Startup Saturday theme for the final leg of this year was Innovative Startups and was held at Sardar Patel Institute of Technology on the 13th of December 2014. All throughout the year Startup Saturday noticed innovation is a key difference in deciding whether one goes bust or gets a thrust and keeping this in mind, we had a great evening planned with three eclectic speakers, one product demo and two lightning pitches this month.

Our first speaker for the day was Swami Nathan, from V2 solutions, who spoke about how innovation is important for a startup to climb the success ladder. He emphasised on the importance of letting go of our Job mentality and creating value, especially in today’s time when startups are looked up with a mood of optimism. He asked each and every one present to track their daily progress and not just run behind the big picture as your daily learning takes you forward. One of the most important reasons for a startup to succeed depends on the simplicity and the beauty of the idea and that can be decided if your mom can understand your idea. If an individual has an ownership mind-set, innovation will follow through continuous transformations and breakthroughs.

Our second speaker was Akanksha Hazari from m.Paani who and aspires to build a better India by empowering the people from the bottom of the pyramid. She initially worked as a peace negotiator and during the course of the time realised her aspirations for running a business. She has travelled extensively in rural India to achieve her aspirations and started m.Paani with the philosophy of using mobile connectivity to solve India’s healthcare and educational problems. She spoke in the same length as Swami and asked people to look around for problems and resolve them.  Akanksha advised aspiring entrepreneurs not to start if they don’t have any fire to solve the problems that they have identified.

Our third speaker for the evening was Milap Shah, cofounder of Printstop India Pvt Ltd and Hokey Pokey ice creams. He is a dreamer and always looks for new ideas to take his business to the next level. He has immense faith in his endeavour and hence decided to bootstrap his venture which resulted him in clocking profits from the first year itself. He spoke one needs to nail your target audience and product and then go about with marketing the product as even great marketing can’t help a mediocre product turn successful. The idea is your baby but you need to iterate fast and adapt as per the market instead of being stubborn to help your product grow.

Our first lightning pitch for the evening was by Niyati Ingale from Dustless painting. She quit her corporate job to work with her father Mr Atul Ingale to introduce the concept of hassle free painting in Mumbai. They have created equipments that do the same work done by a manual labour without the worry of inhaling dust and getting the household electronics spoilt. During the course of the interaction, members from the audience recollected the horror stories associated with painting their houses and Ms Niyati was successful in driving home the point of using Dustless painting for a smooth ride next time around.

Our product demo for the evening was by Mrs Meena Sivan who introduced the concept of paper less business cards through her endeavour Sathsang. Her point being, we always carry our mobile phones along with us, and then why not use the same to send our business card to others. Through her we went to two different ends of the spectrum with Milap Shah from Printstop asking everyone to customise their business cards as per their needs on his website and Meena Sivan asking us to shun the same and go paperless. We can’t have the same business card for our personal and professional life and through Sathsang we can create multiple profiles and use them according to our needs. She also intends to use this platform on issues related to security and going cashless at even our local kirana vendor.

Our second lightning pitch was by Nikunj Jaisalmeria and Akshay Surana from Usedless paper. They collect the traditional ‘Raddi’ from individual households and recycle them. Their central belief is to educate individuals about waste segregation to make the environment around us cleaner and friendly. Their unique proposition is to provide discount vouchers instead of the traditional way of giving money for ‘Raddi’ and are currently providing integrated waste management solutions to households, corporates and educational institutes

All our speakers along with our lightning pitches kept the audience engrossed during the course of our jam packed event and the question and answer session took the event to a whole new level with interactions discussing the various intricacies in running a startup. The networking session was the icing on cake and gave everyone a glimpse of what lay ahead in the coming year. Startup Saturday could not have asked for a better end to the year and asked our peers in Mumbai to look forward to the events in 2015.

Written by:

SSMUM volunteers Vibhav Gupta and Jay Sheth

 Glimpses