Quickly after this, we moved on to five (en-) lightning pitches! While the crowd applauded the pitches made by Prateek Jain from AlumClub and the man who had sold 400 DVDs of Photoshop Tutorials in 45 days, it raised an eyebrow to online tutoring, Startup Café and corporate event engagement facilitator business. The pitches were critiqued by Aditya, Ranjan and Amit Singh from Headstart.
With so much now going on in everyone’s mind we broke for a quick break for a high tea sponsored by our venue host, Yahoo! Refreshed, all the expectant eyes now fell on the geek who had joined us to share his experience and thoughts. We were introduced to the techie-turned entrepreneur Shivakumar Ganesan (aka Shivku), founder of Exotel, a pure play SaaS company providing cloud telephony solutions for businesses.

Interviewd by Amit, Shivku, shared about his entire career journey starting from his days in yahoo as a programmer to now being the founder of Exotel, a successful startup with over 350 customers. He also talked about his not-so-successful startup RoopIt (a C2C market place where people sell their used goods) – which was a forerunner to today’s successful classifieds sites, which had born along with his hunt for a used refrigerator! As the discussion progressed, various questions were thrown at him which he answered very frankly, showcasing not just the experience he’s been carrying with him but also the persona he has turned out to be in this journey. He seemed to be a practitioner and preacher of Lean principles and analytics, which came out with the numerous examples he gave! He shared some thumb rules of SaaS businesses including:-
1. The Cost of Customer Acquisition should be recovered within 12 months
2. The Lifetime Value of the Customer should be at least 3 times the Cost of Customer Acquisition

Trying to catch-up with the running time, came the product demo from another young techie, Sujeet Kumar Mehta, who was so humble in spite of developing a breakthrough mobile-app “launchsimply” that has made heads turn towards him worldwide! The killer-mobile app that can launch any other app in a Smartphone, with just a flick of the mobile got a thunderous applause, with suggestions to rush and patent the same! After all, how many of us ever thought of building an App that can open the music player when you mock the action of strumming a guitar?!?

“It is not possible to improve things that you do not measure” 
At the end of the day, this message came out loud and clear. No matter what your business, one must understand the importance of identifying and measuring key performance indicators of your business! Also, Marketing is PULL while Sales is Push. So, it is these numbers that are going to decide how pushy you ought to be!

A typical score can be as below and you may also find a strong reasoning at the site behind the comparison.

Shameer has a lot of good advice for new entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, it was the well crafted “DecideQuick.com” that captivated much of the attention. So please do go online and try “DecideQuick.com” when you are making a buying decision next time.

Next up was our Main Speaker of the day and Managing Director of Kostal India, Mr. Suresh Bhaskaran. His speech was very inspiring for all the entrepreneurs present when he unleashed stories from his many years national and international leadership experience. Suresh is an adept not only in leading the Auto Manufacturing Giant Kostal in India at Vellore, Tamil Nadu, but also in the sound and solid theories of macroeconomics.

Being an excellent communicator, Suresh’s speech was very down to earth and convincing when he detailed the causes of recession. Thus the audience comprising mostly of the new entrepreneurs were very much convinced on the need to add their story in the new growth story of India vis-a-vis just wondering about the phenomenon of recession.

Second part of Suresh’s speech was to inspire the audience to make the ethical choices to make the growth story sound and sustainable. Suresh, thankfully, shared many of his personal experiences too to drive point home on the need for ethical business practices.

Our third speaker, Mr. Akram Feroze, virtually stole the thunder of the event. We know that it was around two thousand five hundred years ago that Lord Buddha had set out his historic journey from the pleasures of his palace. About 500 days ago, Akram Feroze had set out on a bicycle trip through the hearts of Indian villages. The comparison might be mind-boggling until you personally see and hear Akram.

Having traveled through many of the Indian villages plus having experimented with hitch-hiking trips to reach his talk stages all across India, the wisdom that has become part and parcel of this inspiring young man is nothing but amazing and inspiring. Probably it all started when Akram joined the 400 want-to-be entrepreneurs in the now famous Jagriti Yatra a few years back. Probably even before that, this young man had set his eyes on travelling all across India to know firsthand the lives in our villages.

Akram Feroze, 23, has been waiting for his Lakshadweep travel pass in Kochi when the unique opportunity to listen to him came for Startup Saturday Kochi. What started as a two year journey to discover India now looks destined to be a much longer one now that he has covered only Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Kerala, some in whole but most in parts. Akram is set to visit all districts of our huge motherland in the months and years to come. Akram Feroze can be followed at http://www.facebook.com/TheCycleNatak

While Startup Saturdays organized by Headstart Network all across India are nothing but journeys to discover and open up entrepreneurship potential in India’s young and not-so-young minds and the hearts, here is man who is on a lone journey on a bicycle to discover the true hearts and minds of rural India and its trials and tribulations. And there is a lot that every Indian entrepreneur can learn from this young boy of 23.

Short video of the event can be viewed at http://startupsaturdaykochi.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/startup-saturday-kochi-on-february-9-2013/

Startup Saturday Kochi can be followed at http://www.facebook.com/StartupSaturdayKochi and  http://startupsaturdaykochi.wordpress.com

The brainstorming session (where ideas are put up on the board and teams are formed) was every bit as interesting as a Lok Sabha horse trading jamboree. The hackers pitched their 9 ideas with a great zeal in an attempt to attract similar minded developers (4 were made).

The technologies used were equally interesting. Augustine introduced us to Angular.js. (Check out the website and watch the video, it’s ridiculously quick). It was married to Node.js and MongoDB for his idea, ‘DummyCandidate’. The app gives a foolproof way to identify students under the age of 18 who don’t have a government issued photo-id. We’re speculating that this is one of the first hackathons in India to use this stack.

Next up was Lost&Found by Tirthesh and Raxit.
It was a location based lost and found search built upon php/codeigniter,mongodb and Bootstrap. One can report when,where and what is lost (or found) and the app will notify in the future if any relevant match is found. An Android app was built as well.

Swapnil, Darshan and Satish presented their take on a visual user license agreement in the hope that people would at least take a glance at it before signing their lives away. It looked ‘inspired’ by a certain Metro UI. Stack used here was PHP/CodeIgniter/JQuery+ZurbFoundation

The last app built for the day was was an Android based citizen activism app by Basvaraj & team that enabled citizens to report irregularities like potholes, trees being felled, garbage, etc. to the local municipal body.

What was most exciting to see was that all the teams that set out to build their apps sat through the night and finished their apps to a prototype level. It’ll be nice to see more devs come in and scratch their ‘I-really-want-to-build-that-out’ itch.

The next edition of Hackerspaces will happen on the 24th and 25th of November. If you know someone who stops listening to conversations midway because they’re probably debugging some function in their head, do invite them. Like always, pizza and unlimited chai/coffee on the house.

(We thank our gracious hosts, Infibeam. That hot chocolate was mighty comforting. )

HeadStart is partnering with TLabs – a mentoring driven Startup accelerator based out of Noida. A Times Internet Ltd. initiative, TLabs offers seed investment of Rs 10 Lacs to entrepreneurs along with mentoring and access that a startup would need to thrive. We have known TLabs since its inception and firmly believe in the value it offers to the startup ecosystem in India. The same is only validated with a plethora of accelerators entering India in recent times.

We organize over a 100 Startup Saturdays across 11 cities a year, meeting over 6000 entrepreneurs. Startup Saturday does a great job at connecting entrepreneurs, sharing knowledge and learning from each others experiences. We took on the problem of Startup Hiring with HeadStart Higher recently and we continue to work with ecosystem partners to deliver value to startups in every possible manner. Our partnership with TLabs is a natural extension of what we do at Startup Saturdays and we are happy to bring this opportunity to our community.

With the digital boom in India, there are many untapped opportunities and new avenues opening up in the Internet, mobile & technology space in India. TLabs brings a valuable proposition for entrepreneurs starting in this space, right from funding, experienced mentors to invaluable Industry connections that helps you steer a fast growing company.

TLabs is now accepting applications for its third batch beginning early 2013 already and there is no better time for us to announce this association! Please feel free to email us on capital [at] headstart.in if you need any help w.r.t your application or simply visit the links below and apply to TLabs.

About TLabs | Apply to TLabs

On  Sep 8, 2012, we had our  inaugural  event with about 50 attendees at the Startup Village (startupvillage.in). Having successfully founded  1298.in, our main speaker Mr. Shaffy Mather was at his best sharing his learning and  experience with the audience.

Mr. Mather, apart from being the current economic advisor to Chief Minister of Kerala, also has many “entrepreneur learnings” under his belt which he meticulously shared it with the audience consists of new and aspiring entrepreneurs. Mr Mather was able to sprinkle humour throughout his presentation and made it very lively and effective. The humour took his great stories to greater heights and to more hearts and minds.
We also had felicitations from Dr. Jacob  Vadakkanchery who is the leading Naturopathy practitioner and the founder of the chain of Nature Life Hospitals (naturelifehospital.org) in Kerala. Dr. Jacob Vadakkanchery also talked about his entrepreneurial activities including establishment of Aruvi Nature Food Restaurant Chain and the  Chain of Nature Life Hospitals. Dr. Vadakkanchery also shared tips for the participants to take care of their health.

Our featured emerging entrepreneurs were Mr. Hisham Kabir and Mr. Chandu Sasidharan. Both Hisham and Chandu made very effective presentations about their respective companies at the event and shared their entrepreneurial experiences and lessons learned.

Overall, we had a great  and packed 3 hours of entrepreneurial talks with good amount of interaction from the audience!

Want to attend Startup Saturday in your city?

So, we did our second edition of Headstart Hackerspace at TLabs last weekend. This was the first ever hackathon that we organized in Delhi and it was also well received for a day-long event. We had participation from 6 teams and the idea was to build something using social media APIs like those of Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. Even when we only allowed 7 hours to code, four of of the teams finished their product in time.

The team Illuminati won the hackathon. They built a virtual events platform integrating all social media into a single place where people could log-on and stay in touch with events they could not participate in person. The team members Love, Gagandeep, Varun, Ayan and Himanshu demoed a tool “Lets’ Attend” integrating Twitter’s search and geocode with future plans to integrate Flickr, Facebook and Linkedin too. Congrats to the team Illuminati!

We will do our next hackathon on 15th Sep, again at TLabs. Hope to see you all there!

‘90% of the employment contracts are not enforceable by law’ said the mailer to the event. The theme for August’s Start up Saturday was ‘Legal’ and till the point I read this startling fact (mind you, 90% is like almost every contract) I never even thought of questioning what’s written in a contract. It’s written in my contract, so has to be enforceable by law, isn’t it? “Not really”, says Ramanuj Mukerjee, co-founder of ipleaders.com. Interesting. I had to attend the event to know more.

The event kick started with a quick round of introductions. We had entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, students and professionals from sectors as diverse as healthcare to ecommerce.

First up, Deepak spoke about his venture, craftedkids.com, http://craftedkids.com/ a platform to discover talent among children below 13 years of age. Deepak, an NIT Bhopal graduate was working in IT industry for 13 years when he decided to pursue his passion of starting up.  Not counting the infinite reality shows that restrict themselves only to singing & dancing, he reckoned that there is no credible platform for spotting talent such as painting, drawing, essay writing, playing musical instruments, puzzle solving etc among kids and this is how the craftedkids.com emerged. Craftedkids.com hosts competitions for children below 13 years, where the best talent is spotted both by a panel of experts and the parents themselves. The uniqueness of this platform is the registration for events is absolutely free and there are plans to speak to confectionioary giants like Cadbury, Nestle for sponsorship. It’s been great progress for company that is barely 4 months old.

Next up the most awaited lecture on ‘Psychedelic contracts – How to negotiate like a boss’ by Ramanuj Mukherjee, a law grad from the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata a top law school in India. After having worked for a corporate law firm in Mumbai on PE, M&A deals, he co-founded  ipleaders.com, http://ipleaders.in/ a website that helps make law more accessible and believes that ignorance of law is not an excuse. Every start up has a story, and even ipleaders.com has an interesting story to tell.

Back in 2007, Ramanuj was interning with a reputed law firm in Bangalore and an IT company that was unable to control attrition consulted this firm to enquire whether they could add a clause to employee contracts that would prevent their employees from leaving. Ramanuj’s team looked up the law and said such a measure is impossible and that every employee is empowered by the Constitution of India to leave at any point of time. Six months later, a young IT professional consulted Ramanuj’s firm with a employer-not-letting-me-go problem and when Ramanuj had a closer look at the IT professional’s contract – imagine his shock when he realized the professional worked for the same company he had clearly advised that they could not put in clauses that the employee had to pay for the damages, and that he cannot join competition. It was then, Ramanuj realized that like the young IT professional, many of us are unaware of our legal rights, and in an effort to make law accessible, the idea of ipleaders,com was conceived.

In the next one hour, Ramanuj educated us about contracts, about their widespread presence in every day life.  He spoke about stamp duty, about the facility of e-stamping contracts, restraint of trade contracts with employees/channel partners. He then moved on to negotiation of contracts and let out trade secrets like how lawyers always make a heavily one sided contracts and that you should give them just what they need, and fight everything else!

After a myth shattering lecture, we had a demo by Joseph who explained to us his product called Scrum Organizer, http://scrumorganizer.com/ a tool to improve productivity in companies. For companies that do not wish to invest in ERP and expensive project management software, Scrum Organizer offers alternative software that is simple, effective and convenient.

Concluding the day’s events, we had an interesting product called Mistakeopedia.com http://www.mistakopedia.com/. Srinivas, the founder opined that there is a mind boggling amount of information that is generated everyday on the social network, and his idea is to organize this data, which essentially goes waste. This knowledge waste management tool encourages users to be brave and share their mistakes, on topics ranging from politics, computers, confusion, children and many more.  While Srinivas is still figuring out how to monetize his product, Mistakeopedia.com has already generated waves in the start up space.

All in all, a wonderful session with interesting product demonstrations and the networking that followed encouraged introductions and ideas to be share. And a lucky few, even found a potential co-founder for their start ups.

~ written by: Aditya Ravi

Aditya Ravi

Aditya is a graduate from one of India’s top schools, and works for an exciting biotech start up in Bangalore. Outside of work, he likes traveling, reading, learning languages, analyzing sport and doing the occasional sprint in the neighborhood gym. Sooner than later, he hopes to start up in the healthcare space.

“A cynic is one who knows the price of everything, but value of nothing.”

- Some wiseacre

It was a meek looking Saturday afternoon. The rain gods were busy pouring their grace all over the city of joy.  Lethargy could have been excusable. But as we were to find out, in a room filled with passionate value creators, there is no room for laziness, only engaging dialogues. And thus we kick started our August edition of Startup Saturday, Kolkata. Albeit a little later than the scheduled time, the wait was worth the fun.

After a brief round of introduction from all the SS volunteers and the present guests, Mr. Niel Hirjee, Vice Chair of the Internet Society India, Kolkata Chapter, opened the floor. He discussed at length how ISOC aims at promoting the most fundamental right of freedom on the World Wide Web.  He pointed out how we, its users, can protect the interest of the Internet. Governments all over the world have a right to act as policy makers on the use of Internet, but in the process the right of expression and information cannot be compromised. Internet Society is a global organization, that attempts to bridge this gap by engaging in active dialogues with policymakers, and aims at making the Internet a sustainable medium, despite its exponential growth.

Up next was Mr. Pankaj Judge, founder and Chief DNA Officer of ‘Jiyo India’; a food startup specializing in healthy sandwiches and salads. A health freak, Pankaj had a desire to make a mark in the food business. And he enumerated some of his key learnings, which according to him, has helped him to continue on his path. He heavily stressed on the notion of frugality. He realized very soon that he wanted to handle something that was not extensive in capital investment, a characteristic very common in the traditional restaurant business. He wanted to be different, in a good way. And of course, he wanted to spread the idea of a healthy meal. With all of this combined, ‘Jiyo India’ emerged. A kiosk based, corporate sector, healthy and a quick combination of sandwiches and salads. ‘Jiyo India’ aims at reaching out to corporate house cafeterias to provide their over-worked employees a filling and a healthy, value-for-money meal. Pankaj stressed on the value-for-money concept. ‘Jiyo India’ aims at making value for money products, and not overly priced niches food products; and that, according to Pankaj, sits very well with his vision of frugality and efficiency. Today ‘Jiyo India’ has multiple kiosks in Kolkata at multiple IT firms, and is aiming to expand in the Delhi-NCR region. One key aspect Pankaj could not stress enough, was the importance of having a like-minded partner. He strongly believes, that in order to succeed and enjoy your entrepreneurial journey, an intellect/financial equal in the firm can never be a disadvantage. Howard Schultz of the world famous brand Starbucks would completely agree to Pankaj. In his book, “Pour you heart into it”, Schultz states that for any entrepreneur to be successful and grow, it is a must that an equal must be present; and if that equal turns out to be smarter than you, even better.

Mr. Vikram Kumar followed Pankaj’s act with some insightful tips on seeking investment, dealing with investor and company valuation. Vikram is the founder and CEO of ‘DataResolve Technologies’, an IT company dedicated to providing data security solutions. Perhaps the most important aspect that he shed light upon was understanding an investor’s psyche. He believes that an investor would only even consider talking about your business plans if he/she happens to like you. Such investors are of course individual angel investors, primarily the focal point of absolutely fresh companies. Vikram believes, the most important fact is that an investor should be able to relate to a founder, or a set of founders. To put it very simply, the investor should like you. This heavily echoes Aji Isaac’s idea delivered last month, of people ultimately becoming brands. Vikram stressed that ‘the individual’ is the ultimate litmus for a sound investor to get on board. This is not to say that a bad business plan presented by a very likable person will be entertained, but to stress on the fact that an individual must be looking to build personal relations first than just going after the money. He further stressed on realizing the importance of rejection; albeit hard, it is a tremendous learning device. For any rejection will only fix the error you never knew existed in your model/plan. Hence, be thankful for a rejection. Zero expectations will provide zero heartache. Vikram stated on the fact that one should be ready to deal with multiple people and personalities, because at the end of the day, only practice makes perfect. It is difficult to fake confidence, and the only way to actually gain confidence is to fall and get back up. A very apt time for the famous Batman quote, “We only fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves”. Though this may seem a very trite romantic pep up talk, but it comes from a man and an organization that thrived on it.

Mr. Umesh Bhutoria of ‘E-CUBE Energy Trading’ began by completely seconding Vikram’s point of view. E-cube is a roughly 3 yr. old company, that specializes in financing, project advisory and finance managing of energy sector companies. This was the first time that an energy centric entrepreneur had come up on Startup Saturday Kolkata. We were lucky to have Umesh who enlightened us on perhaps the most fundamental product known to mankind, energy. Umesh began by giving a brief overview of the coal-dominated energy sector. And then methodically shifted focus on where India stands in the global arena. Our energy consumption per capita ranks on the 4^th spot, whereas as our peak hour energy deficit is at approx. 10%.  Cutting to the chase, Umesh made us understand the tremendous value-creation opportunities that exists in our country and how this sole fact was his motivation to collaborate with his brother and co-start a firm that focuses on handling energy assets and commodities.

The rain-laden clouds were still flirting with the firmament by the time we concluded our presentation section, a good time for some tea, samosas and networking.  A huge shout out to Niel Hirjee, Pankaj Judge, Vikram Kumar and Umesh Bhutoria for sparing their valuable time for our small little community that we are hoping to expand beyond measures. And a huge shout out for all those in whose company this great evening was spent, and for all you other folks out there reading the post and going green in envy, waiting to attend the next session!

Do get in touch with us on kolkata@headstart.in  for any feedback and/or if you would like to join our volunteer team at SS Kolkata! We strive to keep adding value to and learn from the entrepreneur society of Kolkata.

See you at the next Startup Saturday!

Cheers,
Team SS Kolkata

Arjun Jalan is a volunteer with Startup Saturday since July, 2012