As the multitude trudges along for the commencement of the Startup Saturday Event, the enthusiasm of the early bird attendees is tremendous. As the world elsewhere wakes up groggily to a lazy weekend, the enthusiasts living in the world’s second fastest growing startup ecosystem are already alive and kicking as Startup Saturday is about to start at Embassy Golf Links.

One of the speakers is busy furiously typing away on his tab, preparing his presentation. Gopal Karmakar, Headstart Volunteer, initiates an interesting activity, a “high-five” session where every attendee answers three simple questions about themselves to everyone around them while they high-five one another: Who they are? What they do? Why they are here? Three simple steps to an infinite possibilities. Gopal gives the attendees an idea about the Headstart movement, its achievements and the roadmap forward!

Gautam, one of Headstart’s veterans, spoke about Headstart. The Headstart movement has spread to 16 cities since its inception in 2008. Bangalore and Hyderabad recently celebrated the Centennial Edition of Startup Saturday while Mumbai will celebrate its Centennial Startup Saturday in August. For more on this, click here.

Headstart is in the process of building and improving the startup ecosystems in Tier II cities such as Raipur, Bhopal and more. The launch of Headstart Vizag and Raipur are in August while Bhopal is due for its launch in September. The primary goal is to improve existing ecosystems and connect lives.

The event also saw Aravindh give us a short insight on Headstart Higher, a platform for startups and jobseekers to interact in a speed-dating format.

One of the delighting facts about the event was that female participation was astonishing, clearly signifying the growth of women entrepreneurship in the startup ecosystem. Incidentally, Headstart’s WE(Women Entrepreneurs) Initiative is specifically designed to provide support systems to women in various stages of entrepreneurship, which involve interaction with industry experts,opening up new network, and opportunities for the women in the startup ecosystem.

Startup Saturday’s Demo Stage has featured a few familiar names in the industry. Flipkart gave a demo day at an event in 2009. 2010 saw OLA give its pitch at a Startup Saturday event, and, now, in 2016, we hope to have another such unicorn come up.

The end of the announcements and introduction marked the beginning of the first session:

Cost Effective UX Research in building a product – Veena Sonwalkar

Veena Sonwalkar, Group Lead of Institute of Customer Experience at Human Factors International, began the session at Startup Saturday with her talk on UX research. The talk covered user research, when one should speak to users, design methods, user research methods. The session had a number of tips and tricks for user research For more on this session:

http://headstart.in/blog/2016/08/16/user-research-101/

Demo Stage 10 min pitch and 5 min Mentor questions

Startup: searchtrack.co

Google has been to a boon to all curious souls with a zest to research topics of their interest. Often, one encounters the problem of organising bookmarks and information. Searchtrack aims to keep all your research in one place and share your research accordingly.  The 10 minute pitch session was followed by a 5 minute mentoring session by a panel with experts from Xobin, VRDaily.in, CheckIn and BHIVE Workspace.

 

Tanushree Deb Barma: Talk about Karnataka Startup Cell

Tanusree Deb Barma, MD of KBITS, gave a session on initiatives taken up by the government to encourage entrepreneurship. Initiatives taken up by the Government of Karnataka have yielded in over 4000 startups with an average valuation of $7,300,000. Tanusree outlined the vision of the Karnataka Government towards the startup ecosystem.

Vision

To create a world class startup ecosystem through strategic investment and policy intervention, leveraging the robust innovation climate.

• 20,000 tech based startups

• Mobilising 2000 Crores (Min 800 Crores)

• Impact Karnataka Initiative: For Impact Startups

• New Age Innovation Network

• Spin off technology for startups

Tanusree also spoke about certain initiatives taken up by the Government of Karnataka to boost the ecosystem which are listed below:

• Nasscom Startup Warehouse

• IAMAI Mobile 10x incubator

• Bangalore Bio-Innovation Centre

• 91Springboard : 150 seats supported by KBITS scholarship through a public–private partnership

Creativity In Product Design – Pavan Soni

Pavan Soni, Innovation Evangelist at WIPRO and Research Fellow at IIMB, blew the attendance away with his session on creativity and product innovation. For those of you looking at creating game-changing products, you can not miss this article:

http://headstart.in/blog/2016/08/16/creativity-in-product-design/

Product Teardown – Jasmeet Singh Sethi

Jasmeet Singh Sethi, Co-Founder and CEO of Tinkerform, began his session with the product teardown in which he shared a number of newbie mistakes that ruin the user experience. This session involved a lot of interaction with the audience as a number of questions being asked by the speaker to the audience and vice versa.  The session proceeded to Jasmeet sharing his experience with designing ListenIn, an app which Tinkerform designed. For more on Jasmeet’s session:

http://headstart.in/blog/2016/08/17/product-teardown-session-key-takes/

The event concluded with some questions, selfies and networking. Come to Startup Saturday if you want to get inspired, learn and network with the best. For more, click here.

Written by Arko Ganguli, Devleena Neogi Bansal and Suhas Mallya
Photos by Leela Sai Dev