About 15 Jat men walk in and the Municipal Commissioner’s large office in Gurgaon suddenly feels small. Sitting behind his large desk, the dapper Commissioner in his Nehru jacket seems least intimidated by the group comprising burly young lads and tenacious old men. It is obvious they have a grievance and have come looking for a solution.

For the 38-year-old Vikas Gupta, the Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG), such encounters are of a daily kind. Since he was appointed to the highest position in the city’s apex civic body last year, Vikas Gupta has had his task cut out for him.

The rampant urbanisation of Gurgaon has left in its wake a distressed population battling inadequate infrastructure. And Vikas Gupta, a 2001-batch IAS officer, with his vast experience in managing urban development, seems like the right candidate to tackle the urban mess Gurgaon finds itself in at present.

Before taking over as the head of MCG, Vikas Gupta was the Director and Secretary of Urban Local Bodies and Mission Director of State Urban Livelihood Mission and State Urban Development Authority, Government of Haryana. He was also the Commissioner of Rohtak Municipal Corporation and the Deputy Commissioner of the district.

Brokering peace

Sitting in his air-conditioned office and listening to the Jat villagers complain about a fellow villager, Vikas Gupta makes mental notes to send away both parties happy.

The Jat villagers had presented an application for the removal of a fellow villager’s waste segregation unit and a home he runs for the destitute and mentally challenged. The young in the group seemed agitated as the ‘culprit’ narrated his side of the story. “Where will I go if I am evicted?” he asked the Commissioner. “I will have to be given an equivalent portion of land to take my inmates with me,” he added.

The complaining villagers were equally adamant that they wanted him evicted as some of his mentally-challenged inmates had earlier been found roaming the village naked. The whole village was riled up about this breach, the Commissioner later tells me while giving a context to the dispute.

After consulting his secretary, he tells the man he can move his unit and inmates to an alternative plot of land, and gives them all a month’s time to resolve the issue.

Early days

Born and brought up in Jaipur, Gupta graduated from the Regional Engineering College, now renamed the Malviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, in electronics and communications. He appeared for the IAS on a whim. “I was a very average student. Always in the first 10, never in the first five,” he tells me. “If you ask me why I choose to be an engineer, I really do not know the answer,” he says, adding after a pause, “I guess I was very good at mathematics and science, and it seemed like a natural choice. But as to the question of why I joined the IAS, I guess I was always a keen observer of political developments, having witnessed the Mandal-Mandir agitations from close quarters when I was in class nine.”

Initially, Gupta thought he would study business management after graduating from engineering college, and then look for a corporate job like so many of his contemporaries.

However, in 1996, he heard that one of his seniors had got through to the IAS. “Like everyone else, I was also thinking of either taking up a corporate job or maybe appearing for the civil services. So, when I learnt that one of my seniors had made it, I decided to try my luck as well,” he says.

It took him three straight attempts to get through. “In my first attempt, I got the Railways but did not want to take up that stream. By the third year, I decided not only to repeat the IAS exams but also gave the CAT.” That year, he cleared all his exams.

Recalling an incident that he feels, in retrospect, changed his attitude to life, he says, “In my second year of engineering, I did not put in a 100 percent effort and ranked 23 out of 65 students. I vividly remember that I went blank during the micro-electronics viva test. I did not know anything. It was then I realised that without hard work nothing can be achieved.” This, he believes, has been the leitmotif of his life so far.

People participation

At the YS Gurgaon Story event, a community-oriented summit, in November, he stressed that “The role of civic agencies like MCG in the exponential trajectory of the city has become all the more crucial and defining. I feel one of the pre-requisites of any city to evolve is active citizen participation. An entrepreneurial spirit is a must.”

Gupta interacted with around 10 startups at the event, taking a keen interest in their solutions, some of which are related to urban traffic and energy issues.

The challenges of administrating a place like Gurgaon are many. There’s a constant conflict between the rural and urban populations, the old way of life and the new one, and it takes a sharp mind to find solutions that work for everyone.

For now, Vikas Gupta seems to be the man with all the answers.

For Bengaluru-based Chanda Agarwal, founder of preservative-free food e-tailer nopreservative.in, finding a commercial vehicle to transport products was always a nightmare. Costs were a concern and she was never able to find that one vendor or driver she could rely on. Her husband Sanjay Sharma, a senior executive at SAP, saw his wife’s daily struggle and discussed the problem with a few friends who handled logistics in various companies. He realised that they were also facing the same problem.

“When I did further research, I observed that the problem was not just one sided; vendors were also facing issues. They complained of unavailability of consignments and said their trucks were lying idle for half the month. I realised that there’s a huge demand and supply gap and it needs to be addressed,” says Sharma, Founder, Trucktransport.in.

Last December, Sanjay, 40, decided to build an online platform to connect truckers, and movers and packers, with customers in a simple, efficient and transparent manner. He spent the next few months speaking with transporters, vendors and end-users to understand their pain-points and issues.

In September 2015, Sanjay launched Trucktransport.in. The platform directly connects customers seeking trucks or movers and packers with verified vendors, while providing instant pricings, rating comparisons and booking options.

“We have developed an algorithm for service providers and provide dynamic pricings and ratings of various vendors so that customers can compare vendors and book the service instantly,” says Sanjay, who has a post graduate degree in Operation Management from Mumbai’s National Institute of Industrial Engineering.

Revenue model

The platform’s revenue comes from service charges, currently Rs 200, levied on each inter-city truck booking and movers-and-packers transaction. The firm does not levy any charge for intra-city truck bookings.

Trucktransport.in now has a 10-member team, spread across functions like finance, marketing, IT, and business development.

Investment and growth figures

Since the launch of the platform, Trucktransport.in has partnered with four IT organisations and online retailers. He declined to disclose their names due to non-disclosure agreements signed with them. The platform claims to have more than 30 verified vendors listed with it and will soon begin operations in Delhi-NCR.

It claims to have over 150 booking per month and plans to reach 20 cities by 2018, when it will have an annual revenue of Rs 26 crore.

In October this year, the platform started its operations in Delhi-NCR. And by the second quarter of 2016, it plans to expand to Guwahati, Pune, and Chennai. It is targetting mandis (wholesale markets), individual retailers and online retailers. Currently, it is in talk with online retailers to provide its services at a pre-determined price. By the end of 2016, Sanjay plans to open up the platform in Rajasthan, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.

Finding reliable vendors and drivers with proper licenses and permits is the biggest challenge. Sanjay, however, says that he’s very selective about vendors and gets them on the platform only after they have been verified.

Sanjay used his personal savings to set up the venture, using the funds to build the product and for market research. He is also in talks with some investors, but declined to reveal their names. “We don’t want just investments, but expertise and network too,” says Sanjay. He’s looking to raise $ 2 million.

Market and competition

According to Research and Markets, the Indian logistics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.17 per cent by 2020, driven by growth in manufacturing, retail, FMCG and e-commerce. The country spends around 14.4 per cent of its GDP on logistics and transportation compared with less than 8 per cent spent by other developing countries.

While the data clearly shows the market and opportunity for a player like Trucktransport is big, the company will have to contend with a growing list of competitors. These include  Bengaluru-based Blowhorn, Shippr, LOTrucks, Zaicus, Instavans and theKarrier; Mumbai-based ThePorter and Quifers; Delhi-based truckmandi; and Vizag-based Return Trucks.

Many of these players have raised funding as well. In November last year, Blowhorn raised seed funding from Unitus Seed Fund. In May this year, theKarrier raised Rs 1.5 crore from Sol Primero, Outbox Ventures, and Nikunj Jain. In June, Shippr raised $500,000 from i2india Venture Factory. The same month, ThePorter raised Rs 35 crore in Series-A funding from Sequoia, Kae Capital, and other investors.

Sanjay is unfazed by the competition. He says other players are focussed only on one segment – mini trucks. He, however, is providing the entire range of services, which, he believes, gives him an advantage.

“Besides, we are quite positive about the progress we have made in the last few months. Our most important stakeholders, customers, and transporters find merit in our approach,” concludes Sanjay.

Website

Picture this. You’ve built an amazing product that solves a big problem. But very few people know about it. What are your options for getting the word out there?

Social media, talking to friends and family? What do you do if you want to advertise in a newspaper?

These questions inspired Sharad Lunia, who has spent his entire career in advertising and related fields, to launch releaseMyAd. After completing his graduation in marketing from  University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School, Sharad worked for ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi in New York and then joined Microsoft in their digital advertising solutions group where he stayed for over two years. He returned to his home-city of Kolkata and launched releaseMyAd on Valentine’s Day in 2009.

An online advertising platform, releaseMyad assists businesses and individuals to easily advertise on any mass media platform, like newspapers, radio, in-Cinema or magazines.

The objective to launch on Valentine’s Day was to enable people to wish their ‘Valentine’ by means of a newspaper ad.

“We were initially very apprehensive about whether or not we would receive any Valentine’s Day newspaper messages,” says Sharad, 31. He and his team, however, decided to run a 14-day promotion on Facebook. They bagged 12 customers by the end of that initial campaign. “I still remember the wave of euphoria that ran through the office when the first client paid up. Though the profits were minuscule, we went and spent it all on a small celebratory get together at Pizza Hut,” recalls Sharad.

Workings of the platform

releaseMyad offers an inventory of over 212 newspapers, 27 radio stations, 19 multiplex chains, and all leading magazine. He does not offer digital media inventory, as he believes it is best that advertisers place such ads. Also, traditional media continues to be much bigger than digital. Advertising revenue in India in 2014 was Rs 414 billion and print and television together accounted for 80 per cent of this, according to a report by KPMG.

releaseMyad offers a marketplace that allows users to complete the entire process of placing an ad on their own. For instance, a user wants to place a property ad, all he has to do is choose the newspaper, pick property as the category for placing the ad, pick the editions he wants the ad to appear in and then make the payment.

Currently, the platform caters to individuals and statutory bodies by enabling ad booking for notices, tenders, property, matrimony and other details. The company works on a commission model.

The idea of releaseMyAd has evolved over time. Sharad says the initial idea was to leverage his experience in advertising at Microsoft to create a completely tech-based online ad platform to serve advertisers at scale for offline media.

This gradually paved the way to services for small businesses and young startups, who face an utter lack of access to reliable advertising agencies and unbiased media recommendations given their limited budgets. It caters to small and medium enterprises to help them reach out to target groups through various multi-media companies.

Increasing the client base

Citing an example, Sharad says, online ethnic marketplace Craftsvilla had initially used the platform to carry out media buying worth Rs 1 lakh.

Pratik Shah, CMO of Craftsvilla, says they used realeaseMyad in their initial years and found the team to be very helpful and effective.

“We realised that the cost benefits we managed to provide to them through our marketplace model could also be extended to others,” adds Sharad. They have since worked with other funded startups, including Peppertap, Swiggy, Housejoy, ZipGo, Doormint, TaskBob and LocalOye.

The team also tries to keep rates low by floating the ad enquiry across multiple publishers and advertising representatives throughout. They also monitor historic pricing of ads across clients, to negotiate better prices with the publishers in the advertiser’s interest.

“Unlike local agencies, our business dealings are not relationship driven. We offer greater transparency and clarity in pricing. Our business is not what you call ‘push-based’, where recommendation made by agencies are a function of the ‘commission earned’,” adds Sharad.

However, the task of aggregating different media options in the initial years wasn’t an easy task. As most media owners were used to the traditional advertising model, convincing them of the effectiveness of an online portal as a viable acquisition medium was difficult. Also, convincing the advertisers to use an online platform instead of personally meeting a media representative and discussing an ad campaign was quite a task.

Sharad says building the right interface and creating a tech-based system helped win over the doubters.

Traction and growth

Sharad claims to have serviced around 2.19 lakh advertisers till date. He says the firm’s annual turnover in FY 2015 was Rs 32 crores and is on track to cross the Rs 80 crore turnover mark this fiscal. The company is profitable. Bootstrapped so far, Sharad says he will look at risk capital to expand to new verticals.

The firm recently opened a Bengaluru office. “The intention is to ensure a tangible presence in every corner of the country. In time, we plan to open several regional offices,” says Sharad.

Internet speed is commonly expressed as Mbits/second. It only takes a split second to have information travel thousands of kilometers. But, in some parts of the world it often takes years for technology to reach. However, for people with passion and a genuine desire to learn, nothing can be a barrier. Akshay Deo is one such person.

Akshay, 27, was born and brought up in Solapur in Maharashtra.. He inherited his interest in computers from his father, who started a software firm in 1989. He had worked on punch cards and started coding in BASIC language back then. This experience helped him increase his passion for computers. Akshay says, “When it came to my future, I always knew I wanted to be around computers.”

Akshay has been an all-rounder since childhood. While experimenting with computers, his interest in Visual Basic, a programming language, grew and he started experimenting with it. His father had sold the software firm and was working in a construction company.Akshay built a software for the construction company his father worked for, to help them keep records of supplies and inventory.

Sure of his future in the world of computers, Akshay joined the Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT) in 2006 to pursue his bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Android had just launched and Akshay and his friends decided to play around with it. In 2009, there were no apps which could help people access a computer from their android phone. Microsoft Remote Desktop was a good resource but was limited to computers. Akshay decided to use the Remote Desktop Protocol and made an app, Omnidesk, to access the PC from the phone over the Internet, without client installation on the PC. They went to different companies for mentoring on how to take the product forward. However, some companies asked them the rights over the IP of the product in return. Akshay refused as it was his first product.

Akshay recounts another incident which made him realise the popularity of his product. Akshay says, “For the logo of Omnidesk, we had picked up an image from Google search. As our product went viral, we were contacted by a company known as Globe Telecom in Philippines. They said that the logo we are using was theirs and belonged to their company. We were very happy that our product was so famous that it reached Philippines. We eventually changed the logo.”

This was not all, they had over 50,000 downloads and a company in Finland wanted to buy them for $5,000. Akshay decided not to go ahead with it. They had revenue of Rs 2 lakh at the time. After engineering, Akshay declined an offer from Flipkart, as he didn’t want to leave Pune. Instead, Akshay joined the research team at Sungard, a data analytics company based out of US.

However, his heart was in Android. Akshay quit Sungard in December 2011 and joined hands with his friends Ratandeep Deshmane, Amit Yadav, and Aniket Awati and started AppSurfer in 2011. They came up with the idea of an Android emulator and during August 2011 they started working on the project and by December 2011 they had the prototype ready. Akshay wrote simulated drivers to allow sending sensor data from remote devices to cloud.

Akshay and his team showcased the product at many meetups. At one of the meetups, the team was advised to position the product as Citrix for mobile. The company received $2 million funding as well. However, the product didn’t work out well.

After AppSurfer, the team started BetaCraft, a Pune-based software services firm. Akshay says, “I am against early-stage funding. It takes attention away from building your product. So we started BetaCraft, where we earn money by services and then build our product using that money. If we feel the need for funding in later stages we will go for it.”

As part of BetaCraft, Akshay has worked on several products including YAAG, a documentation generation engine for web apps built using GoLang; and Ressy, a product in restaurant and table management space. Akshay has also partnered with Google to promote and spread awareness about GoLang in collages. GoLang was developed by Google in 2007 and is being used by companies such as CloudFlare, Dropbox and Sound Cloud.

Talking about future, Akshay says he is looking to build a true tech product from scratch at BetaCraft. He quips, “I do not want to build an online-offline collaboration tool or a copycat product. I want to build a product like Google Glass or Oculus rift, which has technology at its heart.”

Say hi to Akshay.

From being a figment of a science fiction writer’s imagination just a few years ago, today, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become a reality. A handful of Indian startups are working on specialised UAVs that can be deployed for everything from disaster management and crop monitoring to land surveys and aerial photography.

Aarav Unmanned Systems (AUS), a YourStory Tech 30 company, is part of this select group of young startups building UAV technology in the country. Others include Drona Aviation, Edall Systems, AirPix, Skylark UAVs, and Eazypilot. Kanpur-based AUS provides faster and more cost-effective UAV-based land surveying solutions for the civil engineering and utility industries. The company is incubated at the SIDBI Innovation and Incubation Centre (SIIC) at IIT-Kanpur.

Starting up

Co- founders — Nikhil Upadhye, Suhas Banshiwala and Vipul Singh — represented their college, IIT-Kanpur, at the Systems Engineering Awards competition organised by NASA in 2013. They had to design a UAV based on certain weight and payload specifications. The same year, the trio founded AUS.

While in the US for the competition, they noticed there was much more awareness about UAV technology there when compared to India, and realised how extensively UAVs were being used for recreational purposes.

Yeshwanth Reddy, 25, who joined the startup full-time as a Co-founder in 2014, says, “After a lot of brainstorming on possibilities versus fantasies, and a lot of technical scribbles, we were convinced that the utilisation of UAVs for engineering applications was the future of this technology. This was the point when we started working on building technology for 3D mapping and geographical information system surveying.”

A common interest in aero-modeling and robotics bonds the AUS team.

“The team is a perfect blend of skills required and are aligned with a common vision,” says Yeshwanth.

Nikhil, formerly a student-developer at the ‘Google Summer of Code’ programme, directs image processing, software development, controls and embedded systems at AUS. Suhas, who directs navigation, control systems and technology development, has been involved in robotics from his days as a student, and has previously worked with Flipkart as an analyst. Vipul joined IIT-Kanpur as a Research Associate in UAV development and directs systems engineering, sales, marketing and business development. Yeshwanth completed his M.Tech in Aerospace Engineering from IIT-Bombay after graduating from Amity University.

Vipul is the common thread that binds them all. He studied with Yeshwanth at Amity University and met Nikhil and Suhas when he began working as a Research Associate at IIT-Kanpur.

The product

Using photogrammetry, which is the use of photography to glean information like measurement and distances to generate accurate and detailed Digital Elevation Models or 3D representations of the terrain surface, can transform and change the way decisions are made in multiple sectors. This is where UAVs or UAVs will be useful.

Imagine having to construct a bridge in hilly terrain. The first step is to understand the region or topography. Usually, this is done using GPS mapping—a time-consuming and cumbersome process. The decision maker who requires the data is often not an engineer, but someone who relies on engineers to look at the data. UAV technology would not only allow this decision maker to have access to visuals of the topography, but the data collated by the UAV would allow him to have a 3D rendering of the topography, which would allow for better and more informed decision-making than ever before, all from the comfort of his office. This increases precision in decision-making and saves time.

AUS has an all-in product called Nayan, which is a high-performance quadrotor for developers and researchers. However, Nayan is not AUS’s main product. GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping and precision agriculture are the main applications they are targeting. They have the prototype ready and the product will be out soon.

“Currently, these applications are served using land-based systems, which are slow, terrain-restricted, and not extensive. We just moved these things from land to air,” says Yeshwanth.

According to him, they are currently producing topographic data with an accuracy level of 50 to 60 mm, which is comparable to traditional GPS ground-based techniques. Yeshwanth claims their solutions are 15-20 times faster than the competition.

Revenue model

Started in 2013 with a seed capital of Rs 25 lakhs, AUS is in talks with potential investors to raise a pre-series A. The company declined to share its investors’ names. AUS has fewer than 10 customers and a revenue of less than Rs 1 crore.

Yeshwanth is clear that AUS does not want to simply be a UAV seller or service provider: “We want to be an end-to-end solution provider. This involves our product, our services and extensive analytical support in planning, maintaining, and developing our client’s infrastructure.”

The path ahead

They are currently planning a move to Bengaluru and to expand the team. Once the pre-Series A funds come through, AUS will work on more use-cases for its product and also work on more solutions.

“We want to make our UAVs more and more intelligent and venture out into unprecedented fields, which is the long-term vision of the company,” says Yeshwanth.

However, it is the excitement of working with a ‘cool’ technology and pushing its boundaries that fuels this team’s passion. “When we went near the India-Pakistan Line of Control and flew our UAV, when our first autonomous flight happened, and every time we see a new piece of our algorithm or code make the UAV fly and drop, we are seized with excitement,” Yeshwanth says with a smile.

Failures and learning

While brimming with excitement, confidence and passion, the team has not been immune to failure. That has come in different forms- from failure to deliver the first product to the client to loss of their prototype. However, with each failure, they have learnt important lessons:

• Never make promises on hope. Conduct as many verification tests as possible before making any commitments.
• Do destructive testing for worst-case situations for whatever you create. This always leads you to new milestones.
• When you are aiming for quality, never do ANYTHING in a hurry.

YourStory take

UAV technology is a high-potential new technology and AUS has entered this sector at the right time. There are multiple use-cases for UAVs, from recreation to defense, and the global market is expected to reach $5.5 billion, according to a MarketsandMarkets research report. However, the technology is evolving daily, and many companies, globally, are emerging in this category. Some of the giants in this sector include DJI, The Boeing Company, and General Atomics.

AUS has competition in India as well. The team will have to be on top of new UAV technology and start winning customers. They will need to keep an eye on government regulations that are also evolving as UAV usage becomes more popular. According to a Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA ) notice issued to the public in October 2014, Unmanned Aerial Systems or UAVs have been branded a security threat. The notice says the operation of UAV will require approval from the Air Navigation service provider, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Home Affairs, and other concerned security agencies, in addition to the DGCA. “The Ministry of Home Affairs poses a serious bottleneck to our operations and development. Currently we are having to take appropriate permissions every time we want to execute a project and with bureaucratic red tape it becomes a challenge,” says Yeshwanth.

If the AUS team is able to deal with these issues, the sky is the limit.

Website: http://aus.co.in/

For many of us, inspiration for that great business idea that strikes on a Friday night is forgotten once the routine of a new week sets in. Tejomay Rastogi’s story is a little different. The 35-year-old health freak decided to bottle Naanima’s life hacks and sell it to weary Mumbaikars looking for an energy and wellness boost. The idea came to her one Friday in April 2014 and by Monday, she had put in her papers at work and Juicifix was born.

Thanks to that bold move, several people across the bustling metropolis awake to the colourful, liquidy goodness of cold-pressed juices delivered to their doorstep in dainty glass bottles.

“Everybody knows this stuff. We all know that amla is good for the skin and hair, and that jeera soaked overnight relieves gas. People just needed someone to validate these sure shot homegrown hacks. I found myself becoming that person. All I was doing was remembering every last one of my mum’s secret findings, and looking for ways to spread the love,” says Tejomay.

Tejomay’s Juicifix – a range of fresh cold-pressed juices available on subscription basis all over Mumbai – chooses not to get ahead of itself and jump on the bandwagon to becoming a mass product. It retains the charm and freshness of the juice you would ravenously seek at a cart after a long morning jog. Incidentally, that is exactly how Tejomay first started out.

She first began by selling fresh juices from her car at Carter Road in Bandra. Most promenades in the city are dotted with little vans selling healthy pick me ups for the perpetually-stressed Mumbaikar who has just finished an exhausting workout or a tiring day at work.

Tejomay has been at this for a year, and has never looked back – for this decision was very instinctive. “I have always been a risk taker and for me. What was I trying to achieve? Helping busy people get a healthy lifestyle. It was a good cause, I thought, along with a great idea of serving health. It felt like the right time to begin and I didn’t mind taking that chance,” says Tejomay.

Business picked up immediately and Tejomay began getting orders for weddings, diet plans and parties. She wanted Juicifix to be the “neighbourhood juice cart” all over Mumbai, until she realised that logistics and science wouldn’t agree with her plan. Science, because the essence of juice lies in its freshness, which would be lost in the time it took to transport the juice from the eastern side of a crowded suburb to the west. And logistics, because the number of orders streaming in kept growing. She realised she had to change her format to match these needs.

This is when she stumbled upon cold-pressed juices, a rather old albeit strangely uncommon
technology of extracting juice. Cold pressing maintains 90 to 95 per cent of the nutrition, by trituration, which is the process of first steadily grinding fruits and vegetables into a sludge, from which every drop of juice is sucked out under pressure. This process keeps the live enzymes or the biologically active proteins found in raw food intact and helps it stay fresh for three days.

Sourcing her equipment from the US, she and her boyfriend, Avrio Rebello, who supported both her cause and her passion, started selling juices on a subscription model in November 2014. To their delight, her loyal customers placed their first orders with the newly revamped model as soon as she was in business. Among her customers is Sunita Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor’s mother, who is a die-hard fan of Tejomay’s “Green juice.”

“Juicifix, Go Green is the perfect morning juice. It’s got the right blend of all greens that gives you your daily dose of anti-oxidants. I have been having Go-Green for a year now and I just love it!” says Sunita

Customers can avail of several subscription packs – 5, 15, 30 or 90 days – and a cold-pressed, almost assuredly hand-made, chilled bottle of juice is delivered to their doorsteps between 6 am and 9 am every day. The cost is between Rs 110 and Rs 150 for a 275ml bottle, depending on the duration of your subscription.

One of Juicifix’s most popular offerings is the ‘Cleanse’ package. People sign up for a five-to-seven-day package, and a flurry of crates arrive packed with juices for each day of the week. These juices either replace meals or complements them, resulting in, as the name suggests a complete cleanse of toxins from the system. Juicifix started with a customer base of seven subscribers, and has now grown to nearly 350 over the past year. Revenues are now anywhere between Rs 3 lakh and 5 lakh a month.

There have been many forks in the road, and Tejomay has been faced with some tricky choices. But she never wavered on her resolve to never compromise on the principle she built her brand on. She wakes up at 4 am each morning and personally makes as many juices as possible. Even if it means that economies of scale will have to wait another day; she continues to use glass bottles over plastic and encourages clients to recycle them. She steers clear of high-pressure processing, which is in the eye of a big ethical storm in the west, even if it means her juices won’t last beyond three days. She is also very upfront about the fact that her juices are not directly responsible for weight loss, so that are not misled.

The market for cold-pressed juices was worth Rs 9,000 crore in 2010, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20 per cent to Rs 22,500 crore by 2015, according to retail advisory Technopak. In this space, with other competitors like Raw Pressery, Jus Divine and Jus Pressed that supply to large chains of supermarkets like Nature’s Basket., Tejomay wants to keep her line of juices at this medium scale so she can focus on personalisation, and stay in touch with her end consumer to ensure constant product improvisation.

“Our aim is not numbers, at this point, it is loyalty. People have rarely discontinued our subscription based on taste. Customers call saying they dreamed about our Pineapple Express or Green juice… those are our milestones, “says Tejomay.

They plan on securing a stronghold in Mumbai, before branching out to other metros like Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and the NCR area.

“For now, we will stick to home deliveries of fresh juice and subscription plans with corporates and restaurants. Getting into retail would be the next step for us.”

There were 30 days to go. The cash registers were silent. The co-founder had quit unable to deal with the mess. The office space had to be vacated, as paying the rent was no longer possible. Is this what entrepreneurship is all about? This was not what Dinup Kalleril had in mind when he left home with big dreams.

The days were dark for Dinup in early 2013, and so were his thoughts. Maybe his parents were right; he ought to have finished his engineering degree and found a job. The online T-shirt company he had set up wasn’t working, the Rs 25,000-investment was long gone.

His parents assumed their son would be the first one in the family to finish a college degree, find a good job and settle abroad, but this son of a plumber had different plans.

He chose the travails of entrepreneurship and it has been a journey ridden with challenges. The online T-shirt company long sold, Dinup has bounced back with another startup—MonkVyasa, an online astrology consultation platform. He claims the platform, set up earlier this year, has daily transactions of Rs 75,000 to Rs 1,00,000.

But in early 2013, the only course of action left was to become a delivery boy and work his way upward.

The first failed venture

“Sachin Tendulkar was my hero. So my school vacations were spent playing cricket or swimming in the nearby ponds. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but the appeal of a 9-5 job didn’t hold,” says 27-year-old Dinup. Nevertheless, like most of his peers, he ended up joining an engineering college, but soon recognised the move to be a blunder.

“In the second year of college, I decided to become an entrepreneur. I got many ideas and discussed those with my friends. I tried my hand at trading scrap, selling SIM cards and conducting tours for agencies. With the money I earned I got a computer in 2008,” recalls Dinup.

The world of Internet and computers enthralled Dinup and he knew he had to take the plunge. So that year, he quit his university to focus on starting up. But all hell broke loose. His father refused to speak to him until he changed his mind. Finding it difficult to live in the such an environment, Dinup decided to move to Chennai.

Staying in Chennai for two months, he worked as a salesman to sustain himself. “I came back from Chennai with the idea of starting an online shopping portal for T-shirts. In 2012, online shopping was not popular in Kerala,” says Dinup.

But all didn’t go as planned and one of the biggest challenges was to meet the expenses. The money from most transactions was cash-on-delivery, which would take a month to reach them and that’s when Dinup decided to become a delivery boy for his own venture and for other delivery companies as well.

“I delivered products for six months in Kochi. For many Kochities, I am familiar as a delivery boy,” he adds.

Challenges were not new to Dinup, who was born in Pattimattom, 25 km from Kochi, into a family with a humble background. As he had studied in a school where the language of instruction was Malayalam, Dinup had to learn English when he joined college. He also did odd jobs while studying, to get some cash as he did not have pocket money.

Dinup eventually sold the business to a chartered accountant in Kochi and got out.
While his first venture didn’t pan out as he hoped, Dinup continued his efforts to make ends meet and find a sustainable entrepreneurial venture. He ended up being the go-to guy for any online-related services.

A new beginning with MonkVyasa

It was serendipity that led him to his new venture. In December 2013, while at his friend’s house, Dinup saw that his friend’s father was going to consult an astrologer. Dinup immediately asked him why he didn’t try consulting an astrologer online.

“I took my friend’s laptop and searched for astrologer consultations online but I could not find any website that offered such a service,” says Dinup. After going through some websites related to astrology, he figured out about ‘automatic horoscope report’, which is a technology that generates an online horoscope based on inputs like date, time and place of birth.

“That was the Eureka moment for my new venture. I realised that astrology is an important part of decision-making for most Indians. But in this Internet era, we could not get astrology services online like other services,” says Dinup.

Finding his co-founder

However, Dinup knew he needed a strong technical team. One evening, after four months of relentless search, Dinup happened to be sitting in a teashop near Kochi’s international cricket stadium, and he met his college friend Sarath KS, who was then working as a software developer.

“When I talked about the idea of a marketplace website for astrologers, he was very excited. We met several times at the same place discussing the idea and plans. Soon, he decided to quit his job and joined me as the Co-founder of Monkvyasa,” says Dinup.

Another rough patch

The duo took two months to design the entire flow chart and UI before starting work on the coding. The next challenge was to get astrologers on board as most were not Internet-savvy. They took time to convince astrologers to try out their platform and trained them on giving online consultations.

However, technical glitches made them go back to the drawing board. They had built a video consultation platform that had worked well during beta testing with 10 astrologers. But the payment gateway integration and video consultation together did not work.

They shut operations on the website and re-launched in April 2015 after working further on the product. Dinup by then had become a member of TIE Kerala and soon got mentorship and seed funding from Sanjay Vijaykumar, Chairman of Kochi-based startup incubator Startup Village.

The business model

In April 2015, Monkvyasa had 15 astrologers on its platform and began with close to 22 consultations in a month. Today, it has 25 astrologers on board and provides over 22 consultations in a day.
While the team gets over 500 enquiries and 200 online enquiries for astrologers, it is taking things one step at a time. “We want to be absolutely sure of astrologers’ credentials before we on-board anyone,” says Dinup.

The team charges a 15-per-cent commission from the astrologer for every transaction made. Users looking for a consultation can choose between an online video chat and an offline phone call. The payments are made online with the average cost of a consultation being Rs 500.

The vision is to bring the best astrologers in India on one platform, Dinup says. The company is targeting to on-board 2,000 astrologers in three years and reach transactions of $200 million.

“Entrepreneurship has given me freedom even in the toughest of times. I don’t think there is anything else I would want to do despite all the stress and struggles,” says Dinup.

Website

Delhi-based i2e1, a smart network layer platform which aims to provide low-cost and free Internet to consumers and actionable analytics to providers, has raised a seed round of $500,000 led by grow^X ventures.

The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Mohandas Pai, Rajan Pandhare, Debasish Mitter, and Singapore Angel Network. IIT-Delhi, where i2e1 was incubated, is also a shareholder in the company. The platform will use the funding for ramping up operations, analytics platform and the team.

Satyam Darmora, Co-founder, i2e1, says, “Our aim is to provide information to everyone. At i2e1, we are challenging ourselves to create a model, which will bridge the information gap for at least 500 million people over the next five to seven years. Our aim is to build a connected ecosystem where information is available to everyone, at the right time and the right place, to enable better and faster decision-making.” Satyam is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and IIM-Bangalore and has worked as head of Financial Services Portfolio at the Dell Family Foundation, and with American Express.

He adds that while there are many application-level platforms, network-level platforms are still unexplored despite having the potential to transform multiple business models. He wants to use his skills to create the smartest network layer platform and thereby impact lives of Indian citizens across the length and breadth of the country.

Other members of i2e1’s founding team include Ashutosh Mishra (ex- Microsoft, Adobe), Anugrah Adams (ex Chitika, mobile advertising platform), Gaurav Bansal (IIT-Kharagpur alumnus, ex-BASIX), and Maanas Dwivedi (IIT-Kharagpur alumnus, ex-American Express).

Based on innovation at the hardware front, i2e1 aims to reduce the cost of network delivery through cloud-based, remotely manageable plug and play devices. The platform leverages advanced machine-learning systems to create valuable insights and increase revenue and profitability for brands and merchants. i2e1 is live across India with over 100 paying clients, including retail outlets, ISPs, and organisations in the hospitality industry like ZO Rooms. Additionally, it has partnerships in place to help it scale up to over 5,000 locations next year.

Sheetal Bahl, MD and CEO, grow^X ventures, who will be joining the Board of i2e1, says, “i2e1 is led by a very strong team with a grand and audacious vision – to do to the network layer what companies like Facebook have done to the application layer – free it up, in exchange for data, allowing for a more meaningful connect between merchants/ brands and their consumers.”

Market overview

India’s broadband subscriber base – both wireless and wireline users – has crossed the 100-million mark in May this year, according to TRAI data. The sector is mainly dominated by big players like CISCO, Airtel and Reliance JIO, among others.

In the sector, many platforms have emerged that are working on technologies around it. They are offering trans data analytics and machine learning system, reducing the cost of the Internet delivery, offering public Wi-Fi hotspot and providing services to many individual retailers.

“Many other platforms are working on individual areas. However, we have been offering innovations to the entire segment – networking, data analytics and other Internet-technology-related fields,” says Satyam.

Currently, the market size is worth $15 billion and is growing at 30 per cent CAGR.

Satyam adds that he aims to target between 500 and 700 million people in the next five to seven years.

Website

If you are a user of Uber or Ola, chances are you tried the platform for the first time because of a message you got from a friend telling you that the first ride is free if you use a code the friend sent. This is referral marketing and is one of the most effective user-conversion tools used by Uber, Ola and others like Dropbox. But, the Indian e-commerce industry–poised to cross the $100-billion mark over the next five years–was largely indifferent to such campaigns. This was when Anmol Batra and Rajat Goel came up with the idea of referral marketing for e-commerce platforms.

These engineers observed that there were hundreds of e-commerce websites, but no end-to-end plug-and-play referral marketing tool available for them. While working with Bain & Company, the duo started ideating and  built and tested their product performance before deciding to quit the company.

In March 2014, Anmol and Rajat launched Refiral, a SaaS-based marketing tool for online businesses. It’s a plug-and-play referral marketing suite to engage customers on a website, resulting in increased conversions, social branding, and customer acquisitions. It enables e-commerce websites and online businesses to run fully-automated, personalised referral viral marketing campaigns.

E-commerce platforms that sign up on refiral.com decide the offers they wish to extend to their potential customers, and personalise the design templates to match the feel, colour and the content of the website. The set up takes 15 minutes, followed by pasting a short snippet of code on their existing websites. From there, the campaign should run automatically on the main e-commerce website and will start generating referrals. Additionally, Refiral appoints a dedicated campaign manager for each website to regularly measure and analyse the progress and optimise the content, design and offers regularly to further boost the performance. The founders say the platform has one-click integration with over 30 e-commerce platforms globally and works well with self-developed, custom-made websites as well.

“Through Refiral we have been able to touch all the pain points of an online businesses,” says Anmol.

He adds that they are running campaigns for over 700 online businesses across 10 countries, including Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, United States and Hungary. Refiral has customers in e-commerce domain across over 15 verticals, ranging from fashion to food to education, and has clients like Bata, Lemon Tree Hotels, Jabongworld, Provogue, Haldirams, Printvenue, Babyoye, and Arihant Books, among others.

On Refiral, Protik Basu, Head-Digital and Rewards at Lemon Tree Hotels, says, “The campaign is showing good results even in a short time. It’s a pleasure to work with the team as they adapt very quickly to your business needs and are able to innovate quickly. This is especially important for clients like us, who are ever-demanding.”

The platform experimented with multiple pricing models to suit the needs of its clients before zeroing in on a fixed pricing model. The platform sells fixed quarterly, semi-annual and annual plans.

“We are trying to partner with various platforms based out of other countries. Around 25-30 per cent of the total revenue comes from our top 10 clients. So far, we have a generated a GMV of Rs 7 crore across clients,” says Anmol.

Funding and growth

For the first six months, the venture was completely bootstrapped. In January 2015, it raised angel round of $330,000 from Cogent E services. “We have invested the amount across product side, marketing and platform partnerships,” says Anmol.

He adds that after a platform revamp in November, the daily self sign-ups has increased from eight to 10 to 13 to 17. “We are aiming at getting more than 2,000 clients by the end of next year by touching a GMV of Rs 50 crore across clients.”

On partnerships, Anmol adds, “Partnering and working closely with e-commerce platforms is key to our growth strategy. We have partnered with over 30 key e-commerce platforms in India and are actively looking to partner with all key platforms across the globe.”

Meeting challenges

Anmol says that the demand of quick results from clients is the biggest challenge. The clients need immediate results, within days of launching the Refiral referral campaign, but referral marketing is a form of marketing that picks pace over time, he adds.

Market and competition

Referral marketing is a $10-billion industry across the globe. Currently, there are more than two million e-commerce websites globally with a market size of $1.6 trillion, growing at 20 per cent annually.

Referral Candy, Get Ambassador and Invite Referrals are some of the platforms that are working in the same segment.

Website

It’s Monday morning. You’re already cursing that extra five minutes you spent in bed after hitting the snooze button. The cabs are running at double the meter, and the idea of having to drive in peak hour traffic is a nightmare. This was a problem Mumbaikars Youmit Singh, Navneet Singh and Randeep Singh were facing regularly. Add to that, the trio had to cross some of the busiest streets in the city during their daily commute.

“Public transport was inconvenient, and we could not afford the radio cabs or kali-peeli taxis. Carpooling was neither feasible nor practical as our timings were different,” says Navneet, 33.
And yet, they would see cars plying empty. This inspired them to develop seat occupancy sensors to make car sharing more organised. And thus was born Zoomot Services.

The workings

A ride-sharing app, Zoomot lets you book a seat in a cab rather than the cab itself. It uses a point-to-point billing system; tells you if cabs are available in the vicinity; and if a seat is available or not. You could also reserve a seat in advance. The cabs work on fixed routes and follow a fixed schedule.

“The idea is to promote sharing in an organised way with better capacity utilisation,” says Navneet. Youmit and Randeep are IITians, who met through the alumni network, while Navneet is a graduate of Symbiosis. The three have been friends for a while now. When Youmit and Randeep came up with the idea for Zoomot, they roped in Navneet as well.

They tied up with Affixus Technologies to  iron out the technology aspects of the app The team has built a robust system based on embedded micro-controllers and sensors for accurate vehicle tracking, billing, and occupancy status. Their app CoolShare is available via the Android PlayStore or the Zoomot website. They have also established a call centre for customer support.

Fleet management and revenue

The main challenges have been hiring and building the team and fleet management. The team at Zoomot had to build their fleet from scratch as they weren’t aggregators or regular car poolers.

They built the fleet by approaching commercial taxi vendors. They assured the vendors a minimum run of 3,000 km a month at Rs.35,000. “With proper contract management and benefits, we have been able to control our fleet. Nonetheless, it still remains one area of concern,” says Navneet. They generate revenue directly from the customers on a per seat basis, and make vendor payments per cab used. For every kilometre, the customer pays Rs.4.5.

The revenue is directly proportional to the percentage of seat occupancy or capacity utilisation of the vehicle. “So, if we keep our utilisation on the higher side, it will take care of the fixed and variable costs,” adds Navneet.

Also read: With ‘Ola Share’ and ‘uberPOOL’ has ride-sharing come of age in India

After getting the necessary permissions from the Mumbai RTO, Zoomot started operations in October 2015 with a fleet of five cabs. By the end of October, they claimed they were getting an average of 20-30 transactions per day, excluding the free rides.

By November they were operating a fleet of 12 cabs with 45-50 daily transactions with an average ticket size of Rs. 110. Currently, they operate four routes and will add six new routes in December.
“We intend to operate a fleet of 150 cabs in the next six months running on 20 routes in Mumbai,” says Navneet.

To ensure the safety of the passengers all the drivers go through the mandated KYC checks and police verifications. Navneet adds that since the routes are fixed, the GPS signals immediately alert the control room if the route or course changes. There also is a panic button inside the cab for passengers, so that it immediately sends out an SOS.

The team was bootstrapped during the three-month prototyping phase. They raised a seed fund in August from an angel investor and are looking forward to initiate Series A funding for further expansion.

After Mumbai, the team intends to target metros across the country. “We are in initial talks to launch 17-seaters in a bid to reach the masses and cover a broader market segment. Once the operations are streamlined, introducing two-wheeler taxis is also on the cards,” adds Navneet.

YourStory take

Carpooling in India seems to be gaining attention and interest. According to a recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers report, the global market in this space was valued at $15 billion. This figure is projected to hit $335 billion by 2025.

India, according to experts, will get a good share of this market projection. The last few years have seen the likes of MeBuddie, RidingO, PoolCircle, LiftO and CarPool Adda coming up in this space, but the entry of global players like Brazilian Tripda and French BlaBla Car has been the real game-changer.

Biggies like Ola and Uber are also aggressively pushing into the space. However, with ZipGo, a mini-bus aggregator, hitting a rough patch in Bengaluru, policies across different states might act as spokes in the wheel. So how far Zoomot will go with its expansions is a question that is yet to be answered.

App

Last summer, Sandeep Lodha  went to attend his cousin brother’s wedding in Orissa. He realised, when it came to organising a wedding, nothing much had changed even 15 years after he got married.

It was the same feeling of being anxious and clueless about which vendor to choose and which venue to narrow down on. There was very little support and the family had to do the running around to get vendors and get them to do the preparations on time. But Sandeep saw this as an opportunity.

Having graduated from IIT in 1997, and completing his MBA from The Wharton School in 2006, Sandeep had found a good footing in Bain & Company. But three years later he moved back to India with dreams of turning an entrepreneur. “India came across as a natural choice in so many ways. It’s your country and you know the market, while being comfortable with it. Moreover, you understand the psyche of Indian customers, thereby increasing your chances of success,” says Sandeep, 40.

However, the timing did not seem right. So after a few more years at Bain & Company, Sandeep joined Disney India in 2013 to lead the consumer products division.

It was attending his cousin’s weding in 2014 that finally led him to take the entrepreneurial plunge and in 2015, Sandeep founded Weddingz.in.

Weddingz – From inspirations to deals

Weddingz, launched in May 2015, is a wedding platform that allows consumers to discover, book, and buy all wedding-related products and services. The platform also allows brides and grooms to get inspired from the large collection of wedding photos available.

But it took quite some convincing to take the jump, “It’s never easy to startup, especially when you have a family to cater to. But I was lucky to have a strong network of individuals to back me,” Sandeep says.

Between October and November, Weddingz launched operations in 11 cities–including Delhi, Pune, Goa, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer–and lists above 2,000 venues and vendors each on the platform. The team is now 80-people strong. Of this, 20 are in customer support as Sandeep believes strongly in delighting his users.

Traction

On the traction front, Sandeep says that the business is growing 50 per cent month-on-month. The platform witnesses traffic of 50,000 users every month with over 800 customers served in the month of November. This number grew from 450 in October. The platform received over 100 venue bookings in November, compared to 70 bookings in October, with an average ticket size of about Rs 3 lakh. Venue bookings contribute to a majority of his revenues. Sandeep is targeting to grow his business 100 times by end of next year across metrics like bookings and traffic. He, however, did not want to reveal current or target revenues. Sandeep says, “What we are seeing is a strong and growing demand that we are unable to fulfil. Moreover, there is no dull moment in this industry. Weddings are an exciting space to be and you have so many options to explore new products and services here.”

Sandeep claims the business broke even within two months of launch in Mumbai. The venture is currently funded by family, friends, and HNIs.

Future plans

In order to meet the increasing demand, the platform is focussing on automating venue bookings. It is also introducing a real-time 360 degree view of the venue so customers can make an informed decision. This helps in shortlisting a venue as, Sandeep says, most customers prefer to do a physical recce before finalising.

The firm also  plans to launch its mobile application in the next three months. Weddingz also intends to add more features like help customers plan honeymoons or create a gift registry.

YourStory take

In 2014, the wedding planning industry was touted to be a $ 38 billion market place growing at 25–30 per cent, according to Conde Nast India. The industry is extremely fragmented and dominated by offline wedding planners and vendors in each city and town of India. The online space has also seen the emergence of a few players like 7Vachan, MyShadi, Weddings9, urbanrestro and getyourvenue. These either offer end-to-end wedding planning services or are focused on a single service, like venue booking.

Almost every transaction category, from shopping to getting a plumber, is moving online especially in Indian cities. That is clearly happening in the wedding segment too. When it comes to wedding purchases and decisions the bride is increasingly the major decision maker in Urban India. The fact that women are expected to make up over 40 per cent of the 100 million online shoppers in India next year, according to a report by Google and Forrester Consulting, is good news for these online wedding planners. Marriages might be made in heaven, but, pretty soon, big fat Indian weddings will be organised online.

The bright red boards with the bold white ‘OYO’ splashed across have become a common sight across most metropolitan cities in India. A 25-year-old is responsible for much of OYO’s rapid expansion.

“Shrey joined us a year ago when we had only 20 properties. He has been instrumental in leading some of our most critical initiatives. He built the transformation vertical (converting new properties to OYO standards) and later joined the expansion team. We launched in 100 plus cities, in a matter of six months,” says Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO, OYO Rooms, about his Awesome Startup Employee, Shrey Gupta, AVP (Expansion).

OYO Rooms aims to provide a standardised experience to people across the country when they are away from home. Shrey, who joined the company in June 2014, has been entrusted with ensuring great customer experience by establishing and implementing standards across the OYO network. He is also in charge of putting together OYO’s expansion strategy and building the systems and enablers to execute it. Shrey’s pluckiness was clear to OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal right from the start. Shrey had reached out to Ritesh via Twitter to congratulate him on OYO’s seed round last year; within a month he had joined the 15 member team.

“Shrey bet on this idea when most folks did not even understand what we were building at OYO Rooms. He understood the problem and brought the same passion to solving it that most of the founding team did,” says Ritesh.

An obviously proud Shrey shares that in 18 months OYO Rooms has scaled from 12 hotels with 200 odd rooms in one city, to over 3,500 hotels and 40,000 rooms across over 150 cities. They have also launched OYO WE exclusively for women. “These 18 months have been nothing short of inspiring,” says Shrey.

Life’s milestones

Shrey spent his early years in Varanasi and the last decade in Gurgaon. After completing his Bachelor of Commerce at Delhi’s Sri Ram College of Commerce, he began his career at Bain & Co in 2011; however, two years later he opted to be part of the Lok Sabha campaign war room for the BJP. “Leaving the comfort of a ‘safe’ job to give my time to an election campaign was a key moment of my life. It brought me face to face with the ability to take risks and has been instrumental in my decision to join what was then a very young OYO Rooms.” he shares.

The second key moment was when he ran his first half marathon, in 2013. The marathon helped him realise the importance of training and gave him the motivation to keep moving ahead, despite the odds.

Working at startups

Though a strong advocate of working at startups, he believes that early experience with a corporate helps individuals learn new skills in a relatively slower-paced environment. These skills, which could be Excel modeling or work planning, will come in handy at a startup where learning happens on the job. Corporates have the bandwidth to focus on solving problems and building processes. “These skills have held me in good stead,” he says with a smile. But a lot of intangible qualities are also required to be successful in a fast-growing startup.

Shrey shares an experience from his early days at OYO, when the startup’s operations were quite limited. In August 2014, they got a booking for 200 people, which is over 100 rooms, with just 48 hours’ notice. Shrey says: “At that stage, we had a little over 300 rooms in total and only about 50 rooms were ready and available. Over 100 room nights meant nearly 40 per cent of our daily sales and we were determined to not let go of this business. This lead came in at 10 pm on Day 0. On Day 1, our business development team got into action to partner with three new properties in Gurgaon’s DLF Phase 2. By 5 pm that evening, we had found and signed on these properties. The mandate was clear—to transform these rooms within 24 hours and have them ready for our guests. Work on standardising the rooms started on the morning of Day 1. At 10 am, one person was tasked with getting runners, cushions, linen, and towels from our linen vendors. Then it was time to get down to getting over 50 rooms cleaned and ready for the guests arriving the next day. Another team member worked overnight with our board vendor to get three OYO Dollops (the lollipop like circular boards) ready. These were installed by 1 pm on Day 2 (barely 2 hours before the group arrived). I oversaw the deep cleaning of 20 rooms at these new properties while managing the rest of the team. Deep cleaning started at 4 pm on Day 1 and by 1 am on Day 2, the rooms were ready. At the end of it—a team of six people managed to get three new hotels and transform them for our guests. That’s how fast we believe in moving, and this experience guides our working style till date.”

Shrey says the team is very important and believes it is his team’s ‘get stuff done, no matter what is takes’ spirit that pushes the startup to greater heights.

Founder’s Speak

Ritesh says Shrey has the ability to strike the right balance between process and hustle, a quality that is highly prized in a startup employee. “He knows when to change gears and can get things done whatever it may take. Everything we build at OYO has strong process fundamentals and we choose to use hustle to speed up these processes or plug gaps when they don’t work. And this approach to solving problems has helped us scale rapidly and is a core part of our culture,” says Ritesh, who adds that as an early member, Shrey has been part of most important initiatives at OYO and so everyone knows and loves to work with Shrey.

Ritesh shares an anecdote that gives us an insight into Shrey and the work he has done at OYO. “Shrey built the first playbook on what needs to be done to convert a new hotel to an OYO. This meant creating exhaustive checklists, negotiating with vendors and being out there getting things done. We decided to call this process Transformation and all the team members became Transformers. Shrey became Optimus Prime (the leader of the AutoBots or the good transformers in the movie series).”

OYO’s Optimus Prime aka Shrey signs off with a message, “Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t shirk away from speaking up about something that you think should be done differently!”

He sang, he romanced, and floored every hard-nosed corporate honcho at the IIM Bangalore’s first-ever alumni meet — IIMBUE’s Leadership Summit — in Bengaluru on Friday. Shah Rukh Khan, the Badshah of Bollywood, did what he does best and entertained the houseful audience with his brand of leadership lessons in his trademark style and sense of humour.

He began his talk on creative leadership with a popular joke that alluded to the street smartness that the learned audience may have missed out in their quest for knowledge.

Here are nine points from Shah Rukh Khan’s talk that touched upon his life lessons that managers could do well to take to the boardrooms:

1. Leaders are able to assimilate their experiences in order to reframe the world around them in their own terms. They use the very structure of life to dismantle it. They are not afraid to question, to imagine, to dream, and most importantly to believe. They are also not afraid to act, even if their actions may not result in success. Being a public figure, my actions are constantly questioned, reviewed, and distorted. I get it all but whenever I feel thwarted I sing this song, “hum to actor karega, duniya se nahi darega…” so do not stop to act. Action is everything.

2. Dreaming is not enough. You need to dismantle the old, the frameworks that are laid out before you, the ideas that you cling to, the ones that hold you back and prevent you from growing. It is by disassembling your fears of failing and losing not just things, but people and positions, your jobs and most of all change that, that you can be truly creative. I meet many successful people in the world of business and while their ideas are very clear, the way they speak of them is oddly dispassionate. The madness and passion are missing. I get the sad impression that business often becomes numerical…it is only about millions and targets. It is so goal driven that there is a stark loss of inspiration from it. I think the emphasis on organisational goals and efficiencies has clouded the poetry of creating. It is difficult for me to relate to this starkness. I feel it lacks life. Creation cannot be a managerial concept, it has to be an ‘imaginarial’ concept.

3. To lead means to inspire. You cannot inspire people mechanically or through statistics or numbers unless they are stock brokers or bankers (with due respect). Inspiration is an emotional construct…to make people believe in anything whether it is a product or an idea or even you yourself, you need to connect the ability to imagine and dream. You cannot create within a box… it is an open process, one that is welcoming and even wild at times.

4. I have never set goals. I have never set out to earn a particular amount, or to count the crores at the box office, or compare my work with another. In fact, I would go as far to say quantifiable goals are indeed illusions, and the only reality is actually hard work. Making the mistake of believing that your dreams will take flight without having to flap madly at those wings is silly. Every single moment requires diligence. Life remains ordinary if you are unable to sustain the capacity to work hard on your dreams.

5. Leadership implies being prepared for disaster also. And it will hit you. It could come as failure maybe or taking someone away you love. So what will you do about it? Wallow in self-pity? I do that often. But I do it in my huge golden bathroom between the jacuzzi and the steam room. I shed huge tears of self-pity but when I walk out wearing my limited edition cologne that helps. I am ready to embrace disaster. So little bit of crying and wallowing is ok. But the thing to understand is you have to accept it. Change your perspective, do a handstand and rebuild yourself that is what leadership is about.

6. A perfect life, according to me, is a farce. There is no perfect life. Actually, there is nothing more beautiful than the imperfections of life. In my trade, life serves as a fertile ground for innovation and ideas. We use its imperfections every moment. In fact, there is nothing that allows us to live better than trouble, so why not embrace it. And while we are embracing let’s embrace destiny too, and in my case, I’ll embrace Kajol, Madhuri, and Alia too. And guys whichever company you join or create you will not get these perks, so ha ha.

7. Destiny isn’t what it’s rolled out to be either. Accidents happen. I am a living example of accidents — movie star/entrepreneur/speaker at IIM gathering. I wanted to be a sportsman. I hurt my back, and did not have the resources to get proper treatment. So I joined a theatre group to overcome my sadness. My father died suddenly and we were evicted from our rented house and mother went looking for a smaller house. The property dealer’s father-in-law was making a TV serial, ‘Fauji’. My mother sent me to him and I got the part of Abhimanyu Singh and things got haywire from there. Incidentally, we never took the house from the dealer.

8. Destiny plays a part, yes. No one can teach us either how to fight it or chase it. Just like a disaster, it will come your way. But if you don’t have the courage to ride its waves when it comes it will toss you right on the beach and all you will be left with is a sunset of a tired and weary life. So keep your eyes open for life’s magic.

9. Unless you live by the heart, unless you are a Dilwale none of this will translate into a splendor that life is capable of unfolding before you. The mind is the seed of creativity, the heart is the soil. The seed cannot grow without an open heart. To take everyone together with as much goodwill for them as you have for yourself is the basis of all creative endeavour, of all real success, of all happiness, and true leadership.

How does one create India’s biggest and arguably the most well-known ed-tech company? If you ask Byju Raveendran of Byju’s Classes, he’ll tell you it’s by competing with yourself, and not others. His passion and drive are infectious. At TechSparks 2015, Byju’s talk had focused around making students love learning, get addicted to learning. This may sound a bit over-the-top coming from anyone else, but Byju has proved it by creating something extraordinary by addressing the root of the problem – making learning both engaging and personalized.

YourStory caught up with Byju at the company’s headquarters at Koramangala in Bangalore, a high-energy place, buzzing with not just activity but also a high level of excitement among both staff and students. Byju’s started off small, as an offline test prep provider for CAT, GRE, GMAT, JEE & Med, and the Civil Services exams. It thenexpanded into coaching for Classes 11 and 12, and further to Classes 6-10. He’s often be described as a maths genius, but he’s a shrewd entrepreneur too. His company has raised funds from the likes of T.V. Mohandas Pai and Dr Ranjan Pai of the Manipal Group. Many of his former students now work with him, as teachers and course developers.

Byju has spent countless hours teaching maths for entrance exams, and his zeal to transform the nature of learning, working on innovation 24×7, has brought Byju’s so far ahead of being just another test prep provider.To cut a long story short, Byju’s growth catalyst, along with his ambition, was going mobile.

“We have been a very successful offline brand, but last year we launched our first application through a mobile platform, and that has helped us leapfrog to the next level in terms of users,” he says, and reiterates his mantra of personalized learning: “We are making an impact where it matters, and how students learn in those crucial years where they start failing (in a) subject, in the 6^th or 7^th grades. We know we are making a much bigger impact because we are changing the way India is learning today.”

They currently reach over 20 lakh students, all of whom are free users, and are adding nearly 20,000 students every month. But here’s what makes them successful – Byju’s is clocking 20 per cent month-on-month growth in terms of converting around 20 per cent of those into serious, paid users. When you know how high-energy, passionate and driven Byju is, the numbers suddenly seem very realistic. It all stems from his growing-up years, when he always went beyond the curriculum and guide books. He attributes the success to the time spent outside the classroom.

“That’s why I advise all students that there are a lot of things that you need to learn from books, but there is a lot more that you can learn outside the classrooms by playing multiple games…whatever passion you see, the energy which you see, the positive aggression you see is mostly because the amount of time I have spent outside my classrooms – that helped me in multiple ways,” he explains. “One is to learn the real-lifeskills, which is helping me to make bigger and bigger impact…and that kind of forced me to learn on my own. So from the beginning…I used to learn below and above the curriculum. The subjects I used to like I used to learn, and the subjects I kind of never used to like, I used to still follow what most of the students are following today which is about memorizing, replicating and then forgetting.”

Most of the ed-tech companies across the globe, those who actually create contentdo it in two ways.One is to simply capture what I am saying now…The second one is just using 2D animation, 3D animation and characters to teach. Now what we have done is, we’ve mixed real teachers with animation, making it a seamless experience. It took us so much time and so much effort to bring out the energy through the videos.

He’s so focused on talking about the content they create and how they deliver it that it’s almost tough to get him to talk about himself – after all, he is the brand; it’s literally and figuratively his name on the door. So what’s been his key success?

“If you ask me where I have been successful, it’s in recreating a lot more Byjus or better than the original Byju.That’s because I have been able to sell my vision of making an impact in terms of how the students are learning and why that is important. Coming from my kind of background, I know that education is what I am today and education is the only way to make it big or the best way to make it big, depending on which section (of society) you belong to,” he replies honestly and to the point.

So how does he keep going through the challenges – setting up and running a business and constantly innovating? “It’s very simple. In one sentence if you ask me:increase your aspirational level as much as possible, because none of us ever made our aspirational level. And keep on losing to yourself, try beating yourself every day, compete with yourself day in and day out. (Your) competition is not with others, (it) is with yourself.Especially when you are creating something which people have not done before, the competition has to be with yourself,” he explains as clearly as the concepts in the videos his company puts out.

Never one to take things slow, Byju has firmly set his sights on the international stage, to become the biggest such company in the world. “The idea is to reach there in the next four years is what I tell investors and everyone else, but we will reach there much faster, because my target internally is much more aggressive,” he says with all the energy of an enthusiastic entrepreneur who knows exactly what he’s set out to do. And when it’s Byju saying it, disruption suddenly doesn’t seem like a tall order.

When in college, Ankur Mittal, Neha Sachar Mittal and Karina Rajpal had spent many hours discussing startup ideas. However, life after college took the three friends down separate corporate paths. But the startup dream remained and years after passing out of college they joined hands to create Kidology, a luxury kidswear brand.

Ankur a Chartered Accountant and MBA from Georgetown University, USA, has spent the last four years shuttling between New York and London, working as an investment banker for Citigroup and Credit Suisse. During this time, he observed an opportunity in the vacuum that existed between the latent demand and supply of high quality fashionable clothes for infants, kids and expecting mothers in India.

Meanwhile, Karina, after completing her MBA at Georgetown University, was involved in expanding her family’s established clothing, accessories and home furnishings business in India.

Neha, a graduate from Xavier Institute of Communication and married to Ankur, had spent eight years with groups like NDTV and TV 18, as an anchor and producer of entertainment shows.

In 2009, Karina decided to start a new venture that would leverage her existing skills in a new dynamic business environment. She joined hands with friends Ankur and Neha and decided to launch a lifestyle store for kids.  In 2010, the trio launched Kidology.

“We decided to develop an Indian fashion brand for kids, between the age group 0 and 10 years, and which would appeal to the growing segment of discerning consumers in India and abroad,” says Ankur, 37, Co-Director, Kidology.

He adds that the collection includes Indian, western and fusion-inspired garments and accessories for girls and boys from newborn to pre-teens. In addition to the in-house collection, key Indian designers including Gauri & Nainika, Gaurav Gupta, Siddhartha Tytler and Malini Ramani were approached to design exclusive kids’ collections that would be manufactured and distributed under the Kidology label.

The label was launched with a flagship store at DLF Promenade Mall, New Delhi. Within India, Kidology is sold from multi-designer stores in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ludhiana and Kolkata.  Kidology also retails through its own website kidology.in and a number of online stores. Internationally, Kidology has presence in multi-designer stores in Dubai, Singapore, Sydney, London and New York.

“As a team, the co-founders bring together complementary expertise on garment design, production, investment banking, marketing and fashion PR,” says Ankur.

Pivoting the business

The revenue of the company is based on the manufacturing, distributing and selling of clothes.

“What has changed over the last few months is how we do that. The focus has been on improving gross margin while bringing the average selling price down, overhauling our distribution and consequently our reach,” says Ankur.

In its initial avatar, Kidology was essentially a brick-and-mortar brand selling designer wear through its own stores and through other offline stores within and outside India. However, in the past few months, it has been concentrating on online segment as well.

“Our partnership with Cbazaar, Snapdeal, Flipkart, exclusively.com and other online platforms demonstrated a huge online opportunity amongst NRIs spread across the world and that’s when we started giving online retail the respect it deserves,” says Ankur. However, this transition was not easy. They had to change their product design and price positioning. “We introduced product innovations in our designs that would ultimately reduce the need for size exchange. We are in the process of introducing new price points that will help us reach out to a greater audience while maintaining the style and design that keep our brand image and positioning intact,” adds Ankur.  Kidology, at present, caters to the affordable-luxury segment, with prices ranging from Rs 5,000 to 25,000. However, they are planning to bring the starting price down to Rs 3,000 in garments and Rs 500 in accessories.

“We have now partnered with more online portals without sacrificing the brand image by ensuring that the product and the brand are positioned correctly,” says Ankur.

Handling challenges

With continuous cost escalation of raw materials and skilled labour, ensuring the quality of products while maintaining the price and margins come as a major challenge for the venture. The company engages in effective raw material procurement and outsourcing fabrication to combat these challenges. Another challenge is the high cost of real estate even in Tier II and Tier III cities, which further magnifies the importance of a strong online presence to achieve reach, scope and scale in our activities.

Market opportunity

As per the study by ASSOCHAM, the Indian kidswear market is expected to reach Rs 80,000 crore by the end of this year. It is not just consumers in top metros who are willing to shell out a few thousand rupees for kidswear, tier-II and III cities like Dehradun, Chandigarh, Pune, Nashik, Indore and Varanasi have also become big markets for branded clothes for children.  The reasons for children becoming more fashion and brand-conscious, the study states, are increased media exposure, double-income parents and peer pressure.

The Indian kidswear market, which is still in its nascent stage, has witnessed the growth of brands and stores like Mothercare, FirstCry, Mom & Me, Burberry Kids, Armani Junior, Fendi Kids, and Gucci Kids, among others.

This year, baby products retailer FirstCry raised $36 million in fourth round of funding, taking its total fundraising  to nearly $70 million. In February 2015, Mahindra Group acquired VC-backed baby products e-tailer Babyoye.

FirstCry and Mom & Me are among the larger survivors in kidswear retail. Though kidswear is a large business, many retailers such as Lilliput Kidswear and Gini and Jony shut most of their stores over the past few years after suffering huge losses.

On the growing market, Ankur says that the organised branded sector, though growing fast currently, still constitutes only a small part of the overall kidswear market. There is plenty of room for growth and room for new entrants, including international brands. Kidology caters to a niche segment in this rapidly growing industry–it has carved a unique position and product proposition.

Ankur expects the company to hit GMV of $1 million in the next twelve months and to cross $20 million in five years. Recently, Saurabh Mittal, Co-founder and former Vice Chairman of Indiabulls, invested in Kidology.

Ankur says, “We are poised to become the leading player in the occasion-wear segment for kids operating in the affordable luxury and bridge-to-luxury price segment.”

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When hunger strikes and one is too lazy to cook up something at home or step out to grab a bite, the trusty pizza delivery service never fails. Yet, when it comes Chinese cuisine, people mostly tend to opt for dining out. In other words, the popular Chinese takeout of the West had still not found its place in India.

Happy Hakka, started by four friends and food connoisseurs Gautam Ghai, Arushi Vaish, Puneet Saini and Chander Mohan, intends to change this trend. It was initially conceptualised by Puneet Chander and Gautam. Arushi joined in immediately after.

The duo found that while there was no dearth of good Chinese food in Delhi, it was only available at restaurants that also had delivery option.

“We identified a gap in the Indian market, where there is no established delivery-centric Chinese eatery that serves good, standardised pan-Asian food at reasonable price points,” says Gautam, 34.

Realising that they needed to create a differentiator from the several different food delivery services, the startup decided to focus on delivering Chinese food with the option of ordering it online, via a central hotline number or a mobile app.

Placing the order and what follows

Gautam says their vision for Happy Hakka is to make it a leading national, delivery-centric quick-service restaurant (QSR), that provides an upscale, quality experience at value price points. The mission, he adds, is to provide exotic Oriental flavour packages in an innovative format, designed for convenient consumption on the go, in offices or at homes.

The startup employs delivery route optimisation, direct integration with point-of-sale and the option of cash or card on delivery.

The meals are delivered as a complete package along with easy-to-add accompaniments, cutlery and tissues so that the customer can eat straight out of the box. “It’s quick, smart and hassle-free eating, and the customer does not have to worry about utensils, cutlery or doing the dishes later,” adds Gautam.

The food is preservative-free and freshly made as the orders are placed, and the flavours are standardised. “We ensure we put in tons of vegetables, and try to restrict the use of oil to the minimum required. We have some healthy soups and salads on the menu along with an option of having brown rice with your meal,” says Gautam.

The dishes are priced between Rs 51 and Rs 289. The meals start at Rs 99, with a meal for two at Rs 400.

Traction and growth

Happy Hakka currently claims to serve 400 to 450 orders a day, of which 80 per cent are from existing customers. The food is prepared at a company-owned central kitchen that supplies to its outlets, which in turn deliver to customers in their assigned areas.

That has helped keep the costs down for the startup, and is among the first such operation in Delhi. The other player with a similar model is Mumbai-based Noodle Play and Charcoal Biryani. Gautam says their strategy for growth is to make ordering for food so simple that it becomes a habit.

They have designed their own delivery network with the help of SourceFuse, Gautam’s other venture, a digital product and technology development organisation that helps startups and corporations launch web, mobile and social software solutions.

The startup’s app is directly connected with the kitchens and when an order comes in, the restaurant can take care of it without involving any third party. Happy Hakka runs its own delivery service and has built the complete platform that allows it to take and process an order.

Team and the roles

Each team member wears a different hat, bringing diversity into the Happy Hakka’s management. Gautam, has nearly 10 years of professional experience, and has previously worked as a consultant with Ernst & Young for their Risk and Business Practice Solutions.

He has also worked with Europe’s largest travel company e-bookers, UN Security Council in Geneva, and Quark Inc. Gautam graduated from SSCBS, University of Delhi in 2003 with a degree in Information Technology.

Arushi Vaish heads Expansion, Sales and Operations at Happy Hakka. Her experience in engineering for three years and the construction industry for a year has given her a headstart in expansion and operations at Happy Hakka.

Puneet spearheads Marketing and Strategy at Happy Hakka. After a brief stint in Enterprise Resource Planning, he shifted to advertising. It was at Contract Advertising in 2011, while working on a south Indian QSR chain, that he brainstormed the idea of a delivery-centric, mass-brand Chinese QSR, from which Happy Hakka was born.

Chander is the financial and operations brain behind Happy Hakka and is responsible for Financial Management and Backend Operations. He has over 10 years of experience in the operations and finance space and has also worked with Subway for three years, managing their flagship store in Noida.

Also read: Is this the end of the honeymoon period for foodtech startups

Happy Hakka received seed funding of Rs 1 crore from Delhi based Ajay Relan, the managing partner of mid-to-growth stage private equity firm CX Partners. The team is looking to raise its next round soon.

They currently have five stores in Delhi and plan to have 50 stores in two years across the country. “We eventually plan to have nationwide roll-out of Happy Hakka of over 200 stores. We are focussing on geographical contiguousness—expanding in concentric circles with Delhi at the centre and launching in Jaipur, Chandigarh, Agra, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Meerut.”

YourStory Take

If there is one brand that has truly cracked the QSR-based food delivery model on a global scale, it is Domino’s Pizza. If you take a look at the figures globally, the company saw an increase of close to 750 per cent (Forbes).

The key reason for this growth hasn’t been the quality and taste of the pizzas alone; cutting-edge digital and technology strategy has played their part as well. The digital systems are so strong that it becomes easier for consumers to place, track, pay, and pick their orders. This is the case even for India. Happy Hakka will also have to get all these elements right to become as successful.

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It was in a little Thai restaurant in downtown San Francisco, in 2012, that Avik Pal had his Eureka moment on data management for clinical trials.

Over lunch with some scientists discussing various ways of leveraging technology in clinical trials, Avik, a founding board member at iKure, realised that the entire consenting process in clinical trials is extremely paper-based and can be completely transformed using technology. Clinical trials essentially are studies that work on how new medical treatments work.

At iKure, Avik had worked towards providing sustainable healthcare to the last mile, leveraging technology intervention. The iKure experience helped him develop a critical understanding of some of the operational challenges of healthcare data management at the last mile.

Meanwhile, his wife, a physician by training and associated with medical research, shared with him some of the data management challenges faced in the world of clinical trials.

The idea also struck a chord with several other people who were plugged into the clinical trial ecosystem. Thus, eventually the small spark of an idea evolved into the current vision of CliniOps to completely digitalise the clinical trial industry.

The workings

CliniOps, founded in 2013, offers a tablet-based solution in clinical trials, for the biopharma industry, using technologies in social, mobile, analytics and cloud. It captures all the data electronically at the source. Thus, edit checks and several other data management functions are conducted upfront in the clinical data management process.

It can also directly pull data from several medical devices such as digital blood pressure monitors, thereby capturing quality data, right at the point-of-care, that can be instantly transmitted to the sponsor organisation. The team works with pharmaceutical companies, academic medical centres, research institutes and foundations engaged in global health.

“We recognise that clinical trials, especially those with global sites, face several data challenges such as data collection, data management, data quality and data security,” says Avik, 40.

These challenges, he adds, mostly stem from the inadequate access to Internet at the point-of-care, both in the developed and the developing world. The tablet-based solution can work offline too, giving the flexibility to be fully functional without the dependency on Internet.

Building the team

Avik roped in Yerramalli Subramaniam, 41, his friend during his time at IIT-Kharagpur, as the Co-founder.

“After our IIT days, our career paths took us in different tracks. I moved into enterprise application consulting, while Subbu focused on Health IT and medical devices. So when I decided to start our venture CliniOps, he was the first name that came to my mind. I reached out to him and he was very excited to join hands as our Co-Founder and CTO,” says Avik.

Subramaniam has designed the product from the ground up and has brought many new ideas and initiatives to the table.

Recognition and traction

CliniOps has been named among the top innovations in digital health by several forums, including:

• Appcessories (IoT space), ranked CliniOps among ‘Top 15 Companies That Are Revolutionising Digital Health’
• TechNews recognised CliniOps among ‘five revolutionary companies doing innovative research in digital health’
• Founder’s Guide ranked CliniOps among Top Startups in America, in the most promising ‘Health & Fitness’ category
• PharmaVoice ranked it among the Top 10 in ‘Innovation in Digital Health’, 2015

Future plans

“We have mostly bootstrapped our way through by keeping our burn rate extremely low as we worked hard to get our product to market. We initially raised about $100,000 through friends and family, and we are currently in the process of raising an angel round to support our future growth,” adds Avik.

This year, CliniOps has seen revenue of $350,000. It follows a subscription-based SaaS model, but will soon shift to an annual enterprise model. Based out of California, CliniOps has just opened its operations in Kolkata.

The company is actively engaged in talks with a few academic medical centres and foundations that are working on different therapeutic areas. It is also in talks with several big pharma and clinical research organisations for their product integration. The company declined to share the names of these organisations, since the discussions are still underway.

CliniOps has several product lines planned in clinical trial conduct, remote monitoring, patient engagement, and advanced analytics with real world evidence.

The health and med tech space

Touted to be growing at CAGR 17 per cent, healthcare and more specifically health tech is believed to be one of the fastest growing sectors in the country.

The Indian clinical trials market, between 2006 and 2011 saw a growth of nearly 36 per cent (RNCOS).
According to a report by IBEF, the total size of the healthcare industry is expected to touch $160 billion by 2017.

Making clinical trials more efficient and transparent is a welcome development. More such health tech innovations are needed to improve all areas of healthcare in the country.

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Bengaluru-based CapriCoast.com, an online-to-offline (O2O) marketplace for modular furnishings, has raised $3.5 million in a Series A round led by existing investors Accel Partners India and RB Investments.

CapriCoast was founded by Jawad Ayaz and consists of a team of 55 members. Almost two-thirds of the workforce consists of design consultants and techies, with marketing and other roles accounting for the remaining one-third. In April 2015, the startup had raised $1.25 million in funding led by Accel India.

Along with Vinod Chandran, Jawad had also founded Zansaar.com, an e-commerce platform for home decor products. They had raised $6 million from Accel Partners and Tiger Global back in 2012. Talking to YourStory, Jidesh Haridas, Sales and Marketing Head of CapriCoast, added that Zansaar and CapriCoast sometimes engage in cross platform marketing for mutual benefit. “There is a certain degree of synergy, as Zaansar is about home products and CapriCoast is about home solutions. Zansaar has been around for longer and is hence a more well-known brand to the general public. So we do utilise their user base as a referral source. It sometimes works the other way too.”

RB Investments is a boutique VC firm from Singapore whose portfolio exists primarily across SE Asia and India. They have earlier invested in companies like Spuul and 5aSec among others. Rajesh Bothra, MD RB Investments, said,

CapriCoast is well aligned with our investment philosophy of investing in companies who are tackling a complex, multi-faceted problem that if addressed right provides a rapidly scalable business opportunity.

Earlier this year, CapriCoast launched an online-to-offline (O2O) modular furniture marketplace by partnering with Sleek International (an Asian paints subsidiary) and Spacewood – both leading manufacturers of modular furniture in India. The startup claims this model is an industry-first. The startup aims to provide customers with the widest design options and products at the best prices in the industry, with a hassle free, transaction and fulfillment process. Jawad, CEO of CapriCoast.com, said,

Our O2O marketplace model, addresses the problems that customers face today while buying modular furnishing – obfuscated pricing, delayed delivery, limited choice, and lack of transparency. We are working on a data science led, transformative technology that is rapidly changing the way customers experience the buying modular furnishing in India.

The startup is currently working with 50 showrooms across 15 cities in India. Jidesh added that currently the top six metro cities account for a large portion of their sales, but other cities such as Coimbatore, Madurai, Mangalore, Mysore, and Ahmedabad are also doing quite well. He adds, “Since most people furnish only one to two homes in their lifetimes, our repeat rate is low, but high referral rates from old customers make up for it.”

CapriCoast also has an ‘NRI Zone’ on their platform to cater to the specific needs of NRIs who are in different time zones but are comfortable making decisions online. Jidesh said, “Currently we are seeing traction for this, with the Middle East being our biggest market. Going forward we aim to target NRIs in countries such as USA and Singapore.”

CapriCoast works with brands on a pre-agreed structure and earns a percentage of the revenue on every transaction that they have helped initiate.

Prashanth Prakash, Partner at Accel Partners India Ventures, said, “CapriCoast has done an impressive job of building it’s O2O model, and we are seeing great traction on both the consumer demand side and supply side.”

Sector overview and future plans

With purchasing power increasing and Indians investing in real estate, the home and furnishing segment is growing. This November, Rentomojo, furniture, household appliances, and bike rental platform, had raised $2 million in Pre-Series A from Accel Partners and IDG Ventures India.

In August, Livspace, an end-to-end home design and décor platform for homeowners, had raised $8 million in funding from existing investors Helion, Bessemer and Jungle Ventures. Some of the other big players in this space are HomeLane, UrbanLadder, Fabfurnish, Furlenco, Nestopia, and Pepperfry. Mumbai-based Stitchwood and Jaipur-based Wooden Street also focus on custom made furniture.

CapriCoast will use the funding round to broaden and accelerate product development and to expand its sales, marketing, and hiring efforts. It aims to be in over 200 showrooms across more than 50 cities by early 2016. They also plan to scale up their marketing efforts and focus on both online and offline (radio and hoarding) channels.

Going forward, CapriCoast aims to make their referral system more seamless through a mobile app, which is currently in beta phase. Jidesh confirmed that they will be officially launching a mobile app version of their product in the coming few months.

YourStory take

Global rating agency Fitch has estimated that the investment climate in India aided by reduction in interest rates will improve its property market by the end of March 2016. This will have a direct impact on the home and furnishing segment. Furniture alone is estimated to be a $20 billion industry. While there are a lot of players in this space, there seems to be room for multiple winners. With their focus on NRIs, an O2O model and an experienced team backed by well-known VCs, CapriCoast has a good opportunity to capture this segment.

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College is a time when one’s head is brimming with ideas, opinions, and inspiration, and there is a need to connect with like-minded people to share these thoughts. Sadly, there is also a severe lack of youth representation in traditional media, and of platforms where college students can feel a sense of community.

Delhi University (DU) alumni Tarun Bhardwaj and Sunny Talwar, who had also felt this gap as students, decided to bridge this gap and provide a dedicated platform where college students could express themselves through stories, while getting information and remaining updated on what was happening at other colleges.

In 2013, they launched Fuccha (fresher in DU lingo), a one-stop junction that aims to provide students a mouthpiece. In addition, it carries information about competitions, conferences, debates and events being held across colleges in the country. It also allows students to interact with each other and discuss career opportunities in various specialisations.

“Our first focus was to cover only Delhi University, but within a year, we got queries and requests from college students across India. Today, we have a presence in over 200 colleges and more than one lakh subscribers. Our year-on-year traffic is increasing and our monthly visits are averaging more than two lakhs with a highly engaged audience,” says Tarun, 28, Co-founder, Fuchcha.

He adds that 80 per cent of his visitors are in the age group of 15-30 years. Within two years, he claims that Fuccha has generated more than 3,000 internship applications, and over 500 writers have contributed to the platform.

Business model

With so many students visiting the site, generating business has not posed much of a challenge as corporates are more than eager to get this audience’s attention.

Fuccha offers various brands the opportunity to connect with college students and faculty across the country through online partnerships. Brands benefit because they stay connected with the youth, understand their mindset, and are able to explain the culture at their organisations leading to hiring opportunities in the future.

Fuccha is also an online media partner for college fests and has been a part of events at more than 200 institutes including IIM-Lucknow, IIM Bangalore, IIM-Trichy and BITS Pilani.

“Our main sources of revenue have been native advertisements and customised campaigns (including college and event activations). We have done 12 campaigns with brands like Durex, Viber, Study Overseas, Religare and Strepsils, to name a few,” says Tarun. He adds that he charges between Rs 5000-25, 000 for campaigns.

Challenges faced

However, Fuccha’s journey has not always been very easy.

There was an initial struggle with team building to convince people and make them believe in the idea. “No one can work with you or your startup in the long run unless they have faith in you and your idea. So, this was the biggest challenge,” says Tarun. Today, they are a six-member team.

He adds that as far as their product is concerned, many digital media companies find it challenging to get high-quality content and create loyalty and faith in the brand through the content. “We are a media platform. For us, our biggest challenge has always been to make sure our platform attracts the best-quality content and creative brains.”

Market overview

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, there are 350 million Indian Internet users; by 2017, this figure would be 500 million. Tarun says that 70 per cent of these users are between the age of 15 and 35. “They don’t want plain, generic news; they want their own platform where they can raise their voice, read stuff related to them and get information.” So, he’s trying to solve this problem. By end of 2016, he is aiming to add three million users every month.

In the past few years, many youth-centric platforms have emerged and are gradually capturing the market. Youth ki Awaaz, Scoopwhoop, and former MTV creative head Cyrus Oshidar’s 101India.com are some of the platforms generating youth-centric content.

Tarun admits the presence of many formidable players in this segment. He, however, says the target audience is different.

Roadmap

Fuccha aims to provide a microsite for every college. By 2016, it’s planning to launch a mobile app and video channel that generates its own content.

Based on a study by BI Intelligence, spending on digital ads will grow to Rs 10,220 crore and native ads will grow to $21 billion by 2018. “This growth will also open the revenue channel for us,” says Tarun.

“We have seen over 70 per cent growth in our traffic this year compared with last year. We are very certain that Fuccha will contribute well to the digital India campaign and become a youth influencer,” concludes Tarun.

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There are times when being spoilt for choice can be a problem. While you may know which restaurant to head out to, you’re still not sure what to order there. Sahil Khan, author of Pune-based food blog ‘The Tossed Salad’ and owner of egg specialty restaurant ‘The Yolkshire’ saw that a lot of his readers would regularly ask, “Where’s the best biryani in the city?” or “What do I order at this restaurant?”

He realised that even though he, and other food bloggers, had been writing about food in the city for years, and Zomato and Burrp provided peer reviews, people still seemed unsure.

Around the same time, Hrishikesh Rajpathak was working on a purchase-intent mining tool for the F&B industry via social media when he noticed the same pattern. Hrishikesh, who runs the Bay of Bengal restaurant in Pune, holds a Master of Computer Science from IIIT and has five years’ experience in data mining and machine learning at Persistent Technologies. A mutual friend suggested the two work together and introduced them to each other.

The product chain

“While the core remains the same, how we’ve approached the problem has changed over the last year or so — from a search- and list-based interface, to experimenting with a social discovery model, to the current personal concierge style of personalised recommendations,” says 27-year-old Sahil.

Quinto uses AI to build automated chat-based food and restaurant recommendations. They consider it ‘Siri’ for food. They’re currently present in Pune and Mumbai, and the app is available on iOS and Android devices.

While the team launched the product in August last year, they were forced to return to the drawing board in February this year, after taking in market feedback. On November 16, they launched the second version of the product after spending time building their natural language programming (NLP) and recommendation engines from scratch.

When they initially launched as a search and discovery platform, they got feedback from consumers asking for more filters and detailed descriptions. Sahil says that while users had identified the problem, they were unable to solve the problem until they had finalised multiple versions of the app.

The duo decided against adding filters and other descriptors as this would make it a ‘me-too’ restaurant search service. “We wanted to keep the mobile app based model; it’s then we realised that a chat based model would work well,” says Sahil.

This is when they came up with the idea of Quinto. Sahil says it’s like your best friend, who knows everything about what you like to eat and drink.

The workings

Quinto uses NLP to understand what the user is looking for, and, over time, uses machine learning to personalise recommendations.

“Our iOS and Android apps are built natively. People are already talking about the food they’re eating, where they ate it, and their thoughts about it. We collect all that information by using a combination of data mining and editorial curation to build our database of recommendations,” adds Sahil.

Users can simply chat with Quinto to get food and restaurant recommendations. Here’s what some of them are asking:

1. Where’s the best masala omelette around Deccan?
2. What’s good at Le Plaisir?
3. Suggest some awesome Chinese.
4. Options for a bar around Koregaon Park?

Rather than changing the user’s behaviour and setting a fixed structure to how they should discover food and restaurants, the team claims to have moulded their product to fit the natural way people talk. Sahil says they’re adding a massive database behind that, layered with editorial curation and personalisation.

Model and growth

The team is looking at the aggregator model for monetisation, basis a commission model. Essentially, all the delivery apps, food outlets, and restaurants will be a part of the Quinto platform. Once an individual asks about any food or restaurant, they are given recommendations.

However, the percentage of commission and selections of the same are yet to be ironed out. The team says they would like to focus on getting the recommendations right and helping people make the right decisions before on boarding the service providers. After this users could then simply place an order or book a table through their preferred service provider – all within Quinto.

This July, Jaydeep Barman, Founder and CEO of Faasos invested an undisclosed amount in Quinto. The team is yet to make revenues from the product. Quinto has a rating of 3.9-4 on the Android Playstore and Apple App Store. Close to 5,000 downloads of the app have been made in Playstore so far. Currently, they claim to be getting close to 100-120 queries a day.

The team is currently focusing on Pune and Mumbai, and working on getting the recommendations right for each user. Their initial focus is on getting the platform traction right before integrating with other existing services to close the loop with the user after giving them a recommendation.

YourStory take

With the increasing number of players in the foodtech space, there has been a buzz about funds drying up and a need to focus more on business, revenue models, and sustainability.

Many believe that food brings that initial traction quickly; the first 300 orders a day are easy to get. The trouble begins when the numbers go beyond this. Also, customer acquisition is an expensive affair in the food tech space. Sources claim that prominent food ordering platforms like Foodpanda spend anywhere between Rs 400 and Rs 500 on acquiring each customer.

The amount of funding pumped into the foodtech space in April alone was a whopping $74 million on a total of seven deals. In August, this dipped to $19 million on five deals. In September, this number further dropped to two deals.

While there seems to be a slow push and visibility towards using AI- and chat-based interfaces, their model and growth is yet to be proven in the market.

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