to the doctor.

“There were so many medicines on the table, and none of us knew which one had to be eaten before and after food, what sequence the medicines had to be taken in, and how many times each day. We had such a tough time reaching the doctor who was a visiting consultant. Finally, when we managed to get the doctor, he had no clue who we were, and could not remember what he had prescribed. We had to read out the names of all the medicines and then make notes on his instructions,” says Bimlesh.

Bimlesh’s personal experiences further sealed this idea. On one occasion, his mother, who has issues with her thyroid and BP, fell ill as she had skipped a few doses. The family had no clue about her medication consumption pattern. Again, they were unable to find her prescription. Lack of data led the doctor to take decisions with very limited data. This led to treatment on a trial-and-error basis.

This incident happened soon after Bimlesh’s own injury making him realise how critical it was to have access to digital prescriptions and be able to digitally procure medicines and receive reminders.

Breaking the market

The complexity of this process is what gave Bimlesh the idea for his healthcare startup – Aguai Solutions, to make prescription management simpler. We are at the brink of a healthcare and healthtech startup revolution. With a billion-strong population, the healthcare market is believed to be growing at CAGR of 17 per cent. The total size of the of this industry is expected to be $160 billion by 2017.

Bimlesh started Aguai Solutions 2 .5 years ago. The company started by providing application and product development-related IT services to companies in the US and India. They also provide software technology solutions on web/cloud/mobile to healthcare and I-powered businesses.

Over the past year, the team has started building their own products with a focus on the medications and prescriptions space, while keeping the pharmacy at the centre of outpatient healthcare.

Bimlesh says he always wanted to do something that would help the Indian healthcare ecosystem. He looked at the electronic medical record (EMR) and patient management systems for children and senior citizens, but his market research proved that data entry wasn’t the means to help people manage data. This meant that a more holistic approach was needed.

The trio work approach

Aguai Solutions launched three products that connect pharmacies, patients and pharma distributors over the last six months. These include:

1. Pharmeazy and Distributeazy: This technology is used to partner with pharmacy retail chains, and is currently used by six stores in Bengaluru. The team plans to expand to 50 stores in south India over the next two years.
2. Medieazy – This platform has got close to 700 signups, and over 100 orders have been processed through the platform
3. Rxeazy – a platform for ePrescriptions for doctors will be launched by December 2015.

“Our connected healthcare approach is our biggest USP and key differentiator. We have a unified backend with different front-ends of data consumption using web/cloud/mobile interfaces,” adds Bimlesh.

Getting heads together

With this idea in place, Bimlesh roped in Madhur Rao, an IT Professional with over 15 years of experience, and Shreeram MC as the Key Technical Architects. Shreeram has over 10 years of experience, and has worked with other startups and powered several technology products.

Dr. Niaz, a healthcare IT professional, joined as clinician advisor and Tarun Bhargav as Sr. Product Development Leader. Saurabh K, vice-president of BioLife Sciences, was roped in as the Pharma Advisor.

How does it all work?

Once you take a picture of your prescription, send it to the pharmacy near you. The pharmacy gets the order via a phone/web application. The pharmacies then process the order and the medicines are delivered to your home. An app also allows you to set reminders, and take all your doses on time to complete your medication course.

The patterns of consumption are captured and can be shared with the doctor as ‘medication adherence.’ Pharmacies also stand to benefit as the platform links them to distributors, ensuring greater visibility and the ability to send notifications on stock re-orders and movements.

The team will also launch a doctor-consultation vertical, where the doctor writes a prescription on paper using Aguai’s digital pen. The notes on the paper will be captured on the doctor’s smartphone and can be shared in real-time with the patient. “Now the doctor can have a mini-EMR repository on his or her phone with a Patient and Prescription Management system,” adds Bimlesh.

YourStory Take

It is believed the per capita expenditure on healthcare is estimated to increase to $89 in 2015 from $61 in 2012. The market size of the sector in India was estimated to be $75 billion during 2012-13. While the healthcare segment is getting hotter by the minute, many doctors question if all this will ultimately really solve the healthcare problems people face.

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Shuttle bus service startup ZipGo on Thursday launched a membership-based exclusive bus service for women in Delhi-NCR. The service is currently piloted in pockets of Delhi like Gurgaon, Dwarka, and Manesar. The company plans to extend the pilot to Noida and Greater Noida in December.

Jitender Sharma, Co-founder, ZipGo, says that this is possibly the first truly women-only bus service. As an introductory offer, the team is offering free rides worth Rs 100 for new users and referral amounts of Rs 250 for every successful referral. There also is 50 percent bonus offered for those who choose to recharge using the Paytm wallet.

Jitender says the reason behind this move was in tune with the company’s mission to help reduce the usage of personal vehicles by providing comfortable and reliable mass transport facility for daily commute. As women contribute to a large segment of the commuter population in Delhi, he adds that this service was started to provide them convenience and comfort.

“The buses are clean and air-conditioned. Booking and tracking are quite easy. But the biggest value proposition is the peace of mind, comfort and relaxation that comes from knowing that all your co-passengers are women,” says Jitender.

According to him, while the taxi market addressed one portion of the market, a large portion of the daily commuters’ woes was still not solved.

Following an aggregator model, the ZipGo team meets the vendors, explains the system to them and on-boards the drivers. Jitender says that looking at the way the taxi cab business has flourished with the use of technology, the bus services are open to this idea.

Since ZipGo follows an aggregator model, the company is particular about the quality and personality of the driver. Apart from basic checks of background, documentation and police verification, the work histories of the drivers are monitored followed by a five-step verification and interview process.

The drivers are trained on etiquette and behaviour, as well. “We also have a zero-tolerance policy to even the slightest indication of misbehaviour,” says Jitender.

YourStory take

According to experts, the emerging bus service market is going to be larger than the taxi market, which is estimated at Rs 60,000 crore. In the past few months, many players sensing the growth have entered the segment.

Ola, which is one of the most formidable cab aggregators in the country, is said to be preparing to invest Rs 120-150 crore to launch bus services. With several players, the fledgling segment is going to be more vibrant and mature in the coming days.

However, there are several government policies in the way that act as roadblocks in the progress of these startups. ZipGo, which had initially begun its operations in Bengaluru, had a rather rough patch in the city owing to the policies and regulations.

With women-specific shuttle service, ZipGo may taste some success, however, women-only focused cab services like G cabs, Priyadarshini taxis and Viira cabs have been operational for the past few years but they struggled to scale up.

Ola was also slated to launch a ‘by women, for women’ line of taxis, but after the rape incident in Uber last year, Ola appears to have kept this plan on the backburner. Most recently, Oyo launched a new brand called Oyo WE, for women travelers with an all-women staff.

(Inputs by Jaivardhan)

Picture this. Your startup has just begun to scale up and your team size has grown from single to double digits. Your first order of business would be to get your office infrastructure in place. This need is what Anshul Purohit, who had worked in the corporate scene for over 15 years, decided to leverage.

He noticed that while the Indian e-commerce market had covered the B2C segment, they were yet to touch the B2B space, especially the $70 billion Indian telecom market.

“In the present market landscape, although there are e-commerce players like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon, they only deal specifically in the niche segment of selling mobile phones, mobile accessories, or Wi-Fi routers,” says Anshul.

This got him thinking, and he decided to launch Telecom Profit, an online B2B marketplace dedicated to telecom infrastructure. On offer is a range of products such as networking and mobility devices, Internet and point-to-point lease lines, and conferencing facilities, among other products.

Laying the lines

After doing due diligence and researching the market space, Anshul quit his corporate job and spoke to several industry experts to assess and mitigate the risk involved.

He knew he had to get a team in place, and decided to involve his friends Dheeraj Sethi, who joined as CMO, and Abhijit R, who came onboard as Head Alliance. Telecom Profit was launched in February 2015. Soon after, M. Siraj joined as Head of Operations.

Telecom Profit currently stocks over 50,000 telecom products and services across 11 categories and 55 sub-categories. “We have a built a network of 1,000 registered, specialised telecom vendors, and over 4,000 SME and large institutions in a span of six months,” says Anshul.

Roping in the players

The organisation has also tied up with several national and international Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) like TPLink and Zicom. The team intends to add 4,000 more telecom vendors, and over 10,000 more SMEs and large Institutions, in addition to tie-ups with more national and international OEMs. They also plan to expand their current 15-member team to 45 in the next six months.

Apart from the variety of products and services available online, Telecom Profit also allows you to request for quotes from various providers. The platform has a ‘customer buddy’ feature that allows you to seek complete professional assistance to help you choose and buy the right set of products and services.

System checks

However, their journey has come with its fair share of challenges and roadblocks. Apart from building the team, the big challenge was to communicate the idea to trade partners and customers. “It was important that they understood the difference between Telecom Profit and the other existing portals,” says Anshul.

He says that, initially, the trade partners and customers were sceptical, so the team started giving free demos and trials. They also realised that launching and managing operations across India would not be possible with their current infrastructure and manpower. They have currently shortlisted 10 cities for the first phase of their operations. Telecom Profit will be starting the second phase with 25 cities by March 2016.

Telecom Profit charges trade partners for its services and has different plans to cater to their requirements starting from a minimum of Rs.8,000 to Rs.32,000, depending on category and location. They also have revenues coming from OEMs for advertising and promotional campaigns.

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Rishikesh Joshi had everything going for him.

A hard-core sports enthusiast, he was working with the successful IPL team, Mumbai Indians,  overseeing their administrative setup since the franchise was created six years ago. Life was good for Rishikesh, and why wouldn’t it be? An avid sports enthusiast since the age of five, Rishikesh, who himself had played six sports at the national level, was living the dream by working with stalwarts of the game.

But like most entrepreneurs, he felt the need to do more. During his tenure with the Mumbai Indians, he had worked closely with Mumbai’s inter-school sporting system at Mumbai Schools Sports Association (MSSA), the same place he had competed at the school level. He was alarmed by the apathetic sporting environment, loosely scheduled competitions, inadequate infrastructure, and obsolete administrative processes. This made him reevaluate his contribution to the sporting environment in the country.

“All this while, I was totally focused, passionate, and motivated to grow and make a mark at my job with Mumbai Indians. A lot of frustration was building up in my mind when I saw the way inter-school sport was being conducted. I felt there had to be a “feel-good factor” about sports from the early stages of a child’s career evoking the passion and enjoyment that a child derives out of playing sports,” he says.

This drive led him to set up Sports for All (SFA). However, despite having worked closely with the sporting community, things still weren’t smooth:

“I didn’t decide one fine day that I wanted to ride the startup wave, and launch my own venture. It wasn’t as if I had a couple of ideas and would just give one of them a shot. I didn’t have that luxury. It was over a period of 20-22 months (since July 2013) that everything I had visualised about Sports For All (SFA) started to look feasible, possible and commercially viable. I made a thorough 15-year roadmap detailing and putting on paper the entire workflow I wanted at SFA. Only then did I decide to start off.”

Rishikesh just wished to fulfil his dream of improving the support and facilities available for sportsmen at the school and college level in the  winter of 2012. It was only a year later, by mid-2013, that the roadmap he visualised began to take shape on paper.

Ab Jeetega India

Today, SFA aims to be the country’s foremost inter-school sporting system that identifies sporting talent at the grassroots level in a structured and professional environment. Since 2 October 2015, 85 schools have registered with the platform.

Rishikesh says there are three components to the system:

• The on-ground event: SFA Mumbai 2015: Sports & Education Week: This event will be hosted at the D Y. Patil Sports Academy, from 24 – 31 December 2015.It aims to bring together as many as 11,000 aspiring champions from 500 schools across Mumbai City to participate and compete in nine different Olympic disciplines. Rishikesh tells us that they have devised a School Ranking System that will be based on a school’s overall performance across all nine sports, making every participant’s performance matter.

• The online portal: SFAnow.in : This is the backbone of SFA’s system. It documents and records the performance of every participating student and school through statistics or HD videos, thereby giving students and schools a chance to project their skills to one and all while maintaining their sporting records for life. According to the founder, they are enabling content-based strategy, through which they plan to record close to 2,900 videos at their first event, to be consumed and shared by participants/students across digital social platforms.

•  Partnership: Training and Development : SFA will tie up with reputed sport academies and devise programmes to ensure that appropriate and adequate training and skill development is made available to every aspiring athlete from schools in each city. The venture has recently struck a partnership with the Michael Phelps Swim School in Mumbai.

Traction and what lies ahead

The deadline to register for the SFA  platform has been extended to 15 December 2015. Through this member schools don’t just get to participate in events but also seek counsel and help for their students.

Currently self-funded, SFA has invested Rs 5 crore in the event and the venture. However, Rishikesh is confident that they will break even by January 2016 and is aiming for a revenue of Rs 50-75 lakh by the end of the first quarter of 2016.

With 110 schools and 4,200 students already registered on the platform, the firm’s revenue model is fairly simple. They plan to receive funds through sponsorships, merchandise, ancillaries, licenses, etc. Other revenue streams could be broadcasting, where talent seekers would require statistics and videos of these students. The venture could also be commercialised by sharing footage with TV channels looking to showcase the young talents in the country, or through commercials from sponsors on the video channel.

The team at SFA hopes to have a similar event for college students in place by mid-2016.

Rishikesh feels the avenues are vast. He also has a bigger ambition to maintain a database, where a statistical profile of every athlete is readily available. Moreover, by next year, they are planning to expand their base to four more cities – Pune, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Chennai. This number is expected to grow to eight by the end of 2017.

By 2017, they also hope to organise 120 days of sporting events with an active database of 10 lakh students.

Supporting this endeavour is India Test and ODI Cricketer Rohit Sharma, who has pledged his support for the cause by paying the nominal fees for schools that cannot afford the platform.

Rishikesh explains his larger vision by using tag line ‘Ab Jeetega India’.

He tells us SFA’s real customer is “every child and parent who probably does not even know that a champion exists within him or her.”

He says, “Let’s first make our children fall in love with sport, everything else will follow.”

Ex-IITians Debprotim Roy, Vikash Choudhary and Ankit Agarwal founded Canvs.in with one goal – to create an active community of designers and artists in India. It would serve as a platform where they could upload their work, sell online, interact with peers, find jobs and projects, and participate and curate offline exhibitions/workshops. Debprotim says, “Canvs.in is all about bringing design and art to the forefront of the developmental revolution that India is going through today.”

Canvs.in has an advisory from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and is currently based in Mumbai.

The founders believe that Canvs.in aims to solve the following pain points:

1. Creating a vibrant community of the best designers and artists in India under one roof, thereby uncluttering the space once and for all. It will also serve as a platform for them to get to know and interact with each other
2. Helping the design and art community by bringing creative people together, making sales easy, creating jobs and projects for everyone, and getting queries and doubts answered by the community

The First Strokes

In addition to being a creative platform, the genesis of Canvs.in was rooted in a more practical need. Prior to this venture, Vikash and Ankit were running a bulk printing and merchandising business, while Debprotim was involved in a project of his own.  They three of them realised that they faced a common challenge – lack of availability of design talent. While merchandising needed a lot of design based work, Debprotim was on the lookout for a product designer. Debprotim, who was involved with photographers and artists during his tenure at IIT, realised they were finding it difficult to get freelance work and even exposure for the work they were doing.

This led the trio to start researching this space to understand the kind of problems that existed, and the scale they existed on, by speaking with designers and artists across India and joining online forums. This is what they found.

The Art and Design Scene in India

In India, design has evolved into a necessity rather than the luxury product it was once assumed to be. Art has seen a massive global upsurge, post the recession of 2008; in India, it has grown well beyond its pre-recession peak. Like most intellectual communities in India, the design and art community is growing, but stays eclipsed from the mainstream. Most lay people are unaware of where they can discover good artists they can partner with, or whose works they can admire.

Debprotim says, “At Canvs.in, we see users coming from small and big towns alike, with potential that matches the big cities. The difference is in the amount of exposure small towns get due to a lack of technical support or of the offline community building that happens in larger cities. We saw a rapid growth in users and crossed 1,000 users in four months, confirming our hypothesis of the need of the moment.”

The entry of Canva, a multinational design firm, is a clear indication of the potential the country has. Canva is an online graphic designing software that enables normal users as well as designers to create beautiful online collateral like emails, banners, posters, etc. It claims to get around 2,000 new users from India every day, and today has around 150,000 users from India. They plan on getting to 1 million graphic designers from India alone by the end of 2016. Canva recently got a boost of $15 million prior to their move to India. Roy says, “The numbers quoted by Canva are quite attainable, we have been working towards similar numbers since the inception of Canvs.in“

Other global players like Dribbble and Behance are also percolating the Indian markets via local events. While Behance has been on the scene since 2006 and set good standards in community creation, it focusses on projects and portfolios to some extent. They don’t allow the sale of works or posting of jobs.

Dribbble, a small but very active community of designers, has been able to tap into the US job market and is running profitably. Dribbble focusses on display of work and claims to be a place for designers to ‘show and tell’.

Quite recently, local firms like Bananabandy and Cupick have entered the market with slightly different offerings.

Bananabandy is an online marketplace for different designers. They host competitions that any designer can participate in. Cupick has been on the art scene for a while and allows artists from overseas and India to exhibit and sell their work. They have recently entered the jobs market as well.

What Sets Canvs.in Apart

Canvs.in, when compared to its peers, is growing very steadily as a community. It offers portfolio creation, sharing, discovery of artists, sale of work, access to jobs, and quite importantly offline exhibitions and events. This encompasses a wide horizon of design that is individually being targeted by global players separately.

Locally, Canvs.in is a frontrunner with its products and activities. With its focus on both art and design, Canvs.in also got into the Jobs space early; the competition has entered this area only more recently.

Future Plans

Talking about future plans, Roy says “We have been bootstrapped until now, but we received partial funding recently. We are looking for funds. We are currently a nine-member team. We are actively moving towards enhancing the product to bring together and concretise our community. On offline channels, we are looking at expanding our workshops and exhibitions geographically.”

Canvs.in is one startup to watch out for in the art and design space,.

Check out http://www.canvs.in/ for more details

People told me that I was making a reckless decision while leaving a settled job. And I never argued with them since that strong voice within me echoed really loud: “I will sail through this tough yet exciting journey of entrepreneurship.” And well I would say that’s not how this world functions. But the most important question is does it really matter to crazy entrepreneurs? No, it doesn’t when you sail through and yes, it does, when you don’t and your family and relatives do a chorus of ‘I told you so’.

For some, entrepreneurship is a matter of choice and for others it just happens. In my case, it’s an amalgamation. All I knew was that I couldn’t continue my monotonous job but I had the least clue on how to unveil my ambitions to make it big in life. That’s when I took the plunge of polishing the entrepreneur in me. To begin with, I took small projects of content writing, website development and other branding related consultancies. For almost a year, I tried my hand at many such diverse projects to understand the customers in the digital world and market as a whole. And that’s when with deep rationalising I conceptualised CrispTalks.com.

That’s a glimpse of my story. But I know many readers who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs will need a broader perspective to jump into this crazy-yet-amazing world of entrepreneurship. So here’s some entrepreneurial guidance from other innovators who believed in their ideas and lived them passionately.

Here’s what Pawas Jain, Founder, Blue Box Media Pvt Ltd., had to say:

“It is indeed an interesting question that you have raised. Here’s my threefold answer to your question. There were three reasons that made me jump from a safe and prestigious profession of chartered accountancy on to the risky and uncertain path of entrepreneurship:

1. The belief in my idea and moreover the belief in creative innovation. The more we thoughtfully conceptualise a product or service, better are the chances of sustainability of that business in the market. Digital media, the field we rightly chose, is at a budding stage in India and is bound to see manifold revolution in the upcoming years.

2. The motivation from people around. When you have a good set of people and a strong network surrounding the ecosystem, you are all geared up to face the challenges in a better way.

3. A good team to work with, and a co-founder that complements your skill set makes the journey of entrepreneurship easy for you and you are motivated even more to take the plunge.”

This was certainly one of the perfect examples of taking a planned way to entrepreneurship.

And here is Nitin Jain from Indibni, a personalised gifting solution provider for whom entrepreneurship just happened.

“After looking at many wedding gift options for a good friend from college, I was not able to find an apt gift. I decided to design something exclusive and personalised for the couple.

“So I took a photograph of both of them, converted it into a hand drawn sketch, and printed it on a golden foil and framed it between two glasses. When I gifted it to couple, everyone got excited.

“It was my #indibni moment. Gifting is not about price, utility, shape or size; it is all about the experience it gives to a buyer, and the feeling it evokes in the receiver. If what we are doing can touch people’s hearts and bring a smile on their face, we can actually pat ourselves on our back for a job well done.”

Entrepreneurs take the plunge because they are not worried about getting wet in the rain; they love to dance in it.

Do you have your entrepreneurial stories to share? If so, share your experience by dropping a comment. I would love to know what made you take the plunge.

About the Author

Rachna Ghiya is a startup enthusiast who is currently running her CrispTalks.com that serves other start-ups with affordable animated videos. Besides this, she is happily connecting with other entrepreneurs by organising informal meet-ups for entrepreneurs as City Mayor for EntrepreneurCafe.org – Jaipur chapter.

‘Think of us as your next-door Gupta Uncle.’ These were the words that caught my attention for Sendit.in, an online logistics marketplace. While the logistics sector today has a plethora of startups, Sendit claims to be more focussed on solving the logistics problem than just increasing the fleet of vehicles.

Anyone who has taken a road trip knows it is not complete without seeing a fleet of trucks on the highway. It was the same sight of a fleet of trucks during a bike ride from Bengaluru to Davangere that gave Naveen Bagrecha and Puneeth B. the idea to look at a technology-based, on-demand trucking solutions system. After getting their friend Pankaj Sisodia in, the trio roped in Darpan Jain and Gourav.

Acting as a connector

“In the current scenario, the user has to interact individually with operators. This raises a lot of issues of trust, pricing and customer experience. On the other hand, operators don’t have a common interface to receive orders. With transactions happening in isolation, there is not enough room for efficient optimisation of resources and time on the operator’s end,” says Darpan. The team says there is no common platform where the end user can interact with the transport operators and Sendit intends to act as a bridge.

The team provides solutions for intra-city and inter-city goods movement. For this, they have a fleet of vehicles which works on a per-demand basis. To shift goods, all the user has to do is book a vehicle on the platform. Based on the needs, a vehicle in proximity to the user is assigned for the movement. The platform allows real-time tracking, status updates, pre-booking facility and trip logs.
“We take care of trust, pricing and reliability issues and ensure that the goods are delivered in a timely and safe manner. On the transport operator’s end, we help them plan their transactions well, so that vehicles don’t run empty due to lack of information about orders in a particular area,” says Darpan.

Current scenario

Sendit is operational in Bengaluru and Pune, and there are plans to launch in multiple cities by the end of this year. Customers can book orders via website, Android app or a telephonic call. All the operators have a mobile client installed on their phones for efficient tracking and management.

Starting with one vehicle and four to five daily transactions, Sendit today claims to have over 40 to 50 transactions with average ticket size of Rs 400. The team is bootstrapped but is looking for funding to increase its fleet capacity, market expansions and for improving technology.

Darpan says that if one has to look at the complete logistics market that includes transportation, warehousing, VALS and freight forwarding, transportation itself accounts for 61 per cent of the market. “This is because most industries end up spending more than half of their logistics budget on this function,” adds Darpan.

“Our target area would be the metropolitan clusters. Overall, it is projected to be a $175-billion dollar industry in 2019. It’s all about connecting the dots now to increase the efficiency of operators,” says Darpan.

The market

Logistics has always been looked at as a fragmented and unorganised function of any business. However, with the rise of e-commerce and on-demand delivery companies, businesses and consumers are demanding deliveries and supply chain to be more organised, agile and transparent.

According to some rough estimate, the market size of technology in logistics in India is roughly $2 billion and is much larger in other markets like South East Asia and the Middle East. Globally, companies like ORION software, OnFleet, Bringg, Infor, JDA Software and Elementum are established players.

Website

Everyone wants to travel. Some travel during holidays, some over the weekends. Others take an extra day off and a few like me quit their jobs to travel. There are still many who long for adventure but do not set their foot out, because they are told travelling is an expensive affair.

This post is for those who think they can’t travel with less money and for those who have money but want to travel on a shoestring budget for the sake of constraint and the adventure it brings with it. I fit somewhere in the middle of these two categories.

I quit my job in July and started travelling within India. I calculated how much money I had and found that Rs 300 (less than $5) is what I needed to spend per day to last for a year on the road. It has been exactly 120 days of being on the road and I have learnt how to do exactly that.

Let me share with you the tricks and hacks I use to stay within my budget. Whether you set off for shores unknown indefinitely or travel intermittently between your work, you can use and adapt my tips for your convenience.

Before you go ahead and read, be prepared to be as rough and tough as possible. When you don’t have money, you have to have a strong willpower and inner motivation.

Long distance commute: You have two options: hitchhike or take the train. I won’t suggest State buses.

Indian trains: If you are in India, you are blessed to have the world’s most complicated and largest railway system which is as cheap as travelling for free. Of course, I am talking about the unreserved general coaches here. Do not worry about the crowd in these coaches; rather use this crowd to motivate you to travel in more such suffocating environments.

In general coaches, you might have to stand for six hours without having even enough standing space; you might have to sit close to the stinking toilets and, believe me, when the train slows down, the smell of toilet is stronger 1000 times over! But you do not have an option and remember that there is a beautiful destination waiting for you on the other side. In such situations, I take motivation from my fellow passengers. Most of them always travel in these coaches. For them it is as normal as it is for us to travel in an airplane. These include small children, pregnant women, old couples suffering with arthritis and other painful ailments. Surprisingly, you will find them perfectly normal. So I think, “If they can, why can’t I?” After that, everything becomes okay. These days, I have become part of such a group of people and whenever I have to commute long distances, I just show up at the station, take a general ticket and hop onto the next train. I don’t need to curse the IRCTC every day like everyone else.

Hitchhiking: Stand on the highway, stick out your thumb and wave it up and down as soon as you see an approaching vehicle (if you just stick out your thumb and do not wave, chances are that they won’t understand if you are appreciating the design of their vehicles or their driving style or asking for a free ride!). It can take a few minutes to a full day to get a free ride. But believe me, when you do, it is going to be the best ride ever and definitely an experience far better than that of travelling in the train.

There is no secret to hitchhiking. Follow your guts and be shameless. If you are lucky like me, you can also get a ride in a C-Class Mercedes Benz. You will make friends with truckers and learn more about their lives. Hitchhiking is the most preferred form of commuting for budget-minded travellers throughout the world.

Short distance commute: To commute locally in the area you are going to spend a few days, hitchhike. In India, most of the bikers will stop for you. Cars won’t stop so much but you can definitely try. Within the radius of  six to eight km, walk. Walk because you need to stay fit and walk because you don’t have money. Walk because after a few months of walking, you’d love walking and start saying no to free short-distance rides.

Accommodation: You have to understand the power of relationships. You need to be extremely sociable, moderately funny, definitely kind, and awfully shameless. You need to have no ego, prejudices, strong opinions or radical thoughts. You will be amazed to learn, after a few months, that being that way actually makes you a better and more peaceful person. You need to start talking to all your relatives, your long-forgotten friends, people who you extremely dislike, and people who have no morals and values but can be your valuable resources. The next step is to keep in touch with all such people. Ask them if you can spend a couple of nights at their place. You’d be surprised to see that most of those whom you thought were useless people will actually come forward to your help and many so-called closed ones will turn down your requests.

Apart from that, stay in ashrams, temples, monasteries, bus terminals, railway stations, road dividers, parks, and any other place where you don’t have to pay. Believe me, it sounds crazy and scary but it’s actually not. The most difficult part of any act is its beginning. Once you take the first step, the other foot will definitely follow you.

Water: If you had planned to travel 30 years ago, water would be free everywhere. But alas, you are living in a time when humans have commercialised such a basic resource that sustains life. But do not worry, you can still save your money on water. Keep a water bottle with you, fill it from the dhabas where you eat your food and from the taps you see occasionally on the road side. The things to remember is to carry a bottle and keep your eyes open. There is still ample free water available everywhere. If you are trekking through villages, knock on the houses and ask for water. No one has ever turned me down so far.

Food: In India, you will find a lot of local food stalls that serve food at an affordable price. Do not forget that India is home to millions of poor people and they all survive on less than Rs 100 a day. They are your motivation. Go eat in the local dhabas and don’t worry about your stomach. Our mind is everything. Keep that fit; everything else will be taken care of automatically. Eat at your host’s house but help them in cooking. Eat at temples, gurudwaras (Sikh temples) and ashrams.

Drink a lot of water and meditate regularly. You will never fall ill.

Alcohol: Don’t drink local alcohol to save money. You might die. Every now and then they are found poisonous only after a few die due to consuming it. So how do you quench your thirst for alcohol when you don’t have money? You wait. You wait for an offer, an offer from your host or an offer from the trucker (I got them a lot in Punjab). You should make good friends who drink. People won’t give a penny to a beggar or Rs 10 to a needy person but they will happily share their alcohol with you. This irony will work for you. You will meet such people in highways and roadside dhabas.

Mobile phone and Internet expenses: Well, you need to be lucky to get it for free. I am blessed with friends who take turns to do it for me. You need to know that this help is not a small one and you owe them a big one. You should pay them back with what you can. Your stories, your time, and when you start earning, your money. You need to genuinely take care of such friends. Period.

Others: Others may include a lot of things but if you can take care of all the above mentioned needs, you will take care of everything else. Trust yourself.

When we have less money, we will need people more than anything else. We will learn one thing about different people: that they are all the same. Their eyes glitter when they are loved and their bodies jitter when they are scared. Everything else is unnatural. You will learn that we need to know who we are without our possessions. We need to define ourselves by who we are rather than by what we have. We learn all this while travelling on a low budget. It changes us in ways beyond description.

This post intentionally excludes the options of getting a sponsorship, using Couchsurfing etc.

When you start earning through your travels or after your travels, do not forget the important lessons you learnt along the way. Remember all the people who helped you. Also remember that you can never pay them back for their help as the timing is more important than the help alone in isolation. So, help as many people in life as you can. Stay rooted to the ground. Have a wonderful life ahead.

About the Author:

Hitesh Bhatt, A travel enthusiast, a conversationalist and a storylover; I travel with a daily budget of Rs.300 to meet people, see places, create, share stories and experience life. I love to travel to less-traveled, unexplored places. For more about his blog visit Project Go Native & FB page.

A little girl walked into a postcard stall in Ahmedabad, and handed over her postcard to the person collecting them. The address column just had ‘Mom’ on it, while the body of the letter only had “I love you.”

“It may seem clichéd but it is as simple as that. Sometimes we find it so difficult to say such things, and letters are the best way to do it,” says Shivani Saran on the philosophy behind starting the letter writing initiative Battees, in August 2013.

The idea, though, came a few years ago when Shivani was part of the global postcard sending and receiving project postcrossing.com. Every time she wanted to send a postcard, she would go to the post office and be disappointed with their collection of tourism postcards.

She was a design student from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and she had no reason to depend on postcards available in the market. She decided to persuade her fellow design students into giving her their designs to print onto postcards, and voilà, she hit jackpot!

Beginning of Battees

Soon, Shivani had dozens of creative designs printed on postcards and she decided to try out a letter-writing “movement” within campus. Together with her best friend Harnehmat Kaur, who was as excited about the idea, she planned their first event for World Post Day in 2013.

World Post Day happens every year on October 9, commemorating the date of the establishment of Universal Postal Union (UPU) in Bern, Switzerland in 1874. The UPU was the beginning of global communications revolution, allowing people to write to people across the globe.

“We knew we had to incentivise letter writing, which is why we came up with this plan. We offered postcards for Rs 30 each and told people we would give Rs 10 and a stamp if they come back with a written postcard. Well, it worked like magic. A few days later, some students came back to us with their written postcards, and we gave them what we promised,” says Shivani.

Her college mates wrote letters to parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles or even other friends. When they came back with stories about how happy these people were to receive letters, Shivani and Harnehmat realised the impact a simple letter could have on people’s lives.

Spreading smiles in college

They founded Battees the same year. If you are wondering how the name came about, there is an entirely different story behind it: of course it involves these two best friends again. In Hindi, batteesi, derived from the word battees, the number ‘32’, is sometimes synonymous with playing pranks or making people smile (grinning to display all 32 teeth!).

Shivani recalls the prank they played,

“One night, Harnehmat and I were in the mood for some batteesi. We woke up at three a.m. and stuck notes across the campus. I think some were ‘Hope your zip does not get stuck’ in front of the boys washroom, and ‘onions and tomatoes have become very expensive. Ask dad for more money’ in front of the ATM. We just wanted people to smile, I don’t think they ever found out that it was us.”

When they started the company, their main aim was to use post as a medium to spread smiles and love across the country, and Battees was the first name that came to their minds.

Letter writing needs some push

Shivani describes Battees as a system, in collaboration with India Post, to foster, incentivise, and give reasons for letter writing in India, “because it is relevant and absolutely important to hand-write letters for the aspect of thoughtfulness associated with it.”

She adds,

In this day and age, most people don’t even use the pen. We started with a model where we would give people postcards and pens on a table and tell them to write. We even used to post it for them but later figured that the joy in going to the nearest post box or post office to send the letter was greater than just handing it over to us. So we decided to stick to organising letter-writing events.

After organising multiple events in schools across Delhi, Chandigarh and Bengaluru, Shivani moved to Bengaluru, while Harnehmat moved back to her hometown, Chandigarh. They will continue operations from their respective locations.

Battees events are all about telling people about the beauty in letter writing. They sometimes bring in speakers from India Post to talk as well. Shivani confesses that they even end up over-romanticising the stamp by “showing people how much fun it is to lick and stick stamps.”

Once in a while, there is a letter-writing fan that thinks hatke (out-of-the-box).

“A lady after writing her postcard, picks out a stamp and then with complete and utter nonchalance proceeds to rub the back of the stamp all over her face which was damp with sweat. After running out of sweat on her face, she turned to her friends’ forehead and manages to stick both her stamps on the postcard. Shivani and I stood dumbstruck and in awe. Not everyday do we see such inventive and creative stamp sticking at our stalls!” says Harnehmat on the Battees blog.

The response to the initiative has been outstanding, according to the founders. They have conducted almost 10 events over the last two years, and have made more than 2,000 people – mostly school students – send letters and postcards across the country.

On future of Battees, events and tie-ups, Shivani says, “We will be working on connecting schools and old age homes or orphanages, and will be exploring writing letters to army jawans on the border. There are so many exciting possibilities we can think of with letters.”

Website

Finding reliable car service professionals is a matter of luck or recommendation from a friend. Another threat in this highly unorganized market is credibility of the workshop. Poor quality of service, dearth of trained mechanics, and lack of transparency are some of the ills that dog this sector.

Launched in July 2013 by Runal Dahiwade and Alpesh Jain, MotorExpert is an online network of franchised and non-franchised car repair and service workshops. From car general servicing to non-standard services related to brakes, suspension, and body work, this platform offers complete solution in post-sales service.

“We are OYO Rooms for car services – oldest in the segment and known for a chain of branded workshops in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru. We are one-stop shop for standardized car services,” says Runal, CEO and co-founder of MotorExpert.in.

With an investment of Rs 3.8 crore as of August 2015, the platform has recently launched a mobile app offering new features and services for both end customers and car workshop owners.

The app allows workshops to chat with customers for diagnosis and booking, give servicing live updates to customers and other services. For workshops, the other major features are in the form of spare parts and accessories procurement platform and recruit and manage workforce on the platform.

The new features for end customers include locate and discover, discuss and diagnose, live service updates, convenience and transparency. With these features, customers can locate the nearest specialist for the car service. They can also book, follow-up, and confirm payments via the app and above all it claims full transparency on spare parts and bill of material. With this app, the website plans to overhaul its platform.

Launching this new application for Mumbai, Runal says that for now they are concentrating on Mumbai market and will take the app services to other cities later. With 25 workshops on-board so far, they expect the number will touch to 65 by the end of next month. The app is also receiving a positive response from the end customers.

For customer acquisition, the platform is planning various ways. The first line of customer acquisition is being done through the client workshops, who introduced the app to the customers. The other ways are social media campaigns, PR campaigns and through mainstream media like print, digital, and broadcast.

Revenue models

According to Runal, automotive spare parts and accessories market size is worth USD 20 billion per year. The platform bets big on the market. The platform acts as a meeting point for both the buyers (workshops) and automotive spare parts and accessories sellers.

For making revenue, the platform charges commission on every successful purchase.

Market size and competition

In the year 2013, India was the sixth largest car manufacturer in the world. During 2014–15, Indian auto manufacturers produced a record 23.4 million motor vehicles. In 2012–13, the total turnover of the auto manufacturers amounted to USD 67 billion.

In 2013–14, the total turnover of the Indian automotive component industry was estimated at USD 35 billion. Auto ancillary exports fetched USD 10.2 billion in the same year. The total number of registered motor vehicles on Indian roads reached 172 million in March 2013 of which over 21½ million were cars, taxis and jeeps (2012).

According to a rough estimate, there are over 12 million cars outside the warranty period in the country and the number is increasing by around 2 million every year.

The aforementioned data gives a clear picture of the estimated after sales service market in the automotive segment. With the expanding market, both franchise and non-franchise workshop players are joining the segment to cater to the market. About 40% of the service providers in top tier cities fall under the organized sector. The rest belong to the unorganized sector. There is a huge need to overhaul and organize this market to get better quality service and vehicular efficiency. “We aim to become that one-stop solution platform which will transform this segment,” says Runal.

However, MotorExpert is not alone and there are other players such as MeriCAR and Cartisan that are providing similar kind of services in the segment. Besides, these companies have also been able to raise funds from investors.

MeriCAR.com has had two rounds of investments from My First Cheque and Rajan Anandan (personal investment). Now, they are looking to raise a larger funding round in the future.

During July, Bengaluru-based automotive service marketplace Cartisan raised an undisclosed amount in its seed round funding from YouWeCan ventures, Global Founders Capital, TaxiForSure’s Aprameya R and others.

On competition, Runal says that the platform is a big aggregator and is relying more on its unique technology. “In coming days, many more players like Cardekho, Carnation, and other similar platforms can enter the segment. However, the market is huge and opens opportunity for others as well.”

During February this year, the platform raised Rs 1.7 crore funding. The investors comprise of angel groups, HNI’s and industry veterans from automotive, lubricants, technology space based in India, Middle-East, and Europe.

Website

It’s not just enough to be a perfumery expert or a ‘Nose’, you also need a dexterous brain for brewing concoctions, a sharp set of eyes for opportunities, a tenacious grasp on your country’s markets, a keen set of ears listening for what your consumer really desires, and above all, a heart that only beats for infusing the world with delicious fragrances, day after day, year after year. And that’s what Rajiv Sheth might have over all his competition – no wonder he learned a completely alien language just to study perfumery from the finest in the world.

French connection

 Rajiv’s fascination for French perfumery led him all the way to France’s ISIPCA, a very exclusive school founded in 1970 by Jean Jacques Guerlain – where he became the first Indian to attend this school for post graduation. “The entire course was taught in French and I had to learn French. But, as a result, I discovered and learned the very secretive prestige perfumery, recognized world over, not only for the beautiful perfume bottles and its fragrances, but also for their in-depth knowledge about its raw materials, extraction processes, manufacturing techniques, packaging designs, and their savoir-faire.”

Master perfumer Maurice Maurin was the creative director in his family business of exporting essential oils, which was where a young and inquisitive Rajiv began his career as a junior perfumer. In the year 2000, he was awarded the second prize for the ‘Young Perfumers Award’ in Paris by the Société Française des Parfumeurs.

Being an acclaimed perfumer and having learned perfumery from few of the best ‘noses’ of the world, the Indian perfumery industry and its untapped potential baffled him. “A thought provoking question I had when I returned to India after the global meltdown was, ‘Why is still there no recognized brand of perfumes in India?’”

Why Indians don’t buy perfumes

In people’s minds, the expertise in perfumes lies only with established foreign brands. The same foreign perfume brands are very expensive, used only for occasions and not on a daily basis. Doing the math, it didn’t take him very long to decipher that for the average Indian consumer, a perfume is a luxury, an aspirational product to own, which only comes at a premium price. Deodorants and body sprays were used extensively instead, as substitutes for perfume.

Having studied this quintessential Indian mindset, in all good sense, Rajiv took the decision of launching All Good Scents!

I wanted to bring the prestige French style perfumery to India, and this was motivation enough for me to come out on my own to build a fragrance brand in India. A brand with premium quality fragrances, in the ‘affordable luxury’ segments for the new, contemporary and young Indians.

Why he believes All Good Scents can rattle competition, apart from the fact that it is a completely homegrown brand, is his in-depth knowledge of the skill and science of fragrances.

I consider our experience and knowledge in perfumery to be one of the most important edges over competition. By being fully focused on eau de toilettes and eau de parfums as our core offering and not as a sub category or extension of some other business, we aim to be the first perfume house of India.

Sniff and tell

With eyes set on the goal, the brand flagged off in December 2014. With the financial hold-ups that a startup typically has –being exclusively online was a business decision he took early on. But it wasn’t impulsive – all the numbers have been pointing at, these past few years, is that e-commerce and m-commerce have arrived and are here to stay.

For a startup brand, in a relatively un-ventured area, to go into offline retail model is very expensive. Our distribution is via e-commerce and m-commerce, which we believe is poised for a great growth in India. We get a chance to be very creative at low costs online. Hence, I decided to make my vision disruptive and focus on launching the brand via e-commerce exclusively.

But sure enough, he encountered his first and rather obvious hurdle rather soon – dealing with the Indian consumer, ever-so-suspicious of the online seller. This scepticism only multiplied exponentially with his product – as perfumes are sold solely after sampling. But AGS was quick to furbish a solution.

“One of the major challenges was for customers to smell our fragrances. This hurdle of evaluating fragrances by customers, we have overcome with our innovative concept of Scentbox, whereby a customer can choose any three fragrances from our collection for INR 165 with free delivery. Hence, the customer has enough time to try them out at their convenience and select the most suited one for themselves.”

Initially, for a few months, the brand was only available on their portal, but at present they are available across all major online retailers such as Myntra, Nykaa, Flipkart, and Amazon, etc.

Since kicking off nine months ago, on an average, they have witnessed a 20% increase month on month in the number of perfume bottles sold online through theirs as well the other portals.

“Being a startup, tracking the number of bottles sold and the conversions from Scentbox sales is more indicative in growth for us than revenues,” Rajiv believes.

Line extensions like aftershaves, shower gels, etc., in the same fragrance ranges are also in the pipeline.

Wanting to be the go-to perfume experts in India

Wanting to teach a man to fish, versus simply giving them the fish, Rajiv wants people to learn and appreciate French perfumery like he has come to do. Moreover, he senses a criminal waste of the plethora of fragrances and resources our land has to offer, and wants to bridge the gap with education.

“Although our culture has been rich in fragrances, there is a huge lack of education in the modern perfumery and its uses. Thus, education in perfumery is an integral part of our brand and vision –at the same time it needs to be fun. Since we are almost the fragrance experts in the country, we soon plan on starting a few training workshops too, which revolve around the sense of smell and fragrance creation in the coming months.

Minimum cost, maximum exposure

Apart from innovations in their product itself, they have also given their marketing and advertising activities a twist. Making the most of the medium best available given their resources, they have launched a blog, with a fictional series called “All Good,” based on six friends which have been inspired by six of their perfumes.

Their campaign during the one of the most high-traffic occasion for gifting, namely Valentine’s day, was also far from ordinary. Starting a 60 day contest called Miss You, for which they roped in Air France and French tourist office ‘Atout France’ as the main sponsors, they even produced a mushy music video – Tumaaona with the band Raahie exclusively for the campaign!

Website: All Good Scents

Apple’s ‘Think Different’ slogan from their 1997 ad has probably inspired scores of people all over the world to follow their dreams, make bold career choices or start their own startups. With a voiceover by Richard Dreyfuss (There’s an alternate version narrated by Steve Jobs), the ad begins with the phrase,

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…

Sonny Vu, Sridhar Iyengar, who were cofounders of AgaMatrix and John Sculley (a former CEO of Apple and Pepsi) cofounded Misfit Wearables as a tribute to Steve Jobs. The day they incorporated the company happened to be the day Steve Jobs passed away. John and Sonny were at a coffee shop when the news broke out and they felt strongly about ‘Misfit’ and decided to place its values as a central theme for the company.

What is Misfit?

Misfit invents and manufactures wearables and other smart products. They have so far raised USD 64.4M in funding across three major rounds of funding. Their main product line includes a variety of activity trackers and sleep monitors that provide users’ information about different metrics such as their step count, calories burned, distance traveled, and number of hours of light and deep sleep. They achieve this through a combination of wearable devices and smartphone apps.

The company recently partnered with Snapdeal and have made their three main products Shine, Flash, and Link available for Indian consumers. Misfit’s Shine fitness and sleep monitor is an all-metal activity and sleep tracker that automatically measures steps, calories, distance, and light and deep sleep. It lets users track activities such as walking, running, cycling, football, swimming and dance. Priced at INR5499, Shine is compatible with a variety of accessories including a luxe leather band and a polished necklace, Bloom. Speaking about the partnership with Misfit, Rohit Bansal, Co-Founder of Snapdeal said, “With more and more people becoming fitness conscious, India as a market presents a tremendous opportunity for a consumer focused brand like Misfit. We look forward to working with their team and take their offerings to our customers in 5000+ towns and cities across the country.”

Misfit’s Flash tracks the same activity and sleep metrics as Shine but is crafted out of a special soft-touch plastic, with a sport band and is priced at INR2499. Misfit’s Link is a ‘smart button’ that gives users more ways to connect with the world. With Link, users can take selfies remotely with their smartphones camera app, control music or advance slides in a presentation. The product is is priced at INR1999.

YourStory recently spoke to Christy Le, the CFO and COO of Misfit to understand more about the company, their strategies and future plans. Christy had started a career in finance with HSBC as as she loved comprehending the world through numbers. She then went on to do her MBA at MIT Sloan and post that worked at McKinsey for two years. She says,

I learnt a lot about scaling, organising and caring about effectiveness and efficiency at McKinsey. But my perspectives changed and the passion for doing something more and entering the product space interested me.

She found the world of products more compelling than numbers, so after being associated with Misfit un-offocially for some time, finally decided to join full time in early 2013. So far Misfit has six product categories and has sold their products in about 50 countries. She adds, “I’m very proud of the whole team and what we have achieved. All the supply chain, customer services were managed in-house. We have about 200 employees all over the world  with offices in San Francisco(USA), Ho Chi Minh City(Vietnam) and Shenzhen(China). ”

Learnings and takeaways

In 2011, Misfit launched an Indiegogo campaign for their first product Shine with the goal of raising $100,000, but overshot their goal and and ended up raising $846,675. Christy added that Misfit had already closed a major round of funding before going live on Indiegogo. The main aim of the campaign was to get feedback from users to help them improve their product. She adds

Crowdfunding is amazing platform for young startups to get easy and quick access to finance and feedback from potential users. No marketing surveys can tell you exactly what consumers think.

Christy believes that the first commercial order can make or break a startup. For Shine, their crowdfunding campaign helped them place an order of 10,000 units with their manufacturer and helped them optimise their financial and operational planning.  She says,

When you know how big your first order is, it becomes easier to manage and co-ordinate with your manufacturer. Otherwise, if you make too few products, you can’t expand quickly. And if you make too many, you might kill your startup financially.

Misfit has raised $40M in their Series C round led by GGV Capital in December 2014, and about $15M and $7.6M in their Series B and Series A rounds respectively. Talking about tips for the fundraising process, Christy believes “The best time to raise funds is when you actually don’t need it. You can then focus on finding the best investors for your company, who would actually add value.”

Misfit believes in frugality and spends capital only when needed, they also believe that keeping a global outlook from the day one is important. Talking about the trends Misfit has noticed, she adds, “We have noticed that activity tracking is looked at differently across the globe. In the US, customers use it solely to track their activity. Whereas In China it is a fashion statement, not necessarily used to know about how many calories they burnt. With rapid adoption of smartphones, the market for wearables is growing in Asia.”

What sets Misfit apart

The Internet of Things(IoT) and wearable devices sector has seen a lot of interest globally and in India. Some of the popular and well known wearable devices in the market are Fitbit, the Apple Watch, Xiaomi’s Mi Band, Goqii. . An interesting point to note is that Xiaomi is also one of the investors in Misfit. Each wearable has different target audience and varying price points depending on the sensors and the level of tracking involved.

Misfit aims to stand out by providing longer battery life (a few months, depending on usage), water resistance(upto 50m for Shine) to monitor use cases such as swimming. The wearables can also be clipped to clothes or worn as a pendant. Christy laughed and added, “We discovered by accident that the Shine can also survive the washer and drier.”

With more than 60% of their users being women, their focus is also on developing and manufacturing visually appealing wearables. In 2015, Misfit announced a partnership with Swarovski to launch a wearable that combined Swarovski’s crystal jewelry with Shine. To appeal to their user base of women, they also partnered with  Victoria’s Secret to produce a ‘VS-inspired pink Shine’

In addition to traditional wearable devices they are also focussing on home automation, with Beddit, a sleep monitor and alarm, that is attached to the user’s bed and Bolt, a smart bulb that can be controlled with a smartphone app or their smart button Link. These two products are not yet available to Indian users.

Growth and future plans

Within first six months of their launch Misfit had expanded their reach to 20 countries and have now reached about 50 countries. While their biggest market is currently USA, they see more than half of their sales coming from international markets. About the thought process behind launching in India, Christ adds, “The Chinese and Indian markets are similar and people in both countries understand technology and want value for money. Based on our success in China, we are confident of growing rapidly in India.”

Misfit believes that the world is currently going through a ‘Wearable 1.0’ revolution, where people talk about data and how to collect a lot of good actionable data from users. Christy adds,

Our founder, Sonny Vu has a vision that the ‘Wearable 2.0’ revolution will go beyond just collecting data and venture into other use cases such as safety, identification, control.

Website: Misfit

Related read: Is this the perfect time for Indian startups in the wearable space?

Wearable technology poised to surge: things all CEOs & CIOs must know

In the past couple of years, Chinese technology organisations have been eyeing different parts of the globe, especially India, Brazil and Indonesia.  Some of them include Xiaomi, Tencent, One Plus and, more recently, Baidu. If you look at the penetration of search engines across the globe, the whole region of China is painted in the colours of its search engine Baidu.

India is where China was in 2003 -2004 in terms of internet and smartphone penetration,” says Mingyuan Li, VP Baidu.

Similarities and differences

With the increasing use of mobile penetration across the country, many Chinese tech companies now eye India as a powerful and potential market. As a strategy, Baidu begins with identifying countries similar to the Chinese markets, taking into account factors like population, stage of internet and mobile potential and growth trajectory. Instead of rolling out a generic offering, Baidu chooses a select set of products for each country and it also places a strong penetration of its offline-to-online mobile products. One example of such kind penetration is Brazil.

Is Baidu eyeing India with a similar expansion model? Explaining why the Indian market may interest the company, Mingyuan says,

Smartphone adoption and internet penetration are growing hand-in-hand, and are both increasing rapidly. Over the next several years, millions of people will be buying smartphones and using those phones to go online for the first time ever. That’s a very similar situation to how the internet industry developed in China.”

Also Read: Momoe intends to expand to six Indian cities in the next one year

Building partnerships

The team believes the Indian market has the perfect environment for making meaningful connections and forming long-lasting relationships with partners who are just starting to tap into the vast potential of this internet landscape. Mingyuan says that the mobile telecom infrastructure in these markets is similar to that of China’s just a few years ago. He adds that they believe their experience in China will help them take on the challenges that come with a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Mingyuan says that apart from obvious similarities – population size, rapidly-growing internet and smartphone penetration rates and government support for internet programmes – India also has an active startup culture that looks to Silicon Valley for inspiration. “The Indian tech players grapple with the difficulty of reaching a broad swath of users across a multi-lingual environment, a challenge that Chinese companies are intimately familiar with,” adds Josh Fenn, Senior Marketing Manager, Baidu.

Also Read: The blooming startup ecosystem amid the sun and sand of Goa

Following the O2O model

Josh says that they see a differentiation more in terms of adopting the O2O business models that are geared toward people’s lifestyles, where the investment funds are coming from, and the rate of internet infrastructure expansion. This, he adds, is true for any country and not specific to India.

In the short term, Baidu plans to continue to grow their existing products in India – DU Battery Saver, DU Speed Booster, MoboMarket and ES File Explorer – and also seek out more meaningful local partnerships. In the not-too-distant future, Josh says, they would like to play a greater role in connecting people to services here. “Our experience in developing an O2O ecosystem in China will be very helpful in this regard,” adds Josh.

Acquisitions and expansions

In line with their expansion plans in Brazil, Baidu had acquired Peixe Urbano, the Brazilian daily deals site. Post this, Peixe Urbano went ahead to adopt the operational and technological practices of Nuomi Baidu’s daily deals site. Some of these practices included mobile redeemable coupons, push messaging improvements and tweaking of discounts.

So will Baidu look at acquisitions in India? “We definitely plan to increase our overall investment in the Indian market in the future. Investing in a local company is not outside the realm of possibility, when the time is right,” adds Josh.

As of May this year, Baidu’s market cap was at USD 71.4 billion. Mobile business accounted for close to 50 per cent of the company’s total revenue in the first quarter if the year. Baidu wallet, it’s online payment services counted close to 26 million users and the Baidu food-delivery service spread to close to 70 cities in China.

Born out of a chance weekend meeting between old college buddies, Binge pitches itself as a dining experience enhancer with an attached personal wallet. The app set about to solve the common issue of waiting for your bill after a meal or drink, checking to see if everything adds up correctly and then paying via cash or card – which is a problem sometimes compounded if the tab is being split between diners.

Though conceptualised two years ago, the app was launched only last February. Given that a couple of the founders were already from a hospitality background, they leveraged this experience while working on the product.

Santosh Martin one of the founders says:

The last and final differentiator for us is that we are a payment platform right, as a user I can use any of my assets that I want to pay with, so it could be anything credit card, debit card, net banking, we have just integrated with Paytm, so you also have a mobile prepaid wallet so we will do that with Mobikwik, so none of these are competition to us.

The founders are cautious about the growth and prefer to take a slow and steady path to success. Since its launch, Binge has created an active user base of 14,000 people and has tied up with about 120 restaurants in Bengaluru alone.

The founders intend to expand to the Mumbai and Delhi markets by the end of this year as many of their partners have a huge presence in these two cities.

The company recently partnered with Reservation Diary to manage the reservation system. However, Binge has no plans of looking at another acquisition in the near future.The six member in house technology team at Binge manages all the new modules that are being added to the app and they have recently added the reservation feature and soon want to get into feedback management as well.

There are a number of Mobile apps in the market trying to solve payment related problems. Binge is trying to carve a niche for itself by looking only at the hospitality sector. However, the success and sustenance of the app will depend on the user experience of the technology itself and the degree of its success in expanding to other markets.

Video Credits:

Cameraman: Rukmangada Raja / Editor: Anjali Achal

Kanti Sweets was started as a ‘sweet meat stall’ in a 6ft by 6ft space at Kempe Gowda Circle in Bengaluru in 1957 by Pandit Jyoti Swarup Sharma. After his demise in 1973, Rajendra Prasad, the second generation owner of the store, took up the family business. Since 2005, the business has been managed as a family partnership involving Shailendra Sharma and has now expanded to 41 stands and one kiosk at Hypercity Mall in Bengaluru.

With technology having revolutionised many industries, Kanti Sweets decided to embrace it to attract more customers by collaborating with UrbanPiper and Roadrunnr. They recently launched a mobile app to deliver their products, which include rasmalai, samosa, kachoris, and other sweets to their customers’ doorsteps.

Through the app users can locate the nearest Kanti Sweet’s outlet, place an order for delivery, and get notifications about their transactions. Users can keep an eye on their transaction history, purchases and provide feedback to their management team using the app. The app has also used geo-fencing features to prevent people from placing orders when they are outside the coverage area.

UrbanPiper helps merchants deliver a modern customer experience (in-store and m-commerce), which was founded by Saurabh Gupta. They consist of a team of six members and have developed applications for Chai Point and other clients. Roadrunnr founded by ex-Flipkart employees Mohit Kumar and Arpit Dave helps Kanti Sweets on the logistics front with deliveries. They recently raised $11M in funding from Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

YourStory spoke to Shailendra, who believes that going forward more conventional hyperlocal retailers will embrace technology to expand their business outreach. Kanti Sweets is among the few sweet makers to have ISO 9001-2008 and HACCP 22000: 2005 certifications. They have a 35,000 sq feet production centre in Rajajinagar, Bengaluru, which produces five to six tonnes of about 150 varieties of sweets daily. To reach this stage they have mechanized a significant component of their processes.

Shailendra believes that when it comes to the food sector both trust and honesty are very important. They source their raw materials and ingredients from trusted sources to ensure quality of the finished product. He adds,

We have been working with a large number of vendors and some have worked with us for more than 20–25 years. This is very important to ensure quality of raw materials. We source our ghee from Tamil Nadu, kesar from mainly Kashmir and Delhi, corn flakes and ground nuts from Gujarat.

For product innovations and various R&D activities, they take the help of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore. Also under the guidance of an ex-CFTRI scientist they setup an in-house laboratory, which facilitates analysis of the varieties of sweets to maintain quality.

The thought of a mobile app delivery services came out of a casual discussion when they realized that they had about 40 outlets spread across the city and could cater to customers more efficiently by going online. Shailendra adds, “If we had less number of outlets, it may have been difficult but with our current strength and capacity we can cater to most orders within two hours and in a few cases have even fulfilled orders within 15 minutes.”

Kanti Sweets has close to 1000 downloads for their app. They also found that their orders have risen from 10–12 a day to almost 50 through the app, with many being repeat orders. At present, the physical stores offer more variety than the mobile app. Shailendra explained the thought process, “We have noticed that some people who come to our stores are often confused about what they wish to buy because of the variety we offer. Therefore, we have kept our offerings on the mobile app limited to our most popular products to make it easier for both customers and us.”

Challenges

While the food sector has good profit margins, the shelf life of most products especially in the confectionary space are quite small and this poses challenges. Most establishments have to vary their production cycles based on their understanding of the market and past experiences.

Shailendra adds, “Certain sweets like jalebis, sell better in a few stores and don’t sell as well in other locations. Another issue is clearing out all our inventory within their shelf life. In some countries, foodstuffs are sold at a discounted price towards the end of the working day to clear out inventory, but this has not yet caught up in India.”

Another challenge is hiring skilled manpower. Although in certain industries there are certified courses for chefs and bakers to prove their credentials, this is absent in the traditional Indian savouries sector. Here recipes are generally handed down from generation to generation. While some sweet making processes are easy to learn on the job, some others are quite difficult to master.

YourStory take

India as a country has a ‘sweet tooth’ and there is a constant demand for traditional and authentic sweets throughout the year for different festivals and occasions. By partnering with Urbanpiper and Roadrunnr, Kanti Sweets has opened another avenue to reach out to customers who are tech savvy and are already used to transacting on their smartphones.

Through the app, users can place an order for the same or next day. With a number of festivals and occasions in India, an option of pre-ordering a week or so in advance would be an added bonus. Generally, many customers visit sweet shops only a day or two before different festivals and sometimes do not find the sweets they are looking for. Thus, pre-orders will help the consumer as they are assured of their orders from a trusted source and sweet shops will be able to manage their inventory and estimate demand better during the festive season.

Future plans

The current version of the app only supports cash on delivery (COD), but Saurabh from UrbanPiper adds that they are in the process of integrating RazorPay as their payment gateway to cater to more users. They are also working on a new desktop website to facilitate orders from the web too. An iOS app is also expected to be released in a few weeks.

Website, App

Related read: Satisfy cravings for local favourites with Pune-based Sweets InBox

How hyperlocal startups are giving e-com giants a run for their money

DesiDime.com was born out of a failure to launch a daily deals e-commerce site which intended to give a fresh deal every night at midnight. The entire tech platform was ready with gamification surrounding colours to bring in even more excitement at 12 a.m. for users. It was early days in 2010 when e-commerce was rare and daily deals sites like MyDala, BindaasBargain, Snapdeal (yes, it was a daily deals site too!), Taggle and many more mushrooming. Being in USA, I had no access or ability to meet merchants in India and a friend of mine suggested I should start something to market my e-commerce site in the future. Being the tech and product guy, I loved building things. I started wondering if a forum for shoppers would help me understand the pulse of e-commerce industry in India. Within three days, I got the first version of DesiDime.com forums out with the help of open source projects. It was the most exciting time for me, sitting in a Chicago Starbucks for three consecutive days and getting the product out over a long weekend.

Finding the Perfect Co-Founder!

A week passed and no one commented on the forums. Some of my good friends and relatives signed up, congratulated me and gave me inputs on aesthetics, UI and so on. As a techie, one always ends up thinking that just building the perfect product is everything, but there is always more. One of the early users (User Number 20, to be precise) who signed up was my cousin, Mehul Jobanputra, who is now my co-founder. He started sharing a lot of suggestions as he understood what I was trying to do. It suddenly became very interesting to discuss problems with him, how to monetise in future and so on.  He came from a consulting background and had a different personality so we complemented each other well. We still continue to have different opinions but that helps us make good decisions and learn from each other.

Our first user

We started researching on affiliate marketing (neither of us knew much about it back then). We started talking to each other on the forums with kind friends helping us keep the conversation going. But suddenly we noticed our number of comments going down. I asked Mehul about a particular commenter who I thought was his friend. Mehul thought it was mine! We then realised we had our first user talking in our forum. Our user had some difficulties placing an order at Domino’s and we went out of our way to help him out. I remember spending a good 10 minutes to draft the perfect reply and leave a good impression.

After that, more users started joining in and talking to each other but sharing few deals. We thought of adding some gamification around it and launched ‘Dimes Reward System’ wherein a user would be awarded one dime for sharing a good deal. We then found a few users misusing the system and so added a daily cap. We did not have any business plan till then but we started understanding what users wanted and built features around that. Mehul started looking around SEO, affiliate and digital marketing and I continued with building the product.

Show me the money

We then launched something which would automatically monetise links which users are sharing in forums. We rolled it out but made no money for 15 days. Everyday, we would log on to Flipkart affiliate panel (Flipkart was the first e-commerce company to take affiliate marketing seriously) with a glimmer of hope, but then get dejected and get back to work. Mehul thought there were probably technical issues and decided to buy a new mobile phone on Flipkart.com, by clicking on a link which one of the users shared. He checked several times through the day, but could not figure out what was wrong. I then got a call at three am in the morning from an excited Mehul. We had made our first Rs. 168 in the Flipkart account.

More Users and FPD

We started ranking on the first page of Google for “online shopping community” and “buy-one-get one Domino’s Pizza FREE” being a hit among youngsters got us more traffic. People started interacting even more. We understood early on that serving the community is important and so is building trust. We started showing the best deals on our home page and ensured that they are actually value for money before promoting them on the front page. One of our core values is to not promote deals to earn more money. We make sure only the best deals are shown on the home page and people started referring to them as FPD. We got many offers to have paid placement within FPD but we turned them down no matter how lucrative they were. We got moderators; the community started growing; we turned profitable too and the entire concept and vision started working.

Moving Back to India and our first angel round

The concept was proven: we started making Rs 5,000 every month (even though an insignificant amount for both of us to meet ends). I shared our startup story with my colleague and he immediately mocked my earnings and said it’s a good side business. “It does not make sense to leave your six-digit salary in dollars and a secure job for getting Rs 5000 every month,” he said. Mehul had similar stories. But we were determined and definitely sensed the need for a shopping community in India.

Soon the word spread within my office and my CTO, Mark Friedgan, learned about our “side business”. He emailed me late one night saying he wants to talk with me the next day. Around that time, I was also considering leaving the job. When I met him he congratulated me about the startup. He was excited about the idea and the product which we had built so far. He motivated me to work part-time from India at almost the same salary as I drew in USA to make bootstrapping easier. This helped changed gears and our self-confidence grew.

I moved back to India in March 2011 and Mehul continued to work at Universal Consulting so it made it easier to fund the startup. I worked the whole day on Desidime.com and then worked four hours in the night for Enova Financial. We got our first office and our first four employees (three of whom are still with us). We managed to pay office rent and salaries. Neither Mehul nor I drew a salary to remain profitable as a company. Mark again surprised us and asked us to quit our jobs and said he would put in an angel round of funding to fuel growth. Mehul eventually quit his job in October 2011 and I left my part-time job too in December 2011. We focussed full time on the product, started hiring and there was no looking back.

Lessons learnt in last four years!

• Never give up! Just when it seems impossible, you are almost on the step of success.
• Funding is not always the correct answer for all businesses from Day One (Community building, for example)
• Profitability is good but not at the expense of growth.
• Getting the right people at the right time. We would have never reached here without our 52 co-workers.
• Business plan is good but pivoting quickly is equally important. Keep your ears very close to the product.
• You will make mistakes. Admit it, correct yourself and move on.
• It’s important to speak up and be vocal about the product.
• Never cheat your customers who have put their trust in you.

Fast Forward to 2015

Five years later, we have now grown to three products (DesiDime, Cuelinks and Zingoy) and a 50+ team of talented individuals who joined us along.  Being profitable from almost the first month, we did not raise any round of funding. Being profitable was an important goal for us but not at the expense of growth. It is always difficult to bootstrap when every one is raising big rounds of funding. We knew it was not the right time to raise a funding round as we had three products and wanted to give justice to all of them. Building a community cannot be just solved with a supply of money. Definitely not in the initial stages, at least

Sometime around last year, we realised we were ready to grow faster and decided to meet investors who had contacted us over the last three years. Around the same time, we met Paul Nikkel (Founder of HotUKDeals.com) and Fabian Spielberger (Founder of MyDealz.de) in Germany and over an inspiring dinner. We discussed our vision, how they have been building a shopping community for the last 10 and seven years respectively (as I said before, building a good community is hard: it’s not a funding game but requires dedication, hard work and perseverance), the problems surrounding affiliate marketing and so on.

We met them several times later and it was inspiring to learn about the vision of Pepper.com, which is the world’s largest shopping community with the deal websites it already has. Pepper is present in UK (currently as hotukdeals.com), Germany (currently as Mydealz.de), France (currently as dealabs.com), Mexico (currently as promodescuentos.com), Korea, Poland, Netherlands and USA. We decided to join them as we connected quite well and shared the same vision.

Pepper currently gets over 450 million page views, 25+ million users, a hyper buzzing community across all the 10 countries on various deal sites making it the biggest social commerce site on the planet.

DesiDime’s merger with Pepper is the beginning of journey to not only be the biggest shopping community in India but across the globe. We aim to move to a common platform Pepper.com across the globe and bring more utilities to shoppers to find, communicate and share the best deals. Merchants would also get benefitted from advanced user profiling and ability to target the right shopping deals at potential customers.

About The Author:

Jimish Jobanputra is the CTO and Co-founder of DesiDime.com, India’s largest online shopping community to discover the best deals and coupons.

When Nikunj Batheja first moved to Bengaluru in July 2014, he faced the same problem most of us do when we move into a new city: finding a place to stay. The experience of hunting for a place and a series of associated problems gave birth to Homigo. It is a platform that provides working professionals with fully-furnished houses on a shared basis.

During his house hunt, Nikunj found even the online housing companies to be full of brokers. “Even if you do find a house online you will have to cross paths with various sly brokers who will try to fool you and waste your time,” he says.

As Nikunj was just out of college, the one-month brokerage charge and security deposit of 10-months’ rent were financial burdens he couldn’t afford. To top it, the houses shown to him were in bad shape. “We were looking for a fully furnished place. The kind of furnishing these houses had were decades-old and they were still called ‘fully furnished’ in order to charge more rent. We also had to run around to get our Wifi, DTH and gas connections in place,” says Nikunj.

Building the core team

Soon with his IIT Kanpur batch mate Jatin Mitruka, Nikunj began ideating and started to reach out to owners with various kinds of offerings to see what can work best and can create a win-win for both owners and tenants. Both owners and tenants want freedom from dealing with each other. Homigo was born.

After initial market research and numerous brainstorming sessions, the duo started operations and their first house came up in the first week of May. “We posted an anonymous ad with our offerings on Facebook groups and the house was occupied in less than two hours,” says Nikunj.

Soon, the duo decided to add more houses, but needed someone to handle the technical aspects. So their batch mate Aakash Verma joined them. The team claims it already has close to 400 pending requests on its website To take up houses on rent from owners and turn them into Homigo Houses by tastefully furnishing them with all relevant items and appliances. These include even cutlery.

Also Read: Faida in Jaipur brings the concept of shared economy to India

Meeting demand with supply

Nikunj says that the company is focussed on bridging the gap between the demand (of livable houses) and the supply (houses available on rent) in a way that hasn’t been done in India in an organised manner.

He adds that they are creating a win-win for owners and tenants. From the owners’ point of view, the company provides complete property management service where the owner can sit back and collect rents on a fixed date and leave the hassle of finding tenants to Homigo.

From a tenant’s perspective, it is getting a fully furnished space with all the bills taken care of by Homigo and also at an extremely low security deposit. Tenants save on brokerage, security deposit and also the end term painting/repair charges that owners cut when they leave the house. The team has two different rental agreements with the owners and one for tenants.

“We are choosy when it comes to selecting houses. If you see our current houses you will notice a lot of good societies where there all the amenities like gym, pool and a well-maintained club house. Most of the upcoming Homigo houses that you will see will be in societies where bachelors find it difficult to get a house. All in all, Homigo is not just a company, it’s a solution; a solution for owners as well as tenants,” says Nikunj.

Also Read:  Tapping into India’s favourite investment option, IIM A alumni create a platform that enables property ownership sharing

Market space and growth

The team plans to touch 10,000 beds in the coming one year, spread across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. They also intend to build an app soon. Homigo has closed a round of funding of USD 200,000. The team has also received the backing of Rahuk Agarwal the CEO of Mebelkart.

The global sharing economy is believed to touch USD 335 billion by 2025. Players like AirBnB and Stayzilla are working hard to redefine the way we choose stay in different places.  As of 2013, close to four million people had stayed at AirBnB. However, shared economy is yet a fledging concept in India. There still are many questions on safety, precautions and other regulatory issues that one needs to answer.

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