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Tag: Entrepreneurship

  • 5 Most Successful Entrepreneurs From Small Towns

    5 Most Successful Entrepreneurs From Small Towns

    Over the decades, big ideas and successful entrepreneurs have made a mark in small-towns in India. Let’s check out some of such stories today.

    Vinod Khutal

    Khutal  grew up near Indore and studied architecture in B. Arch, before studying computer science engineering. An advertisement by game developer Gameloft on Naukri.com pursued him to a job in their Hyderabad sector, where he co-incidently became a game designer cum developer. In 2009, he founded Twist Mobile, with applications such as Age Effect. He partnered up with VServ to use their app-wrapper technology for ads embedded in applications. Success stories started after becoming the first Asian company with 10 million downloads on Noki’s Ovi market. “Today’s killer app is tomorrow’s delete,” says Khutal, who has now increased their branches into Android and ios apps market.

    twisted-mobile-virat
    Image Source: yourstory.com

    Sriram Subramanya

    The man grew up in Pondicherry and started job in the remote ancillary business, in Chennai and Bangalore and training in Berlin. He later moved into the desktop making business, migrating from print media to digital content. Sriram’s wife had to sell her jewellery at one stage in their life to fund the growth of their firm, Integra. A tight focus on brand value, quality, precision and business ethics helped grow the industry into one of the world’s Top 5 in publishing BPO. Integra also won the Gender Inclusivity Award from NASSCOM.

    sriram-subramanya
    Image Source: .pressideas.com

    Rohit Bhatt

    Bhatt grew up in Udupi, a small town in Karnataka, and studied computer science engineering. He went off with a Japanese company making Mac kind of products. Inspired by Japanese passion, determination, pride and quality inspired him also to strike out on his own era, in the area of Indian language computation. Rohit was also inspired by Taiwanese giants who started off with contract manufacturing then evaluated out with their own brands such as HTC and Acer. His startup, Robosoft, also combined product companies Global Delight (utility apps such as Camera Plus) and 99 Games (such as Wordsworth and ‘Dhoom 3’ game).

    Image Source: thehindubusinessline.com
    Image Source: thehindubusinessline.com

    Sanjay Vijaykumar, Sijo Kuruvilla George, Pranav Suresh :

     This trio was engineering students from Trivandrum, Kerala and started off their first business by selling SIM card packages for students of colleges. Their startup company MobME began with mobile content for movie and Television promotion. Investment also came from wealthy Keralians from India and throughout the world. But their biggest thought about the program was to amplify their success via Startup Village: to create an innovation hub like Combinatory and ultimately create a ‘Silicon Coast’, which eventually got support from the government as well as private sectors. As a result, Kerala has become the first state in India with an official student entrepreneurship cell policy, with the help of this trio.

    sanjay-vijaykumar-sijo-kuruvilla-george-pranav-suresh
    Image source: intoday.in

    Nand Kishore Chaudhary :

    The idea behind the story of Jaipur rags grew up in Churu, a small township of Marwar and started off his carpet business with weavers from the ‘chamar’ tribes, called as untouchables. Today, Jaipur Rugs is India’s biggest exporter of hand-knotted carpets, with a very small span of time. The company imports woven products directly to global markets, and employs a part of weavers, including tribal women, this is an initiative taken by them to promote tribe women. A focus on local inclusion and global market led the company to be profiled as a matter study by the late great Prof. C.K. Prahalad.

    nand-kishore-chaudhary
    Image source: outlookindia.com

    Do not make synchronized just by passion alone, keep an eye on the reality of the business. Things are changing. Always be in the self-learning mode, and think global as well as local, which is the key to make project as your dream project. Be ready to learn as well as not learn. Look for inspiration in all that is happening around you with stories about the successful startups.

    Do not underestimate the challenges of doing business in India locally, red-tapism, corruption, attitudes, non-paying corporate customers, slow and erratic government decision-making. But do not give in to corruption or something criminal offence, they will only waste your time, energy and reputation.

    Every place in India has its ups and downs. You have to learn how to find the balance to maintain the system.

  • Twitter : The 140 Characters Story

    Twitter : The 140 Characters Story

     

    When I was a kid a “tweet”meant birds chirping, but now not only has the meaning changed considerably, also it can have a superlative impact on social workers and their“followers”.  Twitter is not just helping in sharing news through status updates, it’s also creating news.

    Before the advent of Twitter, little did people knew about reading blogs and those who did never heeded them much for information but regarded them just for mere entertainment.  In a world where personal opinions and local news never reached to the ears of the masses, twitter formed its own house of media where news flew around the world in a matter of few tweets and re-tweets. Be it important news like Chennai Floods or be it the colour of the dress, twitter has sung them all to our ears.

    So how was this not more than 140 characters status update website created?

    For the neophytes, twitter is not the brain-child of a single man. Evan Williams is not the sole founder of twitter, as reported earlier by many news channels, but he is surely an imperative part of the team.  Later on the channels added the names of other founders yet leaving the name of one of the key founders unsung.

    Ex-googler Evan Williams had a start-up called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform. 

    Odeo’s Expansion was halted when Apple released iTunes podcasting. It was then when Evan, Biz Stone (another ex-googler) and Jack Dorsey (an Odeo employee) were forced to reinvent the whole thing.  The company started holding official "hackathons" where employees would spend a whole day working on projects. Rebooting the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where they broke up into teams to talk about their best ideas. Jack first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. As described by Dom Sagolla, one of the makers, “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.”

    One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber, presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company.  It was a dispatch service that connects a person to his/her friends through text messages on cell phone.  Everybody in the group got the idea instantly and was interested in making it. They called it Twttr.

    Later Noah Glass, the man behind making of Odeo, suggested the name Twitter. 

    Evan was cynical about twitter at that time but he put Glass in charge to build a version 0.1.The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped they’d have something to fall back upon.Everyone among the early members agrees that original hunch for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. But it was predominantly Noah who plunged for the project to be started.

    “There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, 'Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.' We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. It all fit together for me.”, says McClure, Founder of 500StartUps and Ex-Twitter Employee.

    The common SMS carrier limit then was 160, so any update longer than that would split into another message. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. Thus they settled on 140characters, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message.

    In August 2006, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter — an early 'ah-ha!' moment for users and company-watchers alike. By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.

    Odeo's investors didn't like Twitter, so Evan did them a huge favour by buying back all their stock and making them whole. Twitter was then 2 months old and had only 5000 users but Evan by then had the vision that Twitter had a great chance to become the next big thing.

    Five years later, assets of the company the original Odeo investors sold for approximately $5 million are now worth at least 1000x more: $5 billion.When the early investors were asked of how they felt after hearing about the success of the company, most of them believe that Williams gave them a shady deal.A few wish that Williams had been more upfront about what he was planning to do next, as they would have loved to re-invest in Twitter.

    After buying OdeoEvan  surprisingly changed its name to Obvious Corp.What he did next was shocking to all. He fired Noah Glass, one of the key founders without whom Twitter would’ve faintly existed today. Why you ask? The most common answer heard is that the two had clashing personalities. Everyone in the company says so. Basically: Glass is loud and Williams is quiet.

    Glass says the whole mess left him feeling "betrayed."

    "I felt betrayed by my friends, by my company, by these people around me I trusted and that I had worked hard to create something with. I was a little shell-shocked. I was like, 'Wait…what's the value in building these relationships if this is the result?' So I spent a lot of time by myself. And working on things alone."

    The company came through many ups and downs. Not only there were struggles in inventing a completely new idea but also there were in-house betrayals and shocks. Despite such a mess twitter made it through. In February of 2007 Jack wrote something which inspired everyone on board: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.“ In the same year twitter won an award in the Blog category at SxSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas.

    Twitter in the year 2011 was awarded the most used site. Today it has more than 1 billion users and a crap load of tweets per day.  The story behind the internet giant is not only inspiring but also eye opening.

     

  • How Flipkart changed the face of e-Commerce in India?

    How Flipkart changed the face of e-Commerce in India?

    Shopping in India has changed a lot over the years and people are shopping online like never before. One of the key reasons for making online shopping so reliable & convenient in India is the emergence of e-commerce giant Flipkart. The mega online shopping store was introduced to the industry 8 years ago and online shopping has revolutionised the e-commerce and instilled faith in great customer service since then. Flipkart is now arguably the country’s largest and most exciting e-commerce company. 

    Success stories around the world always follow the roads rarely taken by any and have struggle around and strong determination at the heart of the tale. Flipkart is no exception.

    They quit their jobs at Amazon, Bangalore, pooled together 4 lakhs from their savings and headed out to chase their dream. Today Flipkart generates over 1.5 crore of deals per day.

    Rewinding 8 years from now, working out of a two-bedroom apartment in the city’s upscale Koramangala suburb, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were just another couple of geeks nurturing their own big idea. Both the IITians had the idea to launch an online bookstore tailored to unique needs of Indian customer. They quit their jobs at Amazon, Bangalore, pooled together 4 lakhs from their savings and headed out to chase their dream. Today Flipkart generates over 1.5 crore of deals per day.

    ”In order to make sure that our targeting was right, we would give bookmarks to only those who were coming out with books in hands; the people who have made purchases.”

    “In the beginning it was a two-man show. We did everything ourselves” says Sachin Bansal.  Binny and he spent the second half of 2007 writing code for the site, picking up books from local book shops, dealing with customers’ queries and what not. Instead of blowing money on online and printed advertisements, they used to stand outside Gangaram Book stores on Church Street and hand over Flipkart bookmarks and pamphlets to the people coming out of the shop. Sachin had said in an interview, ”In order to make sure that our targeting was right, we would give bookmarks to only those who were coming out with books in hands; the people who have made purchases.” Despite many difficulties in the initial stages of getting the book vendors to tie up and permissions for the credit card payment gateway, the company later expanded and started selling electronic goods and lifestyle products.

    From previous experience in Amazon and studying current e-commerce customer behaviour they observed some loopholes in the implementation of their big idea and tried to fix them. They observed that not just companies were unable to satisfy the customers due to delayed deliveries, also the cost to customer was increasing. Moreover, Indian consumers may be shopping more online, but the vast majority still prefers to touch and feel a product before paying for it.

    Innovators Sachin and Binny came up with the concept of ‘Cash on Delivery’ and payment by card on delivery. This was done to soothe the grievances of all those souls who had given up on online shopping owing to bad shopping experiences. People just couldn't trust the online services. But with COD, they started to put their faith into it. What adds to the customer experience is the option to return if a customer does not like a product. If not for anything, Sachin and Binny Bansal can make it to the history books for this alone.

    Another problem was the supply chain system. If the goods are not delivered on time then it results in decrement of customer count by a large margin. This problem was tackled by launching their own supply chain management system. The company can thus ensure that customers receive their purchases within the promised time on paying no extra money. It also helps streamline payments.

    Flipkart was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done.

    Some other major challenges faced by the founders was to get tie-ups with major book-vendors and to get approval for the credit card payment gateway. Astonishingly today, Flipkart has almost each and every book vendor/publisher on board and even its own payment gateway, Payzippy.

    Sachin would say, Flipkart was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done. With a small capital of 4 lakhs rupees, their business idea of online book store has revolutionised business across India – a society not very popular for books. The company was set to raise funds of around 5000 crore in the year 2015 which is huge for a 7 year old company.  Flipkart has acquired a stature comparable to the major players like P&G and Tata Global Beverages.

    From handing bookmarks to handling a multi-billion dollar company, Flipkart's journey is no less than the saga of a typical Bollywood film having all those moments of a crisis, nail-biting finish, race against time and a victorious finale. Setting all the odds aside Flipkart has efficiently made it through the Indian e-commerce industry and inspired many young entrepreneurs to start working on their dreams.