We live in a time when a new startup pops up every day, giving rise to a growing need for technical talent. While there are several online portals and recruitment services that help scout and find the necessary talent, they aren’t effective when it comes to pure tech teams and developers. Being resume-based, these services aren’t exactly effective to get an understanding of whether a candidate is suitable or not.

Naren Krishna, Hari Krishna and Ashish Kumar Sahoo had seen most startups face this issue. “There were people from different startups who would tell us how difficult it was to find a legitimate techie,” says 22-year-old Naren. This prodded the duo to set up Stockroom.

Finding the right hacks

The duo have been friends for years now. Naren is a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a Kairos Fellow. Ashish, the CTO, was a full-stack developer and is an IIIT-Bhubneshwar alumnus. Hari Krishna has experience as the recruitment manager at Amazon. After several discussions and queries the duo found that resumes weren’t solving the purpose. They realised that the only details that a resume gives the employer are education and work experience, but the skill sets aren’t measured.

It was then that they realised that it would be a good idea to create a portfolio creation tool for developers. “We decided to do a non-stop 48-hour hackathon and build a prototype and launch it. We have launched the product four months ago on product hunt and emerged as one of the top-most voted product,” adds Naren.

Hiring is not the same for every company, as each one has different priorities and requirements. Naren adds that the team deals with companies more on a personal level by sitting with their technical team to get a better idea of their requirements.

Cutting down the process

Currently, the major problem companies face is that they get a lot of junk and irrelevant applications. Companies also spend a lot of time in the overall hiring process. Stockroom.io believes that hackathons are a quick and efficient way to find and hire developers quickly.

Once the team gets a hang of their client’s requirements, they create different problem statements or challenges for different participants, who in turn register for a challenge online.  The selected candidates are then invited to participate in the hackathon challenge, and the top performers are hired by the sponsoring companies or the clients.

What do the companies get?

The clients get to remotely evaluate the candidate’s skills and compare the same with the other developers and then make the right decision. “We curate the candidates at all hackathons to ensure quality. Our company dashboard provides the companies with various metrics, making it easier for companies to get a better idea of the candidate and make the right decision,” adds Naren.

Once the candidates win the hackaton, and the companies decide on the candidates they pick, they can choose to invite the best developers to their office to discuss the different problems they are solving. Naren adds that this helps reduce companies’ hiring time.

While the portfolio creation tool is free for the users and candidates, the team charges an operation fee and commission fee from companies for every hackathon. The team recently launched Stockroom Prime, which follows a similar model, but with a slight change.

Instead of the companies choosing from the different candidates who hack, only those who are successfully complete a particular challenge set by a particular company are allowed to apply for the job. Also the Stockroom Prime is restricted to certain jobs and skillsets that are marked as premium by the company.

“So far we have more than 10,000 developers registered on our platform and 10 paying clients like Mysmartprice, Sourceeasy and Thoughtworks,” adds Naren. Stockroom is a team of six full-time employees. The team recently raised a funding of $70,000 from an undisclosed investor.  The funds are used towards further development of technology and product base. The team has over 16 clients, some of who are UrbanClap and Travel Triangle.

Hiring hacks

According to a recently published report by ManPowerGroup, 58 percent of Indian employers find it difficult to get the right kind of technical talent. According to reports by the Wall Street Journal published last year, the cost of hires is increasing drastically in India. Apart from that there also is a demand-and-supply gap.

While there are traditional online job portals like Hiree, and consultancy firms, many believe that hiring technical talent is very challenging. Another startup that uses a similar model to help companies find technical talent is Hackerearth.

Apart from this, there are several other online portfolio creation websites. While not exactly in the hacking domain, these platforms help showcase the different work done by each individual in different unique ways.

Website

Urdu is an 800-year-old language, with a tahzeeb that is rich in eloquence and emotional depth. Due to the patronage it enjoyed among art lovers, Urdu has evolved with a unique ability to convey complex emotions and experiences in small and finely crafted couplets. We, the lovers of the language, do take great pride in this. However, over the past few decades, Urdu, like every other Indian language, has faced the challenges of a globalised world, where English has become the ubiquitous language of trade, science, entertainment, and technology. With little digital presence, vernacular languages are shrinking fast, and dangerously.

Urdu, however, is currently undergoing a unique resurgence in India. And the readers and lovers of the language will probably agree. Thanks to the long lost art of storytelling that the Dastangos are currently reviving, or role played by Rekhta, a unique and interactive platform for Urdu Poetry run by the Rekhta Foundation. These initiatives are welcome, although the work at hand is far from done.

Rekhta is unique in many ways. With over 1,700 poets, and 35,000 ghazals, nazms, and shers interactively available in Roman, Devanagari, and Urdu scripts, Rekhta has over the past three years emerged the largest online repository of Urdu Poetry. Factor in the 4,300 audio poems, 4,100 videos, 17,000 e-books, and massive language festivals; and it’s a literary kranti in the making.

Rekhta finds an audience among all age groups. The website is particularly popular among school and college goers, who belong to an age we can all remember, when we couldn’t help but fall in love. And couplets like these help our dreams and fantasies take flight –

ishq ne Ghalib nikamma kar diya
warna hum bhi aadmi the kaam ke

(Ghalib, a worthless person, this love has made of me
Otherwise a man of substance I once used to be)

There is also a strong reader base among the older audience, who have witnessed the decline and neglect of Urdu in their lifetime. Rekhta gives them a sense of pride and nostalgia as Urdu’s charming cadence and lyricism carries them gently into a world that exists only in the abstract dimensions of poetry, aesthetics, and tradition. Life finds new meaning when they muse over couplets like –

hazaron khwahishen aisi ki har khwahish pe dam nikle
bahut nikle mere arman lekin phir bhi kam nikle

(Thousands of desires, each worth dying for
Many I have realized, yet I yearn for more)

And then, there is everyone in between – working professionals seeking respite from their hectic day; teachers, academicians, scholars, idealists, and writers who can’t help but flock to poetry whenever they seek the emotional depth and passion only such verse can deliver; and men and women from all walks of life who indulge in Rekhta’s vast repository of poetry.

The one man behind this massive resurgence is Sanjiv Saraf, whose own story is nothing short of poetic. An IIT-Kharagpur alumnus, Sanjiv started up back in the 80s and built Polyplex, a global business venture from scratch. Today, Polyplex Corporation is the world’s fourth-largest producer of thin polyester film, and has manufacturing facilities in India, Thailand, and Turkey.

Sanjeev, however, was never a typical businessman. Growth and valuation were not his only concerns. Having successfully built a name and brand, he slowly started engaging with Urdu poetry, where every day was a new learning experience. He realised that although we do use Urdu words in our day-to-day conversations, the language as a whole is steadily on the decline. Lack of fundamental knowledge and reading materials were furthering this decline.

“Once I had established Polyplex, I had the time and desire to start up all over again and build something unique and meaningful. Right from my childhood, I used to be in awe of the Urdu language, primarily due to its unmatched expressiveness and diction. I learnt Urdu and wanted to make the language accessible to more people in my country. This is when I decided to start Rekhta.”

The name Rekhta is derived from the language that existed during the 17^th and 18^th century, which finds its roots in Khadi Boli. Rekhta means ‘mixed’ implying that it contained both Persian and Hindi. Over the past three years, Sanjiv and his team have been able to preserve Urdu text and literature, and make them publicly available for free. With support from scholars, academicians, and writers, Rekhta has been able to prepare interactive study materials for those willing to learn Urdu.

Rekhta is today a massive and constantly growing archive of Urdu Literature. A quick click on each word reveals its meaning, making the experience more responsive and interactive. With audio and videos of these poems recorded by professional RJs, actors, and often the poets themselves, Rekhta adds an air of authenticity to the whole experience. What’s more, the website even has sections on easy poetry and popular ghazals and nazms to engage newcomers. It doesn’t come as a surprise therefore that Rekhta today engages readers from over 160 countries.

Having completed the digitisation of the complete works of two great Urdu poets – Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib – and the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Rekhta has also introduced Rekhti, a unique genre of Urdu poetry adopted by male poets, which employs women’s special idioms, mannerisms and accents to describe the affairs of a woman with a woman, a woman with a man, detailing their sensual desires and sexual urges. Rekhti is generally written in ghazal form, and was a product of the socio-cultural and literary ambience in 19^th century Lucknow. Rekhta has also started a programme to provide young and upcoming poets a platform to showcase their compositions.

Sanjiv and his team have also been organising Jashn-e-Rekhta, a unique festival celebrating the Urdu language, where performances, panel discussions, and interactive sessions are all brought under one roof. Jashn-e-Rekhta made its debut in 2015 and attracted over 15,000 Urdu lovers from across the sub-continent. Over 60 poets, artists, novelists, litterateurs, journalists, and lyricists from India and Pakistan participated in the festival to take the audience on a journey of exploration of Urdu and its many-splendored facets. With 75 celebrities from across the world and thousands of participants, this year’s festival, which was conducted recently, has only furthered the horizons of the ambitious initiative.

The journey of Rekhta is far from over. Rekhta Foundation is currently working on multiple projects which are aimed at different age and demographic groups with the objective of making Urdu an accessible language. Sanjiv wants Rekhta as a resource to continue growing. He plans to involve scholars, students, and other lovers of the language and build an ecosystem where users from all spheres of life visit Rekhta, and fall in love with the lyrical beauty and eloquence of Urdu. Sanjiv signs off, saying –

“I don’t know where we will go from here. I am glad we have come this far. We just want to keep working with Urdu and enjoy what we do. We want to keep building our platform, and celebrate the language and it’s culture. There are many projects in our pipeline. We have larger dreams, but even a lifetime is not enough for that.”

It has been a long day at work and with hunger pangs taking over you have the energy to neither cook nor eat fastfood. It is to bring the convenience of quick service restaurant (QSR) to Indian cuisine that Rakesh Rajendran, who has several years of experience in the manufacturing sector, decided to start DUM AA DUM Indian Kitchen and Grill in Pune.

The idea is to deliver freshly-cooked food using traditional recipes. Rakesh says the team closely studies the science involved in cooking these foods and breaks it down into simpler steps, which can be replicated using a combination for technology and processes.

“This approach has helped us to cracking the holy grail of how to make an Indian-food QSR scale up and deliver consistent quality food without having to resort to the typical cook and freeze food centrally, then thaw, re-heat and serve methodology,” adds Rakesh.

Great restaurant food but what about delivery

The idea of starting a QSR food-delivery startup came to Rakesh after facing a similar problem multiple times. He would find that whenever he wanted Indian food home-delivered from his favourite restaurants, he would find the quality  varying significantly on each occasion along with the service times.

It occurred to him that unlike a Domino’s or a Subway or even a Mc Donald’s,  where the quality of food and service was consistent, Indian food restaurants struggled with serving similar great quality food consistently due to their dependence on the expertise level of the chefs on hand. “I realised that if we were able crack the consistency and scalability challenges, then there was a really big opportunity for establishing a global Indian QSR brand,” adds Rakesh.

Onboarding the team

Rakesh was able to convince ex-colleagues working in the US and Japan about the potential of establishing a global Indian QSR brand. They all pitched in as angel investors and he was able to convince ex-colleague Tushar Bhole to quit his job at Capgemini and come on board as a co-founder.

With one central commissary, DUM AA DUM has 13 live kitchens across Pune. The team claims they serve close to 90 percent of the neighbourhood. Rakesh adds that close to 88 percent of their sales comes from repeat customers. “All our internal accruals based on a 60-percent gross margin go towards developing our capabilities to create a scalable model,” adds Rakesh.

To ensure that they have a strong base, the team leans heavily towards recruiting staff from under-privileged backgrounds. Rakesh adds that they have working partnership with NGOs like PRATHAM, Pace and Don Bosco where they help tailor curriculum for vocational courses.

The American dream

The team currently is in the process of creating a customer-facing outlet format and menu design that is targeted towards creating an Indian food QSR brand for the North American market. “We intend to create a palate-friendly Indian food option besides the hugely successful specialty QSR chains like Taco Bell, Chipotle, Panda Express and Benihana. We plan to launch our North-American operations in 2016,” adds Rakesh.

The team currently working with FDA-approved food ingredient exporters to develop the base marinades, sauces and other ingredients. All back-office activities will be managed out of the India office, whereas front-end operations will be driven by the US division.

Sekhar Seshan, one of the core investors at DUM AA DUM, says he invested in the idea and the team because of the kind of use-cases the team was building. While there are several players in a similar space, he adds that the founding team was doing their research and working on the right path towards developing a strong Indian food-based QSR brand.

The curious case of QSR

It is interesting that several startups are looking at building a QSR-based setups for Indian foods. One of the other players is Mumbai-based Charcoal Biryani, which too raised a seed funding round. Most of these startups were established with the idea of bringing in a similar ‘Domino’s’ or ‘Subway’ model to Indian cuisine.

Apart from this Faasos too had begun with a similar model but it soon pivoted.

Seedfund Venture Partner and accomplished investor/mentor Sanjay Anandaram says that most of the technology-enabled food businesses are operations-intensive. “Most of these app-based food businesses gain the initial traction in certain pockets of a city, but the same cannot be expected from all parts of the country,” he adds.

Anand Lunia, Founder, India Quotient, says that food as such is a very operationally-heavy business and it needs to be self-sustainable for at least a decade before it can truly penetrate the market.

For a food technology-enabled business, as we know it, the operations and backend process need to be tightly managed and governed.

Consistency is another key in the business; one needs to ensure the food is consistently of good quality, and it needs to be served at the right temperature, at the right time. And this isn’t an easy task. According to Anand, in an operations-heavy business, only those who are truly passionate about food can work along the different challenges that come with scale.

However, the space nevertheless has more players coming in, so the question that arises is if there is a genuine problem that needs to be solved and startups are looking to crack that in the market, or if it is just another easy-to-build technology.

While hiring is a big problem for startups and corporates, securing potential opportunity in desired ventures is not an easy task for job seekers. Traditional recruiting platforms like Naukri and Shine reduce the problem to some extent, but filtering noise and cut through it is a herculean task. To make hiring process easy, Lalit and Kashish Bhagia stared MyRefers, a referral recruitment platform, in July 2014.

MyRefers has now pivoted from peer-to-peer referral platform to one-stop referral network for individuals, consultants, and freelancers. Lalit (38) says:

While individual based external referrals was the initial focus , we realised a lot of consultants and freelancers were registering as referrers and using the platform. We decided to enable them, rather than keeping them out of the process.

Moving to marketplace fabric also makes sense for MyRefers as excluding consultants (brokers) is not feasible in Indian market. Horizontal classifieds like Quikr and OLX also failed to flush them out and are eventually moving towards verticalisation. Currently, the recruitment space is valued at $1 billion opportunity. However, the market cap of Naukri, Shine, and others constitute barely $100–$120 million.

Currently,over 85 per cent of market is being catered by consultants and freelancers. Lalit adds,

On an average, a consultant sits over 1,00,000 CVs; however, they don’t have the technology and required skills to use it. We simply want to marry this database with our tech capability.

Besides consultants, MyRefers focuses on freelancers and individuals. Freelancers usually deal with over 50,000 CVs,whereas individuals have about 30,000 connections (email, social and jobs board). “Over the past six months, we’ve been developing algorithms to filter these data across different buckets and make it usable for hirer,” says Lalit.

MyRefers analyses data from one’s email and mine data and look for affinities. Lalit explains,

Our algorithms rank every profile on three key parameters, skills (coming from CTQs), culture (where we match the attributes of the current employees Vs. the applicant using social data) and trust (basis the relationship skills and past referring history of the referrer and the candidate)- to arrive at the most relevant hire for a particular position.

Hiring mandate lies with mandate of picking employees but actual hire is being driven by HR executive. He observes that JDs prepared by HR are unnecessary as it hardly explores affinity for define openings. This mis-match often inflict losses of money and time, high attrition and low performance.

Recommended read: A slew of tech savvy startups are redefining the online hiring industry in India

The marketplace approach has enabled MyRefers to target bigger slice of the overall recruitment space. “We are gunning for only 10 per cent of $1 billion recruitment space to become bigger than Naukri,” says Lalit. The platform drives recruitment through 60 per cent consultant, 30 per cent individuals, and remaining from direct application.

While individual external referrals was the focus initially but MyRefers has now expanded to include consultants and freelancers. The company is building AI and cognitive technology based algorithms, bucketing data capability across various classes/points. Myrefers analyse data from ones’ email and mine data and look for affinities.

MyRefers claims to maintain steady growth of 15–20 per cent every quarter. “We are close to breakeven. At present, we make little over Rs two million on a monthly basis,” says Lalit.

MyRefers, a Delhi-based startup, secured an undisclosed amount of pre-Series A funding from VC firm Bedrock Ventures during October 2014 and now plans to secure Series A funding. “We’re in talks and confident to close Series A by May this year,” concludes Lalit. It also plans to roll out its mobile app.

Future prospects

About 12 million people are entering the job market every year in India and thus offering immense potential for new-age recruitment platforms. A recent report indicates that there is 90 per cent increase in the number of users who use mobiles to look for job opportunities and 75 per cent increase in the users who apply for jobs through this medium.

Instead of creating a new platform in crowded market, MyRefers focuses on making existing data usable. Weeding out consultants and brokers appear to be very challenging tasks across various verticals like real estate, jobs, automobile classified, etc. MyRefers decision to see consultant as major enabler in entire process looks interesting.

P.S. We have updated the post with a few changes

Website

India has now crossed a billion mobile phone users, of which more than 200 million are smartphone users. According to a TechSci report, the mobile wallet market in India is projected to reach $ 6.6 billion by 2020. The growing user base, increasing number of mobile Internet users and favorable government policies are incentives to startup in a sector that is currently ruled by the giants like Paytm, Freecharge, and Mobikwik. India’s app store rankings are ruled by the usual suspects – shopping apps and convenience apps for ordering food/ making restaurant reservations or booking a cab. But to see a Korean from Gangnam, who has been a serial mobile entrepreneur, create an app that the uniquely varied Indian consumer base has adopted so widely, is a rare thing. YourStory caught up with 45-year-old Cheolwon (Charlie) Lee, who has made Gurgaon his home for nearly a decade now. Excerpts from the interview below:

How did your tryst with India begin?

The first time I came to India was in 2002, when working with Real Networks, operating under the brand WiderThan (Real Networks is a pioneer in audio streaming with its Real Player software). I was a partner for HelloTunes VAS for the telecom service providers in my role as Head of Real in India. Interestingly, Mohit Bhatnagar (currently MD at Sequoia Capital) used to be a SVP at Airtel when this HelloTunes collaboration started off. We even worked with BSNL and Idea. Back then, HelloTunes was one of the successful initiatives for telecom service providers to increase their revenue per user and Real was able to take this concept to other countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and The Philippines.

How did you come around to starting True Balance after your stint at Real?

In 2006, I quit Real Networks and started Access Mobile, a business built on my experience in creating successful Mobile VAS offerings. Some of my colleagues from WiderThan joined the firm with me. Access Mobile, headquartered in Seoul, has been providing apps – Magic SMS, Picture SMS, SMARTEXT and other VAS offerings to telecom players in India (Idea, Tata, Aircel, and Vodafone), Philippines and Indonesia. We have our own offices in five countries, including China, and we operate with local partners in Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Middle-East.

While it was a successful business and is in existence even now, the formal rise of smartphones started in 2008-09, and the mobile ecosystem changed completely. We tried out many new ideas and experimented with them within Access Mobile, but in 2014, we decided to launch a very different product called True Balance under a brand new legal entity called Balance Hero. I am still a shareholder in Access Mobile, but am running Balance Hero as full-time CEO.

What is True Balance app’s functionality?

True Balance focusses very specifically on making the balance check and recharge process quick and intuitive. This focus has made us understand our customer mindset very well, which is reflected in our metrics. The one-touch recharge and balance earning features are partially implemented as of now. We are also building a more detailed analytics module for users to know their usage, along with relevant alerts to keep them informed.

What is the app’s traction till date?

The app has seen more than two million downloads till date, with many of our prepaid customers opening it more than twice or thrice a day. We were ranked 13 in the Lifestyle category and 334 overall for India in January 2016. We have launched in specific Indian cities only, starting from NCR, and we have already seen this kind of traction. The plan is to go global after completing the rollout across India in a few months.

What is the monetisation strategy going forward?

One obvious model is the kind companies like Clean Master have perfected. That is, to focus on getting such a huge number of Daily Active Users (DAUs) that advertising becomes a viable option. It could also be where other apps might pay a fee for every download that is initiated from the app. Given that we have a lot of intelligence on the apps used, usage patterns, data pack and spend patterns, we will be able to provide more targeted and personalised recommendations thus increasing conversion rates.

Secondly, we want to explore the P2P recharge model in the medium term. Plain recharges are a commoditised business with very thin margins (~0.1 per cent). We have noticed that in emerging countries, there are many use cases where a person recharges for someone else – a kirana store owner recharging for a student, friends recharging for each other, parents recharging for their kids, etc. It is almost like a microfinance model where the recharges can happen and then payment can be done after that with a small commission tacked on.

How do you find India as a place to do business in?

I have been visiting or spending a significant amount of time every year in India since 2002. Frankly speaking, India is an open market when compared with a lot of other Asian countries. Even when I was selling Mobile VAS offerings, the Telecom Service Providers were very professional in their dealings. One problem I faced was that given the size of the country, and with each telco operating almost independently within each circle, it took a lot of time to coordinate with every circle, making payment collections and so on. It is almost like working completely different companies even though they are just different circles within the same company.

I am in touch with Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, since we are in the same industry. He is someone I admire for the work done.

What are the plans for the future?

Our focus is going to be on True Balance full-time, with no other products in the pipeline for the next few years. We want to expand to become an end-to-end balance-related service provider within one app.

We are also exploring the idea of a closed wallet, for which there is no need for a license. This too is something for the medium term.

Which are your favorite utility apps? Tell us in the comments below!

How many of you have been refused a loan, despite your finances being in order and submitting all the documents?

Abhishek Garg found himself in a similar situation in 2014. Having applied for a home loan, to his shock he realised that he wasn’t eligible for the loan and it was rejected. “The credit worthiness of an individual is determined by a CIBIL score. Although this is great way to reduce defaults, it doesn’t make it easy for people who have never taken a loan to get a good score or ranking,” says 27-year old Abhishek, Founder of Finomena.

Bringing in big data

A fintech platform, Finomena, brings in the unique combination of big data and finance to determine the credit worthiness of an individual. The platform works as an intuitive model to ensure that the disbursement of loans happen in a viable and efficient manner.

Rajat Agarwal, Matrix Partners, Investor in Finomena, says that usually entrepreneurs who startup on the basis of a deep personal experience and pain-point they tend to build sustainable businesses.

It takes less than three minutes to fill an online loan application and only 24 hours for the applicant to know the status of their loan. Applicants also have an option to choose the repayment period and the amount of monthly installments that meets their monthly budget.

The team has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Matrix Partners, Kaushal Aggarwal, MD of Avendus Capital, and Harsh Chamria, AVP of Magma Fincorp, along with other angels.

From coffee to credit

Unlike founders and people who have known each other for a long time, Riddhi Mittal and Abhishek decided to join hands and start Finomena over a coffee table discussion. Introduced through mutual friends, the duo have diverse yet complementary backgrounds.

Riddhi completed her graduation at Stanford and worked with the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. She also worked on artificial intelligence and computer science projects. Abhishek, on the other hand, completed his graduation at IIT Delhi and worked for the likes of Boston Consulting Group and Bain Capital.

“When I came to India, there was an infectious energy, and I knew that I could be a part of something much larger here. One day Abhishek was explaining the gap in the finance market to a friend. As luck could have it, I was around and ended up explaining most bits and feeling a sync with what Abhishek was talking. So we hit it off and decided to startup together,” adds 25-year-old Riddhi.

Financing the unlikely bunch

Initially, when the duo did their research, they found that most NBFC’s and banks did not provide loans to a massive chunk of college students and young working professionals, freelancers, or self-employed individuals. They found that this segment was largely untouched by most banks and NBFC’s. The traditional modes of data collection and KYC doesn’t make this category credit worthy.

They don’t have a traditional source and mode of income, thus they lack the appropriate credit history. Citing an example, Abhishek adds that if a student goes to a bank or NBFC for a loan for a laptop, he or she wouldn’t get it and the parents would have to take loan on their behalf.

With more than 50 per cent of the country’s population being below the age of 25, the duo realised that this was a problem that needed to be addressed. Riddhi adds that most of these traditional modes of assessment don’t make sense in today’s world. “India is a mobile-first world. The amount of digital footprint and data every individual has created is simply phenomenal,” she says.

Bringing a different score

Taking advantage of the digital footprint and data that is already available in the space, the algorithms of Finomena assess the credit worthiness of the borrower. The credit worthiness here is determined by looking across a gamut of digital data and footprint the borrower has created. Basis this, the individual is assigned a particular score.

It is on the basis of this score that the borrower’s application is sent across to a selected set of NBFC’s, who are most likely to approve the loan disbursement. The duo say that they see themselves as a customer experience-driven fintech company, helping improve the lending experience end-to-end.

They source applications, risk assess them, and send it to NBFC partners for loan disbursals. The backbone of the business is risk assessment and aim to spend majority of the resources on bolstering their credit risk models and building a strong tech backend in the next three to six months.

Rajat adds that apart from the infectious enthusiasm and passion of the founding team, they also saw that the product the team were building was different and brought in a sense of semblance to an otherwise boring and confusing segment.

Abhishek says, “We source applications via online/offline platforms, like website, Android app and offline stores, where people apply on a tablet kept in the electronics store. We risk assess these applications for more than 20,000 data points using our complex machine learning algorithms and send our assessment report to backend NBFCs. We charge a fee to NBFC for our services and they take the final decision on disbursal of loan to the consumer.”

The team began with a soft launch and one hour of credit literacy talks early this month and launched their app last week. They aim to cover the top cities and colleges in those cities by the end of next month. They also plan to run employee special programmes and schemes in collaboration with companies to offer their employees phones/laptops on easy monthly installments.

Riddhi adds that the Aadhar card and the unique identification number is possibly one of the most powerful ways of transforming the data and footprint of the nation. She adds that there is no other nation in the world that brings such a powerful means of access and identification, which covers such a massive scale and cross section of individuals.

Where is fintech headed?

While the Government of India is trying to solve the problem of financial exclusion with schemes like Jan DhanYojana, Aadhar enrolment, and payment bank licenses, fintech startups across the nation are expanding financial inclusion by leveraging technology.

According to a TechSci report, the mobile wallet market in India will touch $6.6 billion by 2020, backed by crucial factors like the increasing usage of smartphones, a rapidly expanding mobile Internet user base, government focus, and favourable demographics –50 per cent of Indian smartphone users are aged between 18 and 30 years.

According to Sharad Sharma, the next Uber will come from the financial sector in India. Fintech startups have the potential to enable service delivery to 942 million people in the country who have Aadhar numbers.

The concept of legacy or inheritance has always been a part of our culture. Darshan Rawal’s story is the epitome of how such a legacy has been preserved after his great-grandfather built their hospitality business in the 1923.

Built on the cornerstones of value-for-money service, their first establishment was the Gujarat Lodge in Pune. Four decades later, his grandfather took the baton and inaugurated their second property in Pune in 1975. However, no one in the family had ever thought of converting the family business into a company till Darshan took charge.

On his frequent visits to Thailand, Darshan observed how the wellness industry was flourishing. He thought of replicating this business in India and the idea clicked. In 2011, he founded Zazen Spa.

“Our aim is to create a more affordable and accessible spa chain that helps overcome the prohibitive processes of the star hotels. We also want to bring affordability factor in this segment, ” says Darshan, 40, CEO and Founder Zazen Spa. Darshan took over this business after obtaining his degree in hotel management from IHM Mumbai, where he was a gold medalist throughout.

Inception and initial struggle  

Starting out the business with Rs 50 lakh, which was spent in infrastructure and marketing, Darshan faced challenges from all quarters.

“We observed that rentals were the biggest cost after salary. Besides, there were apprehensions about the image of the industry. We tried to address both. We worked on the rentals by planning better space and exploring smaller format spas. With this, we ensured lower operational cost and lower staff cost per spa. We trained freshers, instead of taking experienced therapists and brought down salary cost,” says Darshan.

He adds that a huge pool of money was invested in infrastructure and marketing.

Growth course

Today, Zazen Spa has a chain of 17 spas across Mumbai, Pune, Matheran, Mahabaleshwar, Silvassa and Lonavala. Zazen Spa’s annual turnover is Rs 6 crore.

After founding Zazen Spa, in 2015, Darshan expanded the hospitality arm and founded Zazen Wellness and Hospitality Corporation as a separate company. It focusses on operating and managing hotels and making them profitable (not an aggregator but an operator). It has also launched a concept hotel for women and by women — La Femme Boutique Residences for Her in Pune. Frangipani Farm Stay, Oui Hotels and Hotel Sapna are some of the other properties it manages and operates.

“The initial funding was taken from banks for the spa business. Besides, we partner with builders or property owners to run their property. We have a revenue-sharing model with the partners. If not revenue sharing, then we also look at operations and management fees in some cases,” says Darshan.

Market and competition

According to the KPMG wellness report, the beauty and wellness market in India in 2012-13 was estimated at around Rs 41, 224 crores, and is expected to touch Rs 80, 370 crores in 2017-18.

O2, Sohum and Nomadic Spalon are some of the other names from this segment. O2 spa is a known name which offers its services in 15 cities in the country. Nomadic Spalon offers its services in Delhi-NCR.

Also read: HiJinny endeavours to turn your home into into a state-of-the-art spa

“Today, people are becoming more health conscious and this trend is only going to grow in time,” says Darshan. On competition, he says that he has spent a fair number of years in the industry and has a much larger reach than anyone else.

From spa growth point of view, it is focusing on franchising model, specific to Gujarat, Mumbai and Pune. “Our company has also ventured into hospitality last year. The concept of this business is to takeover sick units/ small/budget/medium size hotels with a cap of 50 rooms by managing and operating them successfully and making them profitable ventures,” says Darshan.

In the past few years, spa and salon industry has changed exceptionally. Spa and salons have come up with their solution-based products which are doing well in the market. In this segment, brands have introduced product lines, which are targeted towards a niche age group, concern or lifestyle. Experts believe that commercially Ayurvedic and natural products will do extremely well in coming days.

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River streams have their way. And just like they choose their own paths to flow, these three women carved their own destiny, not complacent with staying in the shadows of men who scripted greater success and fame.

Latha Rajan told her husband, K. Pandia Rajan, as they co-founded staffing solutions company Ma Foi in 1992, “If people in the office call me the MD’s wife one year down the line, I will quit.” She was a qualified chartered accountant and had established an independent practice. As Ma Foi rapidly took off by 1994, she took a more active role in the its growth, taking up added responsibilities. She feels people are her strong forte. “Managing HR in a HR company is not easy,” she laughs. She then went on to play a definitive role in social outreach programmes, some of which have grown to benefit a large section of the society.

V.P. Rajni Reddy dreamt of being an architect. She chose to study civil engineering, an unconventional choice of engineering stream for girls, inspired by her uncle who was running a real estate business employing architects. She joined her uncle’s business just after finishing college. Before she could dip her feet, she got married to merchant banker G.R.K. Reddy. And it was after a short time in Delhi that Reddy wanted to shift to Madras to set up his own venture in merchant banking. Reddy then forayed into real estate, establishing MARG as a visionary brand standing out for mega projects. Rajni Reddy didn’t follow her husband into the business. Instead she founded a software training company, along with partners to start with, and then moved into the outsourcing business on her own. She now takes care of all the educational ventures of the group apart from running the outsourcing business.

Amudha, the eldest daughter of C.K. Ranganathan, whose CavinKare group is behind several retail brands that are household names today, studied visual communications, inspired by her cousin. She knew that she would end up in business and so she took to several projects and trained herself in retail sales, restaurant management, personal grooming and interior design, all within CavinKare group businesses. But she soon realised that she was not going to find her grounding in any of these businesses. Encouraged by her father at every stage of her experimentation, she finally decided that she would run a school for kids. The inspiration came to her from a school called Alphabet that she would longingly look at, on her way to college every day. Once she found her calling, she followed it without a second thought.

Shaping up

The trajectory these women have followed were shaped by circumstance and a desire to stand out. Rajni Reddy’s resolve was strengthened by a near-traumatic experience of G.R.K. Reddy getting kidnapped by a village mafia. Out of the blue, she received a phone call demanding a ransom for her husband’s release. While her husband returned safely after a five-day ordeal, Rajni decided to take more interest in the operations of MARG, in which she was a promoter-director.

Latha simply went through the grind of establishing Ma Foi. She was entrusted with the responsibility of internal operations of the company, while Pandiarajan took care of business development and customer acquisition. Ma Foi Foundation, the social responsibility arm of Ma Foi, engaged itself in several welfare projects, spearheaded by Latha. The underprivileged sections, especially in north Chennai, were the group’s primary focus. Empowering women was what Latha focussed upon keenly. That also propelled her to establish a micro-finance unit.

Amudha was advised by her father to train herself in different areas. She recalls, “When a new soft drink was launched by CavinKare, I was involved in the field sales.” She joined other selling agents of the company at 4 a.m. for a briefing and was set targets. When she was learning operations in the group’s restaurant Veg Nation (which has since been wound up), there was a flash strike by the kitchen staff at around 11 a.m. Guests were expected at 12 noon. Unexpected situations mean unconventional responses as well. Along with the restaurant manager, and a few helpful staff, she wore the apron and cooked a few dishes, having seen it prepared by cooks. “I learnt how to respond to unforeseen situations,” she says.

Into their own calling

The sailing was not smooth for these women. It was grit and resolve that took Rajni to overcome adversity and emerge successful. Her first venture, Atlanta Software, failed, not because of the market but when the two co-founders decided to drop it to pursue something else. She took the burden of converting that company into an outsourcing business. RR Infotech was born in 1999 (later renamed Exemplarr in 2008) and was primarily engaged in medical billing and medical transcription services for US clients. Investment was significant, as were the operational expenditure, as it necessitated setting up a US office. She says, “It was a seasonal business and when there was work, it will pour.” Dry days were hard, as whatever was gained evened out during the low period. Though fortunes fluctuated, she stayed put. She expanded first into data entry and then into publishing outsourcing. This was also a seasonal business, but the going was better.

More importantly, bettering herself was Rajni’s priority. People at home always considered her businesses a hobby and thought she could shut it down when her demands increased in the family. She didn’t view life and her business as a hobby but as a path to writing her own story. She got enrolled in the Harvard Business School’s 10-week programme for business owners. Not content with the exposure, she also completed an executive MBA from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. “People started taking notice of me and my stock went up in the family,” she says. To equip herself in handling finance, she took the ISB course for executives, a grind for 18 months, in which she visited business schools in the United States and Brazil. The exposure not only increased her confidence but also gave her a peer network through which she learnt greatly, especially how to manage finances.

Latha’s Ma Foi success took unexpected turns. Venture capitalists came in a bit later than the initial 273 investors. “My friends and Pandiarajan’s friends helped us with funds at the beginning,” Latha recalls. “People talk of crowd funding. We started our company through that,” she adds. Investment as low as Rs 5000 was taken and shares issued. When the Netherlands-based Vedior wanted to take a significant stake in Ma Foi in 2004, they wanted all the small investors to quit. Vedior gave a great comfort in operations as they were more of a confederate and did not interfere in the company’s affairs. But when Vedior was acquired by Randstad in 2008, everything changed. And the Rajans also exited the staffing business. But they made effort to retain the Ma Foi brand, and went into consulting, education and analytics in 2012. But Latha’s focus is firmly on the micro-finance business, Varam, through which 60,000 women have benefitted. She has invested heavily in the venture after exiting Ma Foi. “Loans worth Rs. 7.5 crore have been disbursed so far,” she says. The beneficiary women have taken to several micro-businesses and continue to earn their livelihood. For instance, flower vendors, petty businesses, and women rearing cows have achieved better livelihood, thanks to Varam.

North Chennai is the prime area of focus for Varam in Chennai Remote locations in Chattisgarh and Maharashtra have also been added now. Ma Foi Foundation also supports a rural healthcare initiative called Ekam Trust. Latha contributes to it significantly by providing financial and mentoring support. Finding that boys in north Chennai love boxing, Latha initiated steps to train the interested boys in boxing. A sports academy is up and running now to train these boys who have taken to winning prizes at prominent events, even at the national level.

Amudha spent her time researching about schools when she decided to set up a school for tiny tots. She travelled across the country to see for herself how children’s schools are run. She researched intensely on the subject as well. Canopo was set up in 2014. Through her learning, she designed a special curriculum that offered a unique experience to the kids as well as mothers. “Infants as young as 10 months are part of our programme,” she beams. Bonding with the mother is the aim of this training and slowly as the infants grow older, they are taught speaking and writing skills. Consciousness of the nature and the environment is given a special focus. By the time the kids are five-and-a-half, they would have undergone basic learning and would have imbibed a few special skills that enhance their thinking and movement.

Rajni is the founder-member of the organisation for empowering women in IT called e-WIT. “The networking opportunities for women are less. They can’t socialise as men do and if they did, that is looked down as not a respectable thing to do,” feels Rajni. The most important difference that e-WIT has made is empowering women professionals in the IT sector to taking up executive positions and senior management roles. Even within MARG, Rajni became a voice for women to play important and higher executive roles.

While underprivileged women and children’s uplift continues to be Latha’s muse, Rajni finds her moorings in women empowerment and in enhancing rural employability, for which she has set up a rural finishing school. The young, dreamy-eyed Amudha aims to expand the footprint of Canopo across India and eventually far and wide as well. And these ventures have no scent of super-achiever husbands of Latha and Rajni or, in the case of Amudha, her father, who wrote his own history in the FMCG business.

The proliferation of technology and the Internet has reduced entry barriers for starting up to a great extent. Unicorns like Flipkart, Ola, Snapdeal, and Paytm may have all had humble beginnings, but in a short span, they created new markets, which were fairly unknown to us. Weeding out inefficiency and disrupting a segment with high entry barriers become more challenging for a newbie in the trade.

However, true conviction and a positive attitude can help you beat all the odds. This is the key takeaway after one has engaged in a conversation with 34-year-old Tushar Mittal, who founded Studiokon Ventures (SKV) in 2009.

SKVspecialises in providing end-to-end corporate infrastructure solutions for corporate, retail, and hospitality spaces. Mittal says,

I started with the Rs 12,000 I saved during my short stint at DLF. Unlike new-age startups, an interiors business catering to high-end clients demand credibility and proven track records.

His passion for his startup made him endure hardships during the initial days and his eureka moment finally came when he won a contract to modify interiors for a known corporate.

Since then, SKV has come a long way and acquired multiple blue chip clients including Lanco, Gemelto, Emerson, AON and ZS associates, and Mittal is expecting a Rs 110 crore revenue this year.

But success did not always come easy for Tushar, who had to struggle against his own family and established social norms to be able to put his entrepreneurial ideas into reality.

Breaking family barriers from a remote village wasn’t easy

Mittal was born in a small village Rudawal (40 km south of Bharatpur, Rajasthan), where his parents used to run a grocery store. He began his education in a village school and turned out to be the first-ever student to step out of the village to participate in an inter-state debate competition. Mittal adds,

I was good at my studies, but after my higher secondary education, our financial condition forced me to join the family business.

His family had taken a hugeloan from local lenders/ relatives  and the family was under tremendous pressure to return it.

Not ready to compromise on his dreams, Tushar Mittal left his home and family at the young age of 17 to follow his chosen path. Despite undergoing trying financial times, Mittal continued to harbour dreams of pursuing higher studies. Mittal explains:

Once, I went to another city to attend a marriage. While there, I met one of my relatives who encouraged me to study further. Later, we met again by accident in Bharatpur, and he asked me to manage whatever I can. The next day, I left for Kota with a sum of Rs 22,000.

He studied Engineering in Kota and supported himself by working with an architectural firm.

Awards and achievements

While studying in Kota, he supported himself by working with an architectural firm, a stint that helped him cultivate his latent talent in the field of interiors. He also completed his PGDM in Construction Management from NICMAR and BE (Civil) and was the first person from his village to get an education loan from the Punjab National Bank. “Getting a loan sanctioned in 2001 was a tough task, especially when you had nothing to offer as collateral. But I persisted with the zonal manager who helped me navigate a maze of red tape,” says Mittal. Finally, his perseverance off and he got a loan for his Masters’ degree.

In 2006, Tushar got his first placement at DLF. The following year, he left to work with an independent contractor before taking the plunge and establishing Studiokon Ventures (SKV) in 2009.

The company, which has an 80-member team, claims to maintain an annual growth of 30-35 per cent. So far, the company has completed interiors for over three dozen offices including ZS, SITel, Stryker, Axtria, Emerson, Nokia Siemens, Aon. Mittal adds,

Understanding customer psyche is the most crucial part of any product/service. We didn’t lose our focus on these two things.

Last fiscal, Studiokon crossed the Rs 62 crore revenue threshold and Mittal hopes to reach the Rs 110 crore mark by the end of the current FY. “With desired deliverables, control on cost, and deadline-bound commitments, Studiokon managed to establish its credentials quickly and differentiate from legacy-led businesses,” says Mittal.

According to Mittal, technology hasn’t touched the interior business at its core, however, SKV is developing complementary tech capabilities to offer a full-stack platform (right from design and procurement to execution) for all interior needs.

Mantra of bootstrapping

Mittal says,

Bootstrapping makes you believe in yourself and value business fundamentals. I am not against raising institutional money, but investment against equity is the most expensive avenue of funding.

So far, SKV hasn’t approached VCs for money as Mittal sees banks as a better option if your account books are healthy and tidy. Mittal adds:

Bootstrapping teaches frugality and makes you operate on internal cash-flow.

For him, new-age technology startups are creating new markets and solving key pain-points. “But their prioritisation of growth at any cost over profitability is not in line with my business acumen,” he adds.

The company plans to become a Rs 500 crore entity by 2020. Mittal concludes,

Achieving Rs 1,000 crore from a few hundred crore requires tremendous effort and to traverse this distance, we need institutional investors.

It doesn’t exactly go with the personality of a biker – that figure that zips past you on the roads like a phantom – to take a break from burning rubber on dirtroads and wait around whistling for hours to get his or her bike serviced, ever so often. Three bikers, who have lived for dismantling and rebuilding toys and gadgets since they were little, knew there was an opportunity to revolutionise this technology. Express Bike Works (EBW), the world’s fastest bike wash ensemble was born out of that gut feeling and conviction.

Motorcyclists turn gadget-nerds

Niraj Taksande, a mechanical engineering graduate from Mumbai University and an MBA from IIM Indore, has been best buds with Bhushan Karn, who holds a B-Tech& M-Tech in electrical engineering from IIT Mumbai, since their childhood, when they shared an insatiable curiosity for mechanics and gadgets. Bhushan’s classmate at IIT, Jigar Vora,turned out to have the same itch, which is what brought them all together.

“As the three of us got together to discuss our ideas; we realised that we have the potential to create a dynamic product. Normally, when a biker goes to a local garage for washing and servicing, they would keep the bike and call for a pick up only by evening. As a group of passionate bikers ourselves, we would go on long rides for days together. Due to our adventures, our bikes would need regular washing and servicing, but the conventional bike care system failed to impress us. We used to look forward to quick washing so that we could move ahead on our journey. However, the local bike care centres in India are very laidback and take ages to wash bikes. Hence, we decided to invent a system where bikes or two-wheelers could be washed within two minutes, thus giving a world-class bike care experience to the customer. There was scope to build something that would let the bikers come and get the job done in real time,” says Niraj.

This is when the trio quit their respective jobs—Jigar left JP Morgan, Bhushan left ASUS Taiwan and Niraj, the SI Group – to dedicate complete days and nights to brainstorm and create a true-blue, completely Made in India gem. Starting in April 2013, they readied the prototype in an exceptionally short period of time of eight months, andchristened it “Express Bike Works.”It was launched in the India Bike Week in January 2014.

How they do it

The fastest bike wash machine in the world, this machine is capable of washing the dirtiest of motorcycles within in under five minutes, claims Niraj. “It is an optimum combination of water flow and pressure derived over thousands of trials. Our self-derived empirical formula resulted in a super-efficient washing system. This is topped up by a specially designed biodegradable shampoo. We also developed a way to cap the usage and wastage of water. An EBW machine only uses one fourth the water that other bike washes use for the same process,” says Niraj.

Business Model

Once they had the machine ready, their initial model was to sell this technology to existing service centres. Currently, they have sold two machines worth Rs. 10 Lakh each in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai.

They later evolved their model to set up 360º bike service centres under the EBW banner, and started working on the franchise model, providing the machinery, training, branding, and software for running each store centrally, and also assisting their franchise partners and entrepreneurs to grow by mentoring them on how to run EBW assisted stores. They have eight stores that employ two-threestaffers each and cater to all two-wheelers that need express-care services like express-wash, express-maintenance or express diagnostic reports. The services include washing, detailing, paint protection, rust protection, express maintenance, oil change, lubrication, chain restoration, break and clutch care, electrical care, health check-up, 40-point check, and of course, their signature ‘Quick service – under five minutes on-road assistance.’ They are reaching out to petrol pumps, malls, corporate parks as potential franchise partners. So far, they have opened up eight franchises at Pune, Delhi, Nasik, Dhanbad, Hubli, and Thrissur, where they have uniform branding on collaterals, for customers to recognise their brand.

They have also sold EBW machines to authorised service stations of OEMs like Hero, Royal Enfield, and Honda who form their B2B customer base. They are solving another major painpoint with their state-of-the-art machine. “The working conditions at these wash centres are difficult leading to high attrition rates. With our machines, these service stations can wash 230-250 vehicles per day with the help of two-three employees only.”

The company set the record of washing over 230 bikes in less than 10 hours, at one of the largest motorcycle OEM service centers.

Revving for revenues

So, royalty from EBW store franchisesand machine sales to authorised motorcycle service centers form their main revenue model. Till date, they have serviced over 1.7 lakh motorcyclists at all their touch-points put together, and are growing at 200 percent QoQ.

The company started out bootstrapped, but raised an undisclosed round of funding in 2015 from pedigree investors Mark Mobius- Executive Chairman, Templeton Emerging Markets, Vaaman Sehgal- Motherson Sumi Gr., Abhimanyu Munjal-Hero FinCorp Ltd and Kunal Khattar-Carnation Auto India Pvt Ltd.

India being the sixth-largest motor vehicle and car manufacturer in the world, auto manufacturers here produced 18.5 million two-wheelers in 2014-15, according to a Know India report.Their long-term plan is to building a pan-India network of local stores to tap the service market for these two-wheelers, which is worth $2 billion. “We have plans to open up stores in Bangalore, Kochi, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Vijaywada and many other cities in 2016. Our immediate target is 50 touchpoints across India with 25 in Pune itself to begin with.We also have plans to foray into the international market soon.”

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Have a startup idea? You are not the only one. So, what sets you apart? How does your product help improve the market? There are many questions a startup entrepreneur needs to be prepared to answer, and if there is one thing that helps one in their quest is market research and understanding. However, there is limited information available for niche and uncovered sectors.

It was while looking at the gap in the market intelligence and consulting space, that Ankur Gupta and Meetu Bhasin, friends from their time at Delhi University, decided to start up in the field. Their friend Namit Goel also joined in. “We were motivated to create a difference in the field and create a catalogue for otherwise uncovered and niche sectors,” adds 28-year-old Namit.

What does it do

Ken Research’s core business model is that it generates its income through the sales of market intelligence and equity research, which can be either customised or syndicated.

The startup recently launched a subscription base via Ken Wallet to enable its clients to get a bundled research piece on a recurring basis as per their requirement at a discounted rate with a year or a tenure subscription.

“We create pull-market pitch through prior intelligence in sectors where information is seldom available. These research reports become case studies for clients who are seeking intelligence in that sector,” explains Namit.

Building an aggregator for market research

Around 70 percent of the company’s revenue is generated from clients outside India, including from regions such as the US, Europe and Asia. Some of its marquee clientele include Roche, Amway, Emami, Freecharge, Eureka Forbes, Huron, Panasonic, Practo, Tata Communications, HSIL, IndiaMart, PayU and Western Union.

Ken Research also has started an aggregator platform while simultaneously publishing content with a separate SMO team to promote the reports of its channel partners including publishers such as Timetric, Canadean, Buddecomm, WealthInsight, World Market Intelligence, Verdict Financial, Pyramid Research, Conlumino, Kable and Others.

The categories it covers include consumer products and retail, agriculture and animal care, healthcare, media and entertainment, metal, mining and chemicals.

This aided Ken Research to create a one-stop research-need solution for the clientele across verticals. “We currently have a repository of over 6,000 research reports, which will extend to over 20,000 by the end of this year,” adds Namit. He adds that the face of market research has changed with the contribution of small and large enterprises.  The market opportunity for outsourced market intelligence is huge with new business growth and optimism with startup ecosystem.

Namit says that their USP is their realistic research approach and analytics that they use to uncover facts and report CATIs bias, hypothesis testing from industry veterans.

A little bit of the past

Prior to joining Ken Research, Ankur and Namit worked as an investment banking analysts with UBS Investment Bank, followed by the stint with an investment bank in Bengaluru, where he was the part of the M&A, venture capital and private equity transaction advisory team, and was responsible for managing mid-market transactions and deal flow generation.

Meetu was part of the management team of Koncept Analytics, where she helped the company build strong relationships with global advocacy, and successfully expanded the product development process. She worked on varied industry verticals including education, healthcare, BFSI, technology and telecom, food and beverages, and others.

Market research for market research platforms

“Our strong network association aids the team to map the market and check the sanity of the market data from gamut of entities in the ecosystem. Our focus is to provide the hypothesis and logical reasoning behind the addressable market and confidence interval for the accuracy of the data and account for contingencies for the market intelligence,” adds Namit.

The team’s estimates say that outsourced market research sector has grown to almost around Rs 1,000 crore from Rs 350 crore in the last 10 years. The team believes that market research spending from startups and companies who wish to achieve scale in sectors such as e-commerce, logistics, healthcare and education will drive this market forward.

“Our competitors include firms working in the domain of industry research and consulting, such as markets and markets, RNCOS, IMRB International and others,” adds Namit. The team nevertheless believes that Ken Research has built a reputation of cataloguing uncovered and niche sectors research where intelligence is not available or the market is too fragmented or unorganised to get the information.

The platform clocks a 50 percent year-on-year growth in topline and research contribution to renowned intelligence marketplaces, such as Thomson Reuters, S&P Capital IQ, ISI Emerging Market, among others.

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Whether it is a branded jacket or the wrought iron bed that you’ve always wanted, from clothes and accessories, to furniture and consumer durables, people are slowly turning towards pre-owned commerce. While platforms like OLX and Quickr are well-known and have created a strong segment of classifieds for used goods, many believe they lack an important factor – trust.

This is where a platform like Koove hopes to come into the picture. Working as a social buy, sell and exchange platform, Koove claims to bring in the element of trust and ownership. The user must register on the app and become a part of the community to sell, browse, comment, discuss, chat, help others and buy.

Bringing in trust

Every member is part of a community, based on apartments, locality or corporate. They have to verify various details like their phone number, work place, address and other important details. The members are verified and vetted by others who know them, making it more than just a social profiling. “It is easier to buy from someone you trust, rather than a complete stranger,” says 27-year-old Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar.

Similar to shopping at a brick-and-mortar store, one can browse and window shop on the Koove app, read the comments, chat with the seller and then choose to buy something. The idea came to Rashmi R Padhy while he was in the US.

Startup love

This wasn’t Rashmi’s first venture. He started ShoppersOn in 2011. His second startup TechChamp was selected by seed accelerator Start-Up Chile. Prior to 2011, he used to work as a software programmer for a Fortune 500 company in the US. Koove is a pivot of TechChamp.

Rashmi had, along with a friend, started a group to buy, sell and exchange children’s stuff in New York. It grew overnight to over 4,000 people and transactions started pouring in from the first hour.

After a couple of weeks of research and experimentation, Rashmi knew this is what he wanted to pursue. Armed with this idea, Rashmi came back to India and started looking for a co-founder. It was then that he chanced upon Rohit Kumar and Ayush through a social startup group that Rashmi managed and owned.

Finding the right co-founders

Rohit has been working with startups since the beginning of his career. He was one of the first employees at TooStep and worked at MyParichay too, with his last role there being that of CTO.

Aayush has handled strategy, marketing, product and category for FreeCharge, Airtel and Aircel-Maxis. He has been involved in the startup ecosystem in Bengaluru and has lent his marketing expertise to them on advisory basis in the past few years.

“The key challenges were getting a product-market fit, finding the core team and working on the initial growth. Now, we are rapidly expanding our core team across product, technology, marketing, growth and operations. We are looking for evangelists, ambassadors and champions who can help us build the platform day in and day out,” adds Aayush.

Aayush adds that even the likes of Amazon, Alibaba or Flipkart haven’t been able to the crack the social shopping experience yet.  In the past few months, Koove has built access to over five lakh members, and their app has over 4,000 downloads. They intend to reach one million users by the end of the next financial year.

Currently bootstrapped, the team is looking for investment. “We would only look at partnerships and VCs who can invest their mind and hearts with us and build this as we go along. To us, the VCs need to be as invested in us as we are with them and set very high benchmarks,” adds Aayush.

The booming pre-owned market

On the competition, Aayush adds that they are social community first, more than just being a platform for buying and selling. He says that the current bunch of players in the segment haven’t been able to crack the social and trust aspect. “There are people who are buying and selling pre-owned goods, but not exactly using a social mode where they can trust the community to even give them suggestions on what to buy and what not to buy,” adds Aayush.

Pre-owned fashion has caught the attention of quite a few entrepreneurs in India. Spoly Elanic, Revamp My Closet, Once Again, Zapyle, and Etashee are some of the ventures that have started up in this category in recent months and years.

According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report, the collaborative economy has the potential to increase global revenues to $335 billion by 2025. While there is no reliable data on the market size for pre-owned fashion, a Google report estimated that India’s online fashion market would be $35 billion by 2020.

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The year was 1989 and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) was piloting Project Safal, its fruit and vegetable business. Suresh Satyamurthy joined the project as part of the engineering team, which created the country’s first frozen storage technology.

Suresh recalls his biggest challenge at the time being the unavailability of information with regard to distribution. No one had data on how much inventory was being pushed to a particular distributor or retailer, and how much did they had in stock.

It’s been nearly three decades but the situation today is not very different. Today, according to the 48-year-old entrepreneur, 95 per cent of consumers still shop through unorganised retailers (kirana stores) as opposed to supermarkets, and the world’s fifth largest retail economy lacks clear visibility of the supply chain.

This led him to search for a solution to offer these retailers.

His inspiration? Walmart’s proprietary Retail Link, which keeps every player in the ecosystem aware when a unit is sold, right from the supplier to the distributor.

Thinking on the same lines, Suresh co-founded Bangalore-based Tarnea with his friends Madhav Sitaraman (38) and Senthil Rajagopalan (43) in 2013, and brought unorganised retailers onto SmartMile – their technology platform.

Making retailers smart

With almost 200 retailers on the platform, SmartMile helps retailers both upstream by finding the right Distributors and Principal Suppliers, and downstream by helping them manage customers.

Choosing pharmaceuticals as their first vertical, the platform also aims to help retailers in four areas:

• Inventory management: For drug stores, the biggest problem is keeping track of expired inventory. With multiple batches coming in with different medicines, it becomes difficult for drug retailers to track inventory, which has limited shelf life, making it a manual process. SmartMile helps stores keep a track of their inventory, alerting store managers about perishable products that are likely to expire, thereby automating the process.

This also saves retailers from losses as they are able to return the products to distributors or companies directly, in due time, if not sold.

The platform also helps store staff respond to customers faster by equipping each salesman with the billing system. According to Suresh, retailers using SmartMile claim that they’ve reduced their customer wait time by almost 80 per cent. Additionally, in case the Internet breaks down, shop data is stored locally transmitting it to the cloud server when the connection is revived.

• Ability to optimise buying: Retailers usually lack price transparency and choice when sourcing goods for their shops. With more than 15 large-scale distributors on the platform, the retailers are empowered to choose the best price and trusted deliveries. 

• Mega retailers vs retailers: Suresh tells us that the biggest attraction mega retailers and stores offer is their loyalty card, which can be availed through points, discounts or gifts, leaving normal retailers behind in the race. The platform helps normal retailers or kirana stores to extend benefits of the loyalty programme to customers, while integrating it with their buying profiles. This lets stores set offers and even issue loyalty cards.

• Integration with e-commerce and hyperlocal: The firm also helps offline retailers extend their digital presence by putting them on the map with hyperlocal and e-commerce companies. The platform has also opened its API to hyperlocal startups as well as distribution aggregators to integrate with it and be a part of the ecosystem. This in turn helps hyperlocal startups source products faster from offline retailers.

Kicking up a storm – traction and pricing

As of now, Tarnea claims to have 1.1 million customers who have transacted through their platform as of January 2016 with 1.6 million transactions between 2015-16.

Claiming to have doubled their numbers every quarter, the co-founders tell us that the value of the transactions are as large as Rs 160 crore.

The firm plans to notch up their retailer count to 5,000 by November 2016. As of now, Tarnea has operations in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Tarnea gets 90 per cent of their users from Tier 2 cities.

In the future, Tarnea is aiming to set up shop in 15 states and 100 cities, with Hyderabad, New Delhi and Mumbai next on the anvil. The startup also tells us that there is a possibility to also take the solution to markets like the US, Europe, and Africa, which surprisingly face similar challenges.

While divulging no information about their revenue, Suresh says that the platform is free for the lightweight version offering billing, financial transactions, and auto management. Trying to match costs to an average telecom bill, the medium version of the product is priced at Rs 500, which offers internal inventory management capabilities as well.

The company is working to launch the premium version of the product by July 2016, with the features and pricing yet to be decided.

While already having raised funds from angel investors, the firm is looking to raise a Series A round this year, and has been incubated in this year’s batch of the Microsoft accelerator programme.

Tarnea’s unique case    

Tarnea is an open architecture SaaS-based retail solution.

According to a recent report by Google and early-stage investor Accel Partners, Indian SaaS companies are expected to reach the $10 billion revenue mark in 2025. At present, according to the same report, India has over 500 SaaS startups currently, collectively earning $600 million in revenue.

What makes India a lucrative market is the cost advantage that India-based SaaS companies offer, as seen in Tarnea’s case.

However, what makes Tarnea an interesting solution is the open architecture, which if successful, will get the hyperlocal biggies onto one ecosystem, instead of letting them work in their silos. Additionally, payment solutions and Fintech companies can also integrate with this ecosystem building exciting solutions for the supply chain.

Suresh feels that their unique position in the industry is as a B2B2C platform. However, what needs to be seen is how adoptability pans out for this platform, for it to reach its potential.

Website

After shutting down my second venture, I thought I will not join any startup. I started working as a freelancer writer and marketer. I was consulting for a couple of startups and helping them grow their user base. In doing so, I was able to earn sufficient money. But when an opportunity came to join full-time the startup I’ve been consulting for, I made a checklist.

So, the following are some of the things I looked for in the startup. If you are considering joining one as well, you could also look into these factors.

# What value I can add to the startup

The first thing I looked at was the value proposition from my side to the startup. There is no point joining a startup if you are not confident of delivering value. You may or may not have all the required skills but you should know how much benefit you can provide to the startup. More than skills, you need an attitude to work in a startup.

It was an easy decision for me since I was consulting for them for more than two months. I knew what the startup was expecting from me and what I could deliver. Along with necessary skills, I was having a startup mindset. The founders were also confident that I will be able to deliver a lot of value to the startup.

# Who I will be working with

The next important thing was to know about the team and founders. I knew the founders for more than one year.

Good people attract more good people, so they were able to build a nice team. I was sure that future hires will also be awesome people like them.

Don’t work with someone you don’t enjoy working with. Nothing can give you more happiness than working with good people.

# What will be the role and will I be able to do it any justice

This was a tough one.

They offered me the position of full-time CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). I was excited and I accepted the offer. But soon after putting my feet into the CMO shoes, I realised that I will not be able to do justice to the role. No, not because I was feeling incapable but because I was working from a remote location.

A CMO role is a critical position where you need to work closely with the founders, team, customers and investors. I was working from a remote location while the rest of the team was working from the Delhi office. It would be difficult for a startup to redefine the culture of team for one person. It would have worked in a complete remote team where primary channel of communication is Skype & Slack.

When 90 percent of the team is working from an office location, primary communication happens unplanned, during lunch or tea breaks, asking someone for a favor, taking feedback from a team member when he is passing by your seat, and most importantly sitting with someone to get work done.

After a couple of discussions, we decided that the role of ‘Head of Content Marketing’ will suit me perfectly. Once goals are clear, I will be able to execute the plans with perfection because I will have less dependency.

# Whether my personal goals and company goals are aligned

I know my personal goals very well. I have to excel in digital marketing and always work location-independent.

It’s okay to sacrifice (postpone) my annual goals if I get a chance to work with a bunch of nice guys on a mission.

There was no doubt that my goals and startup goals were overlapping.

# Will it enhance my skill-set

I have skills like content writing, storytelling, e-mail marketing, SEO, ASO and social media marketing. I also have complementary experience of product development, team management and running two startups.

Since my personal goals are aligned with the company’s goal, I can see tremendous opportunities to learn new things and improve my existing skills.

# The compensation in terms of cash and equity

The least important but necessary part. I would have loved to work for free for such an opportunity but I have bills to pay. The startup is generous enough to pay me what I need every month and some portion of equity for my long-term association with the company.

You should talk about it in the end and close it as fast as possible. There could be chances of ruining relationships if compensation discussions are dragged on for a long time. Personally, I don’t prefer indulging in salary negotiations during startup hiring. You should be clear about what you need. If that is being offered then accept it, or move on.

#The exit point

The last you should be clear about are the exit gates. I joined the startup on basis of team and mission. I will leave the company if they start hiring bad people (for whatever reason) or deviates from its mission of improving healthcare. Else I would stay on, during the good times and the bad.

In its essence, the second version of Scoot is an aggregator of on-demand, intercity and rental taxi aggregators. By integrating multiple APIs, Scoot looks to take the hassle out of juggling between multiple apps and allows users to get the service they desire more quickly. To do so, users need to set their pick-up location and the app provides information about taxi cabs across different service providers.

Currently, Scoot shows the nearest(or cheapest) available taxi cabs across Uber, Ola cabs, Lyft, Sidecar and Hailo. It is currently active in 85 Indian cities and a few locations abroad too. If on picking a service provider, the user doesn’t have the app installed on their phone, they will be redirected to the Playstore or AppStore to download the app to complete their booking.

Story so far

Scoot’s founding team consists of Aditya Bagmane (24), Akshaan Nambiar (22) and Dhruv Kalro (23). Aditya is an engineer from RV College, Bengaluru and had worked with Bagmane Group for a year. As the COO at Scoot, he handles partnerships and operations. Akshaan has a bachelor’s degree in media studies from Symbiosis University, Pune and worked in media for a year. As the CMO at Scoot, he looks after marketing.

Dhruv has a degree in business management from Center for Management Studies, Jain University, and had interned at Embassy Group for a year. As the CFO, he overlooks all the financial transactions at the startup. Currently consisting of a team of nine, Scoot counts Sagar Yarnalkar and Gunjan Thakuria as their tech and product advisors respectively.

Scoot initially started out as a side project in January 2015. Realising the need for a better solution instead of juggling between multiple apps, the team launched the first version that aggregated the services of only on-demand cabs-Uber, Ola and TaxiforSure.

Related read from January 2015: Someone just created an aggregator app for all the taxi aggregators

After seeing good traction and feedback from users, they realised that they were onto something. A minor hurdle in their path was convincing taxi aggregators to give them access to their APIs. As it was a relatively new concept, not all aggregators had made their APIs public or were willing to share it with developers.

But, over time, Scoot found that aggregators were able to see their side of the picture and the benefits of a ‘super aggregator’. The team claims that Scoot currently has about 35,000 installs across both Android and iOS.

Scoot has a straightforward business model where it earns a revenue for every transaction that it has facilitated through its platform. Currently bootstrapped, the startup has relied on word-of-mouth, digital marketing and offline marketing at selected locations like tech parks to help it boost growth.

In the process of integrating the recently launched bike taxi services, Scoot aims to add self-drive and airport transfer services in the future. Integrating multiple APIs and getting them to work in tandem while keeping the size of the app as low as possible is a key challenge for Scoot.

Sector overview

Smartphones have brought in a new revolution in this on-demand and sharing economy that is taking the world by storm. With multiple players in the market and a lot of options, juggling between multiple apps while standing on the street can be tiring and time-consuming.

So this has led to the rise of ‘super aggregators’ and other cross-integrations. Facebook recently announced that Messenger and Uber had tied up, and users could now book cabs directly through the messenger app.

With the intercity and rental market opening up there are many more services that end consumers want. Aggregators apps have also gained mainstream popularity in recent times, specially in the content market where players help consumers access the best content based on their preference and gives content providers more visibility. Coming back to super aggregators for cabs, Hyderabad-based Bucker aggregate cabs, food and mobile recharge apps and then there are Ixigo cabs, Instago and Ek based out of Delhi.

What we liked

Scoot is well-thought-out and simple to use. By providing current location and destination, the app provides fare estimates across all on-demand taxi providers for easy comparison. Users can also sort through cabs based on price, location or company depending on their need at that point in time.

The app also has an offers tab where it provides users access to different discount codes they could utilise for their rides. The inter-city and rental aggregation are executed well too, and users can connect with different service providers based on their specific needs.

What could be improved

While the app lives up to its premise as a ‘super aggregator’ that helps users save time and effort, more features such as a map-based user interface and ability to save frequent routes would add to its appeal. Also, including a separate tab for ‘shared taxis’ across aggregators would be a useful feature.

YourStory verdict

Finding and booking a cab during peak hours is a hassle that customers and also cab drivers face. Scoot and other ‘super aggregators’ provide a level playing field for all aggregators and decreases lead times for both parties(consumers and cabbies) involved in the transaction. Juggling between multiple apps can be quite difficult and frustrating, so there is clear value addition through this service. With a young team that is close to product-market fit, it will be interesting to see what further integrations they add and how they scale operations.

Website: Scoot App

What do you think about this app, do let us know in the comments below. Also do check out other apps under our App Fridays series.

Also download the YourStory Android or iOS app for more updates.

“The audience has clearly moved on to their mobiles, and you don’t want to miss that bus. And it sure can’t be caught with banner ads and interstitials,” Milind Pathak, COO of MadHouse had warned advertisers of the criminal waste of the potential in mobile advertising. With nearly 60-percent smartphone penetration, all urban Indians are ‘connected Indians’, but, at this point, they also happen to be ‘irritated, interrupted and bored Indians.’ What they have been getting on their apps and games so far is the mobile version of TV’s infomercials – plain-Jane, tell-it-like-it-is banner ads, pop-ups and interstitials that are just there to inform and make a hard sell, and not to hook, entertain, rouse curiosity and create recall.

The Zero Games hopes to revolutionise the way advertising is done on mobile. And it is starting by targeting that section that is on their phone with unblinking eyes and unwavering attention, come hail or storm. Yes, we are talking about the gamers.

Game on

Arjun Chadha, a computer science engineer from Uttar Pradesh Technical University who had spent six years in distribution, had anticipated a thriving career in gaming at the young age of 23. To him, entrepreneurship simply meant solving problems with simple solutions that no one else sees. And indeed, there was a problem. Looking purely at the numbers, compared to the readership and viewership of print and television, respectively at 34 to 35 million, the penetration of the mobile is nearly 10 times that figure, at 300 million. Yet, there was only two-percent ad spend by advertising brands on this medium, because existing forms of mobile advertisement failed to garner hits and convert to sales. Arjun knew it was time to bid farewell to archaic banners and popups, and present an ad in a way that really sneaks up on you, but grabs eyeballs nonetheless.

Let’s rewind, though. In his days as a software trainer, he worked for National Mission on Education through MHRD at IIT-Bombay, where he met Nishanth Kottapalli, as one of his trainees, who was exceptionally good in UI/UX and strategy. He also met Chetas Bhardiya in a similar manner, and the three formed a team to startup, but to solve another problem altogether. “When the tab Aakash-2 was a disaster in India, we wanted to make a tablet PC that was cheaper, and in which there would be three core offerings – augmented reality, virtual billboards and analytics. At that point, our mentor Akshay Randeva (the Director at Qatar financial presently), told us about another glaring problem within the mobile world – the failure of mobile advertising, and asked us to focus on the second one completely, rather than creating a tablet,” Arjun recalls.

So, they took up the virtual billboard technology, combined it with analytics, and after research, created the final outcome, ‘PLAKC’, which is an acronym for Preference Likeness Awareness Knowledge Conviction.

Advertising of the future

PLAKC is a cutting-edge technology that allows ads to be placed inside the game environment on 3D elements or objects of a game like a billboard, storefronts, characters and objects etc., which makes the ad a natural part of the landscape of the game’s world.

The line of code took a whole year to build, staring from early 2013 to June 2014.

Win-win

As an aggregator, the startup’s business model caters to two stakeholders.

One side of its business approaches advertiser brands and ad agencies and shows them the value in mobile advertising. The other side focusses on acquiring as many game developers and game publishers as possible as clients, to whom The Zero Games sells PLAKC as a SaaS offering, albeit free of cost, so that they can enable in-game advertising within their games.

The benefits are spelled out to the advertisers. “We showcase our innovative technique of placing ads, and the community of gaming publishers, developers and games we have built. We explain to them how their ad will reach a community of half a million avid gamers –with geo targeting and reduced costs, even through our gaming company partners,”Arjun explains.

The developers and advertisers have separate portals. The former is to visit plakc.ninja, the latter, plakc.club. After the deal is cracked with the advertiser, 70percent goes to the developers and 30percent goes to Zero Games.

The publishers are given their software development kit free of cost, and with more intuitive analytics tools. They have launched alpha version of the software development kit, and are in the process of building the beta.

“Our mission is toget all publishers in the globe by 2020. Our vision is to give better opportunity to advertisers, to reach millions of gamers through PLAKC,” Arjun says.

Have they got game?

Its Saas offering being its source of revenue, the startup plans to make it chargeable, once the pending trademark procedure goes through. It has on-boarded marquee games studios from around the world and serves around one million impressions each day, through over two lakh daily active users.

The company received angel funding in July 2015, and is looking forward to a Series A in three months. A few competitors have emerged, like Greedy Games, which is also funded. Globally, players like Woobi from Israel and Media Spike and Rapid Fire from USA and Canada are competition. But Arjun feels there is enough room in this uncharted territory, at this stage.

Website

Whether it is the entry of new players, acquisitions or funding, the budget hotel space has been abuzz with activity for a few months now. It doesn’t come as a surprise, though, considering the growing volume of people travelling and booking holidays online, which according to Travelbizmonitor, is believed to touch 47 percent by 2017.

Determined to grab a chunk of this market is Singapore-based RedDoorz. It is an asset-light budget accommodation brand and service offering for hotels, resorts, inns, service apartments, B&B and guesthouses. It provides budget accommodation owners access to expert advice and assistance to standardise their offering and directly distribute online via its technology platform.

With an increasing demand for customer satisfaction, RedDoorz aims to not only help consumers receive standardised services across all RedDoorz-enabled budget accommodations, but also help budget hotel owners with technology to distribute across multiple digital platforms.

 Figuring the Southeast Asian gap

RedDoorz integrates the booking system and the check-in of the guest is monitored real time. The idea of starting up came to Amit Saberwal and Asheesh Saxena while they were still working at MakeMyTrip. Working closely in the Asia Pacific region and in the segment, they found the space to be unorganised. They realised that technology could change that.

“We saw that the budget accommodations today have fragmented and non-uniform experiences that affects the consumer satisfaction. This is where RedDoorz has a strong value proposition,” says 45-year-old Amit.

The Southeast Asian travel market today is at $ 60.6 billion. With prominent tourism and business hubs like Thailand, Bali, Singapore, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, accommodation far exceeds supply at many periods of the year.

A large number of properties are offline. Further, the market is highly fragmented with low adoption of online distribution technology. Hotel owners are unable to realise the full monetary potential of their assets and have to make do with lower average daily rates.

Hiring galore

Even though they were backed by knowledge and experience working on the space, the duo found it difficult to build the right team. However, they leveraged all their contacts from the Southeast market and worked on bringing people with a similar vision on board. Their board consists of Philip Wolf, Founder PhoCusWright, and Ajay Bakaya, Executive Director at Sarovar Hotels & Resorts.

However, they are still grappling with the other regular startup challenges like fund raising, acquiring new customers and taking them through the user journey and refining the product.

Bank rolling and revenues

RedDoorz launched in the middle of last year and has been present in Indonesia for nearly three months now. The team claims to grow at close to 50 percent month-on-month and cover close to 10,000 room nights a month.

“We expect the launch in other countries to be equally favourable as the challenges faced by hotel operators that we solve cuts across the region,” adds Amit. Like most similar platforms, the revenue model of RedDoorz is that of buying at a certain price and selling at a certain price, where the money is made from the margins.

RedDoorz raised its pre-Series A funding from Jungle Ventures and 500 Startups to strengthen its market expansions.  The Asia Pacific market is experiencing exponential growth in the travel sector and is poised to be a dominant region.

“Our focus currently is to be present in prominent tourist and business hubs across Southeast, Asia including Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur,” says Amit.

The saga of budget hotels

 Of the budget hotels in the Southeast Asian markets, ZenRooms by Rocket Internet is one among many others like international-based Bespoke hotels, Nida Rooms, and Tune Hotels. According to a report, the budget hotel segment in Southeast Asia is believed to be worth $10 billion, with close to 100 million tourists coming into the region every year.

Apart from the international players, even Indian-born companies are targeting the Southeast. In 2015, OYO Rooms bagged the largest funding of $100 million from Softbank. Zostel entered the low-budget hotel space with Zo Rooms, followed by a series of funding raised from Tiger Global.

In the estimated budget hotel aggregation market, which is anything between $25 and $40 billion, various platforms are vying to grab the larger part of the segment. Besides, many smaller acquisitions have also happened in the industry. An example would be Wudstay acquiring Awesome Stays last year.

Website

Technology has given us new ways to talk and reach out to people all over the world. In 2009, Reddit, an entertainment, social news service website, came up with AmA (Ask me Anything) subreddit for people to interact with celebrities. Earlier this week, Bill Gates held another AmA on Reddit, where he spoke about his Harvard days, his personal life, and his vision for the future. Read on to get a glimpse of his life and thoughts.

During Harvard University days

I decided that I would be different and never attend any class I was signed up for but always attend a class I wasn’t signed up for. This worked out in a funny way when the final exam for a Combinatorics class (which I signed up for) was given at the same table as my Brain studies class (which I attended and did not sign up for). My friends from Brain studies thought it was very strange that I sat on the wrong side of the table and took the Combinatorics exam even when I was the most vocal student in the Brain class.

He emphasised on the hard work he had put into studying at Harvard. He said –

I studied super hard during reading period and almost always got A’s. The big exception was organic chemistry where the promised video tapes of the lectures sometimes had no sound or no video – that spooked me and I ended up getting a C+ in the course!

Three things Bill Gates thinks about future technological advancements

First is an energy innovation to lower the cost and get rid of greenhouse gases. This isn’t guaranteed so we need a lot of public and private risk taking.

Second is progress on diseases particularly infectious diseases. Polio, malaria, HIV, TB, etc., are all diseases we should be able to either eliminate or bring down close to zero. There is amazing science that makes us optimistic this will happen.

Third are the tools to help make education better – to help teachers learn how to teach better and to help students learn and understand why they should learn and reinforce their confidence.

Bill gates shares his thoughts on artificial intelligence

I haven’t seen any concrete proposal on how you would do the regulation. I think it is worth discussing because I share the view of Musk and Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence, it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control.

On reading books

I have a rule that I always finish a book once I start it. This might now work for everyone. I only read two books at a time – in fact usually just one unless one of them is so complex I need to mix things up. I read a lot at night and my biggest problem is that I stay up to late and regret it the next day when I haven’t had as much sleep as I would like.

Harvard dropout Bill Gates spoke about the value of college and how it ‘is easy to underestimate’

I think the value of getting a great education – that is going to college – is easy to underestimate. The most interesting jobs require a college education. The STEM-related jobs are probably the most interesting although they are not for everyone. The value of staying curious – reading a lot and learning new things even after college is also underestimated.

The most useful thing Bill Gates ever learned – To read? To type? To think before speaking?

A technological advancement that Bill Gates thinks we were better off without

I am concerned about biological tools that could be used by a bioterrorist. However, the same tools can be used for good things as well. Some people think hoverboards were bad because they caught on fire. I never got to try one.

On technology he wishes existed

I recently saw a company working on “robotic” surgery where the ability to work at small scales was stunning. The idea that this will make surgeries higher quality, faster and less expensive is pretty exciting. It will probably take a decade before this gets mainstream – to date it has mostly been used for prostate surgery.

In the Foundation work there are a lot of tools we are working on we don’t have yet. For example an implant to protect a woman from getting HIV because it releases a protective drug.

On being frugal

I think people’s spending instincts are set when they are in high school. I don’t like spending a lot of money on clothes or jewelry (for me – I do like to buy nice things for my wife).

Feeling powerless as a billionaire

The problem of how we prevent a small group of terrorists using nuclear or biological means to kill millions is something I worry about. If Government does their best work they have a good chance of detecting it and stopping it but I don’t think it is getting enough attention and I know I can’t solve it.

On plans to retire and enjoy a quieter life

I love my work. I love meeting the scientists and field workers. I have the flexibility to work less if I wanted to and I do take vacations now. When I was in my 20’s I didn’t believe in vacation so I have mellowed. I feel super lucky that I can be involved in the Foundation work with Melinda for another 30 years assuming my health holds up.

Would you pick up $40,000 up off the street?

Since our Foundation can basically save a life for every $1,000 we spend I would pick it up since that would be enough to save 40 lives, which is a big deal.

On running for President

I like my current job at the Foundation better than I would being President. Also I wouldn’t be good at doing what you need to do to get elected. I thought Michael Bloomberg was thoughtful about why it didn’t make sense for him to try and run even though he is a great executive.

Would you consider marrying Melinda to be one of the top three decisions of your life?

You are correct! I would put it at the top. Deciding to work on software was a good decision but that just crept up on me rather than being some choice.

User emrimbiemri123 has done a beautiful job of compiling all the questions and answers at one place, which can be found here.

The ‘Startup India’ buzz is adding freshness all around, but are startups actually buzzing in India?

Fancy ideas, disrupting stories, mind-blowing execution, but what will this lead to? Is there a business plan underneath or its just fluff to try out what you think is right. But the one big thing that the Indian startup industry lacks is matured thinking and planning ahead.

Let’s look at the ideal stages in a startup’s journey from both an insider and an outsider’s lens.

Many Indian startups mainly focus on increasing their customer base and rarely get to see the third stage. It is a sad fact that bigger picture with long-term plan is not created by anyone and business viability is ignored for a long time.

Most of generation X and Y are living in the present, which is good in a way that you are all ears for problems and want to sweat for the right solution; but before the solution gets validated, there goes the funding, marketing, etc. Still, in this maddening rush, some players, like Car Dekho, Oyo Rooms, have done it wonderfully.

We all hear long discussions on unit economics (typically used to determine whether a business will be successful by measuring the economics involved per unit. This is a critical part of business plan), but is there anyone actually on the ground working on it? Due to lack of such long-term vision, startups fail to provide sustainable solutions to problems. It is like raising customer expectations and then letting it fade slowly because customer delight was only a means to the end. So what’s going wrong here?

Let us look at it the ideation way (typically the way in which ideas are validated for the possibility of building a business out of it):

1. Is the depth in problem space? This is true without a hint of doubt as here are so many problems in India to be solved and all ideas have merit. But as a founder you should be cautious of the market you are entering into, without being swayed away by the fancy market numbers and valuations around. Be realistic in your approach.

2. Is the solution right? If the product looks right at the discovery step then it is assumed to be the best as hardly any Indian founders are patient players, who are playing maturely at it thinking of making it strong to last for long. Both solution and its placement should be continuously worked on. There are companies, like Amazon and Google, that have been there and did it by carefully taking steps; whenever required they have unlearnt things also as it’s not a sprint these players are thinking of playing. One can take away tons of learnings, even cricket has many such lessons.

3. Is the money not enough? If you answered yes to it then you are totally off the VC circle and startup world. The money is so very much but sadly there is no planner.

4. Is there a business plan underneath? A lot of founders get busy in choosing which hat to wear and miss out critical timelines to think about business plan. This is the leaking hole in the bucket. Founders will go to any extend to build customer traction without thinking about the means of revenue generation. Isn’t everything linked to revenue at the end when it’s a business unless it is pursued just as a passion? Is there anyone thinking on those lines – step by step?
5. Is there enough mentorship available? It’s saddening to see that what Indian founders need the most is mentorship, which they rarely get or it can be debated that they neglect a lot of what they get as they are in the awe of self-proclaimed success. It’s time to get reality check done. A serious and mature VC can do it, only if founders are not able to take a call. Why are we not seeing involved VCs on Indian boards?

When any or all of the above are compromised, we see things like VC Burn, lay-offs, bankruptcy, etc.

Let’s wait and see when Indian founders will open their eyes to the real world. That’s when we will start to see brightening results from startup India fringy.

Imagine something you created had the ability to get someone through a career-making presentation without them imagining the numbers dancing on the slides. Or that you could save someone the embarrassment of throwing up every time a ladoo was waved in their face on their wedding day. You would have every reason to be completely invested in the product you were building. This is what inspires the father-daughter duo of Bharat and Mitali Tandon as they constantly work on improving the elixir they have concocted for night birds – Morning Fresh, the antidote for nasty hangovers.

A rather dope solution

Mitali Tandon started out rather young. While still in college, she volunteered with the Spastic Society of Karnataka and was part of the ‘Young Enterprise’ group. She clocked short stints with the forensics department at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Bangalore, and took up advocacy at Samvada, an NGO backing Dalits and Adivasis in Karnataka, as their fundraising manager. During that time, she also involved herself in her father’s business that dealt in Animal health, biotech and pharmaceuticals. It was then that she had her eureka moment.

“Our parent company Sericare, is a pioneer in the field of sericulture and using silk as a bio-material,” says Mitali, founder and CEO of Morning Fresh. ” I was always encouraged to work with my hands and be independent in thought and action. During our research, we discovered that certain peptides from silk protein stimulate the production of ADH. ADH is an enzyme that naturally occurs in your liver, and that is what helps break down alcohol. But it gets overpowered when given excess alcohol to manage, thus resulting in hangovers. But peptides re-activate the enzyme. We were very excited by the potential of the idea, and decided to test our hypothesis. We did a preliminary study on rats. We got fantastic results, which was really our ‘aha’ moment and that encouraged us to start developing the product.”

They developed Morning Fresh as the only post-drinking solution to help relieve the after-effects of alcohol consumption. “Most people rely on home-remedies or informal methods. Our target audience is also very health conscious and we were particular about keeping the product natural, portable, and easy to consume,” explains Mitali. Completely natural, its key ingredients are silk protein hydrolysate, Vitamin C and Mulberry Extract. They created three flavours – cola, mint and strawberry, at Rs 100 a bottle.

Binging on strategy, expansion, and publicity

To build a business around the breakthrough, they evaluated the market size in terms of the number of cases of alcohol bought every year, and the number of bars and restaurants that serve liquor. The quick survey showed that binge drinking was on the rise, and that there was a proliferation of bars and restaurants in the city and youngsters were increasingly leading a fast-paced life. Their customers are young professionals between the ages of 21 and 35 years. They are social drinkers, party goers, have high disposable incomes, and are also often health and fitness conscious.

“Our model is to continuously and consistently set a relevant context of Morning Fresh to our customer by being visible and available at venues our target market spends time at. And, there is a pattern that emerges in their lifestyle and entertainment preferences, so, we want to be around when they are most likely to need the product. Like at a bar with the bill; ensuring that wedding planners make Morning Fresh available in guest’s rooms at the end of a sangeet or a cocktail reception; or even at the checkout counter of a liquor store,” explains Mitali.

“Customers expect us to be responsive 24/7. I have received calls at midnight and 2:00 am from customers who want the product ‘immediately’. We realise it is an occupational hazard, especially with a product of this nature and are working towards a sustainable solution,” she elaborates, regarding the next leg of their business.

No morning without Morning Fresh

Mitali wants Morning Fresh to stand for responsible drinking, by having the top 500 bars and restaurants in the country that support responsible drinking stock it as part of the drinking routine or drinking culture. “Drink Morning Fresh as your last drink of the evening and wake up fresh, ready to take on your day. This should become the new drinking routine,” says Mitali.

This is being done by associating with specific kinds of events in the city – like Kitsch Mandi, Strawberry Fields, SteppinOut Food Festival; through e-commerce platforms for easy access to information and sales, and tying up with distribution points like bars, restaurants, and wedding planners.

In the two months, since they have been in distribution, they have built a presence at Dewars Wine Stores, St. Marks Road, Red Fork and Hangover at Indiranagar, as well as events in venues like Shiro’s, Ub City, Church Street Social . With a user base of over 500, they have sold over 3,000 bottles, and had several little success stories that form the basis of their motivation. “When customers call us saying they made it through their own wedding because of Morning Fresh, and thank us for making sure they received their last-minute order in time or because they were able to get to work on time or catch an early flight, we know we are on the right track,” says Mitali.

Who’s the boss?

Between the 25-year-old daughter who wants to experience first and decide later, and the 62-year-old seasoned entrepreneur, who is set in his ways, their business is as varied a concoction as their product itself. “My father has had extensive academic and professional experience in the world of business, bio-technology and business development. He brings his collective experience, love for bio-technology, wisdom and foresight to the table while I add creative energy, new technology and out-of-the box marketing strategies. And as you would have guessed, the tug of war that ensues is mostly strategy related as we are trying to find a balance between traditional and modern methods of creating an impact.”

Also, in this space locally, there are certain herbal capsules, Mitali informs us. “However the functionalities of our products are very different. Abroad, there are several products that target the same segment; however, very few, if not none, are post-drinking solutions that use silk-proteins as their active ingredient,” she says.

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