What is the start-up story behind your venture?

pdStartup is one stop solution for startups and small companies to get consistent branding through functional designs. As an identity design studio, most of our clients would come to us with request to further their services with print and web designing. That is when we scrutinized the issues faced by our clients. After getting the logo designed by us, the client had to scout for other agencies for print and web solutions. The task turned out to be complex and redundant as they needed to explicate the same concept again, which may/ may not corroborate our design approach. We identified a need and decided to extend our services to offer one-stop solution for Identity, Print and Web, so clients could enjoy our design expertise for consistent branding without expending too much effort in terms of money and time.

Who is your target audience?

Like, I mentioned, we focus on reducing a startups time to market by partnering with them to develop functional designs for their brands. We also work with small businesses. An established company with an urge to enhance their brand recognition is also our client with whom we work to not only develop a new look but also develop designs that are in sync with their vision and brand values.

Who are your competitors? How do you try to differentiate yourself?

A small ad agency, creative studio or freelancer can pose as a competition to us.  But what we offer is of greater value. We have a well-defined process, wherein, we read our clients brand values, conduct research regarding their industry, competition and clientele. Based on which we develop designs that are functional in terms of effectiveness to communicate about the company and deliver results. With the breadth of our services, we maintain consistency in designs to build the brand the company aspires. Other key aspects about us are we are valued for the service and quality we offer and pride ourselves in establishing a close and open working relationship with our clients at every step.

How do you market your initiative and educate prospects?

Design is a highly relative service (what sounds music to you may sound noise to your client) so we aim at high client satisfaction, so that the client refers us to his/her network, and showcases our portfolio in different media.

Another initiative that we are focusing on currently is to develop knowledge base for entrepreneurs and small companies. We then broadcast the information through our blogs, twitter and facebook fan page. The idea is to develop a community of entrepreneurs and small business and aspiring entrepreneurs to discuss about their marketing initiatives, more specifically about brand designs.

What are your future plans?

Currently, we serve domestic clients and referred international clients. As per the preliminary study we have conducted, there is tremendous scope in the international market. So we plan to expand in the US, Middle & Eastern Europe and Australia region.

Another plan is with respect to the operational model; designers are scattered across India and mostly come from small towns and need to relocate in big cities for a career as designer. We are working on a novel operating model to be able to reach them in their cities and work with the best talent.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs?

For a budding Entrepreneur I have a three pointer advice. Apart from passion, drive and love for what you do, you need to

1. Be Pragmatic – Always have a back up.
2. Hire people who enthuse your company – Experience is secondary. A great hire will ensure your clients are delighted always.
3. Have a plan and stick to it. If it doesn’t work remember you already have a back up.

Our take on PDStartup:

Some of the first things you would want to get done as a startup are designing a professional looking logo for your firm,  developing  & hosting a smart website and creating attractive business cards!  pdStartup is not only a one stop shop for all these services but offers them at affordable prices as well.

We interviewed Mr. Mayur.K.Motwani (CEO,Styx Infogateway LLP) about his venture thehangout.in.

The Hangout is the perfect place to find about all those places where you can hang out with your gang or your special ones.

1)      Briefly, what is TheHangout.in about?

 TheHangout.in is all about enabling its users to hangout better by giving them information about various places to hangout in India. It is India’s 1^st Local Hangout Search Service. A visitor to our website can obtain information like the address and contact nos. etc. of various places to hangout like coffee shops, eat-outs, lounges or even the street food stalls and save himself/herself the torture of wasting their time on asking the address or taking directions from all kinds of people in that area, thus enabling him/her to spend more quality time to hangout with their friends or loved ones.

2)      What gave you the idea for TheHangout.in?  How has the product in its current form changed since its original idea?  What have been your biggest obstacles?

 The original idea for TheHangout.in was of a social networking portal but after analysing the social networking space for a few months we felt that the idea of launching a social networking website was not very much challenging and different enough for us due to the presence of a large number of social networking portals on the internet. The idea of TheHangout.in then went under a drastic change when I (Mayur Motwani) and Mr. Lokesh Motwani were very frustrated on a Sunday when we were not able to locate a very popular street burger stall in Thane in Mumbai and ended up wasting more than one and half hour just to locate it. It was at that moment that it came to our mind to start with a hangout search service which would save other people the kind of torture we had faced that day and in this way the current idea of TheHangout.in was born. There were many obstacles on the way to launch TheHangout.in as it is today but, I would say the biggest obstacles were of tracking down the types of places people would hangout at and also of getting information about places to hangout in India. To overcome these obstacles we undertook a study through our sources to understand at what type of places, people in India like to hangout at and in the process the innovative and very different categories of Street Treats and Highway Hangouts were evolved. After overcoming this obstacle, the only major obstacle that remained was of getting information about places to hangout in India which we were able to overcome only with the help of many of our loyal visitors who since the pre-launch, till today keep on giving us various details about different places to hangout in India. We are highly indebted to them for all the information about various hangouts we have got on TheHangout.in.

3)      What are the barriers of entry in such a listing venture? How is this service different from search engines? What core technologies do you use?

Frankly speaking, there are almost no barriers if one is truly committed towards entering in such a venture. It’s very true that barriers give us the opportunity to re-think and come up with an innovation to breakthrough that barrier. But, if one thinks at it from a realistic view, the biggest barriers of entry into such a venture are of lack of funding for gathering information about various places all over a vast and diverse country like India and the presence of many corporate giants in this industry which makes it very difficult for one to be competitive enough in the market. TheHangout.in is different from search engines in a way that it gives local information like the address and contact nos. of places to hangout in an area. It saves its users the pain of putting all the types of keywords one could think under the roof and still not finding that perfect category of places to hangout by enabling them to search for the type of hangout they want to search by simply clicking a button. Also, TheHangout.in is different from other local search engines in a way that it is focused primarily on finding information about places to hangout almost anywhere and everywhere in India and is not limited to only a handful of cities in the country. In today’s world, technologies keep on changing at blazing speeds replacing the older technologies by performing many times faster than the old ones. The basket of technologies that we use are very sophisticated and helps the users of TheHangout.in to search for the places to hangout even by the names of buildings, street names or even by the name of a landmark nearby as opposed to the technologies used by many of our competitors which restricts them to search only by their pre-specified areas.

4)      What is the major traffic to your website? What marketing and promotional methods do you find most effective?

 The major traffic to our website is from Mumbai since it is a city which adapts to the new trends very easily but, we also do get a good amount of traffic from other cities like Pune, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore etc. and also from many other non-metro cities like Nellore, Amritsar etc. Currently, we are trying to promote TheHangout.in through channels like Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing and SMS Marketing. But, for us the social media marketing through facebook, twitter & other social media marketing channels and Internet Marketing through Google adwords have been most effective.

5)      How do you source your location listings? What is the process of being listed on the website?  What checks do you have in place for accuracy of information?

 There are two types of listings on our website, free listings and premium listings, the free listings only have certain essential information such as address and contact no. etc. whereas the premium listings have almost all the information about a particular place to hangout including the personalized photos and videos galleries for it & the offers going on at that particular hangout and also, the premium listings are listed above the free listings, thereby getting more focus of the visitors. The free listings are listed on the website with the help of the submission of listings by our registered users and also by our own independent research for an area whereas the premium listing of a particular place to hangout is listed on our website when one of their authorized personnel chooses to get their hangout listed on our website. One can get their listing done on our website by two ways; the first one is by becoming a registered user of our website and submitting their listing as a free listing. The second one is by opting for a premium listing by shooting us a mail at sales@thehangout.in. Our sales department then takes the customer through the process by explaining him/her the procedure and by discussing the charges for premium listing of their hangout. The listings on TheHangout.in are subject to a check by the visitors as well as our own research panel. The visitors can report to us if they find any information about a particular listing as incorrect or abusive by using the “Report Incorrect” and “Report Abuse” buttons on the website.

6)      What is your target market for consumers?

 Currently we are targeting at the visitors to our website between the ages of 18-35, as people in this age group have larger access to internet and spend a lot of their free time in leisure activities. Also, a large share of the internet surfing population in India is from this age group. But, by saying this we don’t want to deny the fact that everyone irrespective of their age nowadays do like to spend a quality time by hanging out with their friends or their loved ones and TheHangout.in proves as an apt medium to help them hangout better.

7)      How do you make revenue? Can you share current revenue figures?

 We get majority of our revenue from two sources, through banner advertisements and through the sale of premium listings on our website. At this moment, it would be difficult for us to share our current revenue figures but, we for a fact can surely say that the revenue that we are currently making is sufficient enough for us to fund our cost of operations as well as invest in the growth of our venture.

8)      How many people are included in your startup team? What are the skills and the experience that they bring to the table? Do you think it is essential for the founders to have experience before starting up a venture?

 Currently our startup team includes only 2 people i.e. I (Mayur Motwani) and Mr. Lokesh Motwani. I, Mayur Motwani, a graduate in BMS (Marketing) from Mumbai University, am primarily concerned with the Operations and Marketing aspect of our Organization whereas Mr. Lokesh Motwani, currently pursuing MMS in Finance from Welingkar Institute of Management, looks after the Finance and Administration department. I have a hand on experience of Field Marketing of services like Market Research Services, Web Designing Services etc., while Mr. Lokesh Motwani has been actively managing his Family Business of Garment Exports since 2004. Experience is always a welcome ingredient in the mix of every startup’s core points. But in the case of Styx Infogateway LLP, of which TheHangout.in is the premiere venture, which is primarily a service solutions provider in the web arena, experience is not absolutely essential as the business model requires constant change in organizational dynamics.

9)      How would you define success for your venture?

 Success for our venture means every Indian who wants to have a good time or just wants to get away for a little while should think of TheHangout.in every time he/she wants to get out and have some fun. Not to mention, the Streetside Thelawalas who will be jumping around the aisles with all that added collateral publicity.

10)  What are your future plans for the next 6 months? What are the New Features that you would like to include in your website?

 The future plans for the next 6 months currently I would say are to aggressively market our service through various marketing mediums and to also make our services available to a wider audience through more channels other than only the internet. It is too early I think to let everyone know what New Features we would be including on the website since many of the New Features are still under testing mode. But, I could say this with a lot of confidence that there are a host of New Features that you would see getting included on TheHangout.in very soon which would ease the usability of the website and enhance the experience of the users on the website.

Our views on thehangout.in

Thehangout.in is an interesting venture.TheHangout.in, India’s 1st Local Hangout Search Service which enables you to search for the places to hangout in your city, let it be any local club, theatre, restaurant or even the local pav-bhaji waala’s thela.

The website is extremely user friendly and well- designed.All-in-all this is the perfect information providing website.

We wish the team of thehangout.in all the very best ! 

Do you have any questions for Mr. Mayur or his co-founders? Post them in the comments here and we’ll ask the team to respond.

We interviewed Mr Rohan Rehani of EntrAct Consulting. EntrAct Consulting is a fast growing consulting firm in the Indian startup space.

1.) What is your startup about?
EntrAct Consulting is an intermediary between Entrepreneurs and Investors. Startups are generally of amongst three types – an unproven idea, a small business running successfully at a local scale and a company which is looking to expand  from is current base and structure. Each of these types has its own requirements for growth in terms of mentorship, team formation,  financial planning and most importantly, funding. From germinating an idea by providing the necessary support framework and  guiding the entrepreneur to getting the right team and attaining initial seed funding, to helping an established business attain funds for expansion, EntrAct helps connect startups to mentors, partners and Investors necessary for their respective growth.

Very broadly, the services we provide to Entrepreneurs and Investors are as below:
1. For Entrepreneurs / Startups
After understanding the requirements of the business, we start with a feasibility review where we get inputs and insights from experts in the relevant sector. From helping with formulating and framing the business plan, getting industry experts onto the advisory board, streamlining the business and finally helping the entrepreneur get its initial growth or push and then help them connect with Investors until funding is procured, we work with the startup in every step of the way.
2. For Investors
Besides the most obvious offering of bringing forward to investors quality projects that have been streamlined  to have the potential to grow exponentially, we also scout amongst our network of Entrepreneurs for businesses and hence connect them to the most appropriate quality projects.

2.What is the story behind EntrAct Consulting? What led to the inception of EntrAct?
Shruti had her own flower retailing business servicing major corporates in NCR. In 2007, she got the opportunity to go to ISB, Hyderabad where the faculty took her business and made into a project and business plan, showing her the field of opportunities available for her business. Having an entire B-School analyze your business and its potential can really be an eye opener! Subsequently, Shruti went through the process of raising Debt as well as VC funding for her venture
With this experience, she was asked to be a support consultant to the first batch of 29 women entrepreneurs for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 women initiative. It was here that Shruti realized that a lot of the 29 women were at the same stage she was before she joined ISB – i.e. naive about the potential of their businesses and with limited idea of how to grow it.
It was with this in mind EntrAct was started. As with any venture, getting the team right for EntrAct was essential as each member needed to complement the others strengths and experiences. Some of us have experience working with startups while others bring on board their networks of Investors and Mentors. We’re trying to do what ISB did for Shruti – show entrepreneurs the true potential of their business and put them on the right path for growth and ultimately connecting them to potential Investors.

3.What experience do the founders bring and what are their roles?
Having started recently ourselves, there are no fixed roles or defined KRA’s for the founding members of EntrAct. That being said, there are of course, somethings unique about each of us. Here is some information about our team:-
Shruti Dhanda
Before EntrAct, Shruti, an ISB alumni, had successfully raised funding for her own company before selling it in 2010. She has also worked in various capacities with other startups in their own fund raising process. Shruti helps our Entrepreneurs see the largest possible picture in terms of what their business idea can grow to.
Sanjeev Sapra
Sanjeev is a Chartered Accountant with over 20 years of experience with extensive experience in diverse sectors ranging from Media, Telecom, Technology, Infrastructure, Manufacturing, Trading/Retailing, Healthcare, Hospitality, Education etc. Sanjeev looks into the financial aspects and viability of all the projects that come our way.
Kuldeep Singh
Presently pursuing his MBA from IIM Ahemdabad, Kuldeep has a prior experience in IT in the Insurance domain. Kuldeep brings on board his excellent networks of Entrepreneurs, Mentors and Advisers.
Rohan Rehani
After his engineering, Rohan has worked in various roles in manufacturing, marketing and sales in the Manufacturing and Dot Com sectors. Before EntrAct, he has also worked with a number of startups in their initial stages in order to help them gain market traction. Rohan mainly  is responsible for the Business development. He also supports the entrepreneurs in the ideation stage by evaluating their growth plans and handholds them during each phase in its execution.

4.Which is the most popular feature of your service and which one are you most excited about? Who is your target audience?
I think what appeals to our clients the most is that we adopt a very hands on approach with our projects. We become somewhat of a guiding partner in the process.
Due to this approach, we tend to take an active part in planning of vision, growth, scalability and sustainability of the business. This, in fact is quite appealing to our entrepreneurs as we try and see their business in a new light.
Our target audience is entrepreneurs and startups who are looking to grow, but don’t know how.

5.Who are your competitors? How do you try to differentiate yourself?
There is no competition in this field per se. The requirement is huge and there are not enough players to serve it.
Our differentiation lies in the fact that we aim to create value by adding something new and different to the idea / business in its existing form. By helping the entrepreneur look beyond the obvious, we create the distinguishing factor that makes the venture appealing from an Investors perspective.

6.How did you fund the venture? Do you have external funding? When did external partners step in?
EntrAct is self funded through savings and reserves of the partners. As our operational costs are relatively low, we do not need any external funding and so do not have any external partners.

7.How do you plan to market your initiative and educate prospects ?
We follow a very basic approach to marketing:-
a) We intend to meet as many Entrepreneurs as possible by attending Startup Meetings that happen in and around Delhi.
b) Increasingly participate in Startup Forums online to garner more visibility
c) Referrals from our existing clients.

8.Can you disclose statistics? User base? Revenue? Profitability?
Presently we have 9 projects ranging from F&B, Telecom, Music, Sports, Automotive, Hospitality and Education sectors. 2 projects are in the idea stage, 4 are post revenue and pre-profit  and 3 are post profit.
We have not had our first real success yet, but are expecting a major round of funding happening within the next two months to one of our projects. Talks are on at the moment and we can’t divulge any more information.
Once we have our projects rolling we will publish our successes.

9.What are your future plans?
We’re currently increasing the projects in our pipeline. Also, as I mentioned earlier, we have not yet had our first success. We expect that to happen within another two months. Once that happens, we will also take a more aggressive approach to marketing.

Our take on EntrAct Consulting:
Most good ideas fizzle out because they remain just that! In fact, it is said that 90% of startups fail within the first 120 days! Therefore, it is imperative to execute an idea by involving the right people and making smart decisions. By promising to offer proper guidance, EntrAct Consulting seems to be the guide startups have been searching for!

We interviewed Mr Prabhat Kiran about his venture Clayology.com. He is the Founder & CEO of this firm which has been helping companies to adopt ‘fresh’ techniques for their marketing campaigns.

What is your startup about?

Clayology Interactive Agency is a Social Media Marketing & Production company with a twist.

We understand that the success of every viral campaign, be it a viral video, game or an application is in its uniqueness.  Claymation or Stop Motion Animation is something quite different and unique because it does not involve computer generated avatars. They are hand-made and completely organic.

So, when we came up with this unique combination ( Claymation and Viral seeding) we were greeted with open hands by Media Agencies.

What is the story behind Clayology? What led to the inception of Clayology?

I have been in the internet marketing industry for quite sometime.  I have been an Online Marketing & Brand Management Consultant for various companies and so always had to come up with tailor-made strategies for each of them.

Industries like Travel, Gambling etc had high competition. The media buying slabs sometimes don’t even justify a decent break even for them.
I was consulting for a poker company in China , they wanted to tap the local market with local games.  We decided to go with a viral game campaign with a ‘fresh’ approach.

The so called ‘fresh’ approach clicked and that inspired me to come up with an Agency with a twist..something that grabs attention & something that cannot be replicated easily.

What experience do the founders bring and what are their roles?

The company has been founded by Prabhat Kiran who is a Social Media Strategist, who has developed strategies & consulted for many A list Venture funded companies in India, Hong Kong, China & UK.

The expertise lies in Social Media Marketing, Optimization, Branding Establishing Features, Functionality and Traffic Promotions.

He has experience with various Web 2.0 promotions like Viral Marketing (Video, Games), Third-party Applications, WOM, Video Promotions, Pod casting, Google / Yahoo Verticals, Mobile Marketing, SEO, PPC  etc  and has covered various researches on segments like Social Network / Online Video / Media / Web 2.0 platforms.

Each and every member of the team has ample experience and a strong background to boast in their respective forte.

Which is the most popular feature of your service and which one are you most excited about? Who is your target audience?

The most popular feature of our service is of-course claymation.  Since we are a B2B company we target Media Agencies in major.

Who are your competitors? How do you try to differentiate yourself?

Our competitors are mainly companies like Webchutney &  -  involved in viral creation and campaigning but since we are exclusively into claymation, we have an edge over them.

How did you fund the venture? Do you have external funding? When did external partners step in?

All the funding had been raised internally.  We are negotiating with some Venture Capitalists at this moment.

How do you market your initiative & educate prospects?

Since our target is Media Agencies, we have customized brochures and show-reels  for them.  We do a lot of Media Buying in Facebook and Google Adwords and also do Organic Optimisations.

Can you disclose statistics? User base? Revenue? Profitability?

Its too early to disclose.

What are your future plans?

We are on some plans which are still on paper but you can expect a new venture from  Clayology in next 6 months time.

Our Views on Clayology.com

Claymation constitutes only around 5% of the Rs 1200 crores Indian animation sector, however it is slowly becoming a force to reckon with.

Although firms like O&M and Vaibhav Studio are present in this area, Clayology.com is the only Indian venture which combines social media with claymation and shall surely reap the benefits of being a first mover in this category

What is your startup about?

What is the story behind Innoz Technologies.  What led to the inception of SmsGyan?

Initially we were taking the content from free sources. Now SmsGyan is joining into partnerships to provide users with more accurate results. Moreover we are trying to do a step more than just provide information. We have already partnered with companies like LifeMojo, Sutrajobs, etc. So we also act as a medium for such companies to let their services get noticed and people interested can apply via sms!

Taking LifeMojo as an example, our users get to know about LifeMojo services on queries about health and if they are interested we let them sign up via sms.

Which is the most popular feature of your service and which one are you most excited about?

What made you expand your services from the sms domain to instant messaging? Do you expect this to affect your sms revenue generation?

You provide several types of information services to users that can be accessed by using a combination of keywords.  How do you educate your user base on how to use your existing and new services?

Keywords is always an issue in this kind of a scenario. We do have a help option to give the users a list of keywords. We do have the spell checks working and we are trying to reduce the hassles of keywords by accepting the requests and analyzing what the user actually wants. To educate users about the new keywords, we make sure the promotion of the new keyword is top priority.

For us personally it was a big learning point. Moving from just the technology to actually looking into financial points too. There were some good advices and we are working in too.

SmsGyan has succeeded in getting a lot of PR coverage from print and web media.  Whats your secret?

The secret is the service. When we talk to people about it, they try it out and like it.

Each request costs the user Rs. 3. So the costs are covered if we mange to answer a considerable amount of queries per month.

In our beta stage we had around 25000 unique users and have successfully answered more than 3 lakh queries.

What are the future plans for SmsGyan and Innoz Technologies?

We interviewed Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra about their startup creADivity

Please explain what your company does in a few simple words

creADivity is an online platform for creatives and clients to come together for building advertising and design solutions for the industry. With more than 550 freelance creatives (mainly design talent, marketing freelancers and students, and agency professionals) available on the platform, we are able to generate designs to satisfy real life business needs such as advertisements in print and digital forms, OOH designs, logos, calendars, web UIs etc. for our clients

Could you tell me a bit more about each of the founding team members’ background and their role in the startup?

Sitashwa: has experience in CRM Consulting and technology. He has been working with creatives for the past 5 years and has created quite a few commercial and non-commercial ventures over the best part of his adult life

Manik:  is the quintessential business development guy! He also has experience in technology development and creating and managing a digital platform.

How did your previous experiences help you during the first 10 months of running CreADivity?

Previous experience has been helpful in creating processes in creADivity. Both of us have worked for large MNCs and that helps us envision what a large company might look like and processes that would be required to sustain it. A lot of that experience is going to be useful when creADivity begins to grow big.

What made you guys take the plunge for this idea?

We have been passionate about the idea for a long time now. There have been 2 main reasons – a. Joy and challenge of creating something from scratch, b. Knowing that something like creADivity could really add value to businesses

What does your business model look like now compared to when you started?

Oh, there have been a lot of changes. When we started we were just thinking about contests and were under the impression that delivery would take care of itself, but over time we realized the challenges and quality related issues. So we have brought-in things like creADivity Champions and independent Account Managers on the platform. It keeps evolving!

When did you decide for yourself that you will one day start a business, any particular trigger?

Manik: Selling has been in the blood   Have always enjoyed creating things from scratch and talking about them. creADivity became inspiring when I realised that I could make it something very big.

Sitashwa: Creating teams and products has been a passion for a long time now. Have been very enthusiastic about creADivity right from the beginning.

Do you have any particular role models that you follow and why them?

Manik: Sachin Tendulkar – for me the idolising starts and stops there! The guy has been phenomenal, amazing strength of mind, great amount of passion and dedication & he has kept is foot firmly grounded.

Sitashwa: I don’t have any role models as such but I keep learning from the people I meet. It could be someone with vast business experience, it could also be someone from the street – all have a lot to offer!

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Thinking what new features should the new creADivity platform have, what people to meet for advice, what customers to talk to

Did you have any interesting bootstrapping experiences, you would like to share?

One needs a lot of help when bootstrapping! We got lucky a number of times when people came forward and gave us work or partnered with us to get some work done for a low cost.

How did you get involved with TiE and how has their support helped you to succeed?

We participated in TiE Entrepreneurial Acceleration Program (EAP) -  a venture competition in which 48 ventures participated. We were among the 3 winners and received networking, mentoring and investment related contacts and advice from TiE. We got be partners of TiE at the TiE Summit 2008.

What marketing channel did you find most effective to draw people to your website?

Till date, eMail marketing has worked well for us but we do realize that its early days and to scale up to the levels that we intend to do, lot many more marketing investments needs to be made. However, being in the online space we will be depending more on social marketing and online marketing techniques than the traditional marketing.

Did you have to seek outside funding yet? If yes, which channel did you find the most useful: banks, Angels, friends?

Angels! But can’t share much details as of now

Could you give us a brief overview of the next steps planned for CreADivity over the coming 6 months?

Having received an angel investment, we are undergoing lots of changes. The platform is getting revamped, the brand is going to change, an office is being set-up and new people are being hired.

What was THE single most important thing that you have learnt from your experience that you would want to pass on to fellow entrepreneurs?

Too early to throw out advices but one extremely important thing that we have learnt is to keep eyes and ears open to any individual or idea because you never know how when and where it might work for you.

Any tools/ resources that you found useful and that you can recommend for our startup tools section?

Checkout VC and incubator websites for documents on creating effective business plan pitches and executive summaries.

Sites like Alexa track traffic and are useful for new internet businesses.

Links to Guy Kawasaki’s videos could be very useful.

Thanks very much for your time guys and best of luck with your future plans.

My own 2 Paise

creADivity is a service that brings together companies searching for good Designers and Freelance designers hunting for projects. I can only speak from the perspective of the customer: I am currently considering using creADivity for my own logo design, simply because their service helps in solving a problem that many startups, like my own, face. That is there are many great designers out there, but firstly I have to spend considerable amount of time finding them and secondly most of them are rediculously expensive. creADivity works to solve these issues.

Of course, their system still has a few flaws here and there, but one great thing that Manik and Sitashwa are doing is to personally get in touch with every customer that shows interest in their website. That way they get to speak to people like myself and understand our needs and problems. They are very open to listen to critical feedback and will make sure they find a solution around whatever problem you face. This is a great example of the importance of staying close to your customers and letting your business model evolve with their feedback, especially in the initial phases.

What do you think? Has anyone else had any experiences with Graphic Design projects in general that they can share?

We interviewed Sangeeta Venkat and Venkat Kandaswamy about their startup ApartmentAdda.com

How would you describe your startup to a layman?

ApartmentAdda is a single online platform for Apartment Residents and Association Committee – to communicate among themselves and manage their Apartment Complex.

Today 65% of the home-owning middle-class-and-above demographic in large Indian cities lives in an Apartment, leads a very busy work life, is often globetrotting, and is connected by internet or SMS. These apartment residents seek to utilize technology for a convenient way of handling residential issues and participating in community initiatives. ApartmentAdda.com is the solution for them.

What gave you the idea to create ApartmentAdda.com? When did you start?

It all started after we bought an apartment in Bangalore in early 2007. We were the 6th family to move in and every day was an adventure in getting the basic amenities in place. We formed a managing committee to get things done – like pushing the builder for timely completion of works and to regulate work timings for carpenters – because they were hammering our peace out even at midnight!

We started with a yahoogroup for owners and with more residents moving in, an Orkut community emerged for fun interaction, a blog for buy-sell notices, another yahoogroup for the managing committee, and yet another for tenants! Confusion prevailed – important information did not reach everyone effectively, friendly chit-chats were mixed up with serious complaints; we were not even sure if a group member belonged to our community at all!

Once our Owners’ Association was formed, we noticed that too many precious weekend hours were being spent in apartment management. We actively looked for an easy online tool to manage an apartment complex – like tracking complaints, dues, expenses, long-running issues etc but there were none at that time. This was in mid 2008.

All these pain points led to the creation of ApartmentAdda – a single online platform that caters to all the communication and management needs of an online community. We launched ApartmentAdda in November 2008. The residents of our complex were adventurous to try out the new platform – tracking maintenance dues, expenses, and even conducting their election online – Oasis Breeze perhaps might be the first apartment complex in India to conduct an online secret ballot.

Can you provide me some details about the founders backgrounds as well as their roles at the company?

ApartmentAdda was founded by Venkat Kandaswamy and Sangeeta Venkat.

Venkat has over 11 years experience in developing web applications, high performance and high availability applications. He is also a usability expert with keen interest in easy-to-use and inclusive designs. ApartmentAdda’s UI is designed to be used by a cross-section of users – from tech savvy users to beginners with the www – and is highly appreciated for its ease of use and optimal layout.

Venkat takes care of the design, development and operations of the portal.

Sangeeta has over 10 years experience in consulting for financial applications. She is also an active Management Committee member of her apartment complex, and has helped design the accounting package in ApartmentAdda which is highly appreciated for the flexibility and intuitiveness – it is used with ease by Association Treasurers to Estate Managers.

Sangeeta is in charge of the functional specifications, user acceptance tests, helping with business development, and acts as the gatekeeper against any unwanted-but-cool product feature.

Who is your role model or inspiration? Any successful entrepreneurs whose work you follow closely?

Our benchmark and inspiration is Steve Jobs & Steve Woznaik’s creation – Apple.

* Apple has created new industries – the PC industry, online music store and now the Mobile Apps
* Apple perhaps was the first company to take user interface and design seriously.
* Apple has managed to create die-hard fans.

We strive to be the Apple in our industry.

Do you have any interesting bootstrapping stories/tips that you can share with us?

We started ApartmentAdda as a sole-proprietorship. We spent many hours at the security gates of apartments, showed demos, answered many questions, and finally we won a premium customer. The great moment arrived when we were to receive our first check – and the Association Committee objected to drawing check in the name of an individual – as advised by their auditor. We managed to convince them eventually, with the assurance that we will be registering a company soon. We are glad to have fulfilled that promise to our first premium customer, with the recent registration of 3Five8 Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Can you describe some of the main features of ApartmentAdda? Is there any particular feature that has had very positive response? What are the extra features that are availaible to premium accounts?

ApartmentAdda’s Maintenance Fee Tracker has scored high with our customers. Tracking the dues, the receipts, fines etc. is a tedious process, usually accomplished using multiple documents. In most cases it is done by the Association Committee – comprised of volunteer residents who spend time on weekends. Managing finances is only one of the thousand other tasks they have to do – coordinating with the builder to get the promised work delivered, getting the legal paperwork done for the property, figuring out how to raise funds for the next community initiative etc. They appreciate the time ApartmentAdda saves them and the smoothness of the whole operation.

The second most appreciated tool is the Complaint Box. Any resident can raise complaint for their flat, which is visible to all other members of their flat. This means that the owner of a tenanted flat can see from anywhere in the world, what are the defects arising in his flat and how those are being fixed. Also, common complaints can be raised as community complaints which get coordinated effort from everyone to resolve efficiently.

Furthermore all our premium applications are integrated with SMS. This keeps even the non tech-savvy residents in the fold – as they get the important alerts like dues, service interruptions, or meeting reminders. Also ApartmentAdda SMS do not carry any nagging advertisements.

We encourage readers to visit our features page for an entire list of premium features and their descriptions.

Do your customers experience a learning curve in using ApartmentAdda? How do you handle customer service

Right from the beginning our goal was to build an easy-to-use online tool and we have been quite successful on this front. As we speak, senior citizens, estate managers are using ApartmentAdda and are finding it very easy to navigate the pages. We have an elegant dashboard design which summarizes the activities in each of the applications like forum, notice board, complaint box etc. All pages are only two levels deep.

We offer email support for our basic customers and phone support for our premium customers. Also we earnestly maintain our FAQs which answer most of the questions our customers have.

What is your revenue model? How has your success been in converting free accounts to premium ones?

We have an online subscription model – where the Association Office pays ApartmentAdda for using the Premium LITE or Premium PRO packages. We charge based on the number of flats – the charge being Rs.75 per flat per year for Premium LITE and Rs.100 per flat per year for Premium PRO. There is also a BASIC package which is free of cost.

The interesting fact we observed is – the associations who are serious about using ApartmentAdda directly opt for the Premium packages. The communities who are yet to form an association are the ones who are on Basic now and they have already shown interest in using our Premium tools once they form the association.

How do you advertise your product? Do you focus on online or offline advertising? Which advertising methods have given you the best results?

We approach Residents’ Associations directly, offline as well as online. Some curiosity traffic comes via search engines and our blog. We also frequently present onsite demos to prospective customers which generates quite some excitement. This also creates word-of-mouth advertising, which has given the best results thus far. Almost all serious users have reported hearing about ApartmentAdda from another user or from someone who saw the demo last weekend.

Is there any other information that you would like to share with us?

We would like to thank TheIndianStartup for the interview and would like to wish all the best in your endeavor to build the eco system of entrepreneurs.

My views

ApartmentAdda is definitely a unique service with an easy to use interface should be accessible to even basic computer users.  Their Freemium business model offers a lot of functionality at even its base level so that there are no barriers for apartment owners interested in using their service while their premium features provide compelling reasons for existing users to upgrade.

Venkat is an active member & blogger at theindianstartup.com’s community of entrepreneurs. Other members can see his profile here. If you have any questions for the ApartmentAdda team, please post them on his profile wire or in the comments below.

We interviewed Namit Nangia about his startup LifeMojo.com:

How would you describe your startup to a layman?

LifeMojo is a company focused on helping you achieve your fitness goals faster.

Our web platform LifeMojo.com helps you start your fitness journey, monitor your progress and figure out how to eat right and stay healthy.

Please tell us about the background of the founders and their roles at the company.

We are 3 founders, details of what we have done in the past are available here : http://istrait.com/aboutus.htm

The roles that we take up for LifeMojo:

1. Varun Gupta is our CTO and manages the entire content on LifeMojo.com apart from his technical contribution.

2. Himanshu Khurana is our CFO and CMO so he takes care of the Finances and Marketing for LifeMojo.

3. Namit Nangia is our CEO and takes care of business development, sales, creative elements for the website and strategy for LifeMojo.

All of the co-founders have a technical background so we all contribute to the technical development on LifeMojo.

What gave you the idea for a health portal? Was it a personal experience that inspired you?

Yes, It was a bad personal experience that inspired us to start LifeMojo.

Namit, Co-Founder and CEO of LifeMojo got a chance to meet Dr. Shikha Sharma (a renowned weight management and health expert) as a Technology Advisor. Dr Sharma wanted a solution for a few problems that existed in her business. After that meeting and after seeing Adnan Sami lose 75 Kg, Namit tried losing weight and was able to lose 11 Kg in 45 days (which he soon regained). On analysis of this successful weight loss, the LifeMojo team realized that the key was constant monitoring of what he ate, his fitness regimen, and an eye on his weight. But the problem was that he soon regained weight. The team looked around and found a lot of similar people and a solution to this problem. The solution is right diet consultation, as per one’s body composition and meal preferences. But this right advice is (1) expensive, (2) inconvenient due to the traveling involved (3) inaccessible, since good nutrition experts who understand one’s meal preferences are not easy to find. And thus as a solution to all these problems, LifeMojo was born!

What is the size of your userbase? What makes people pick lifemojo over other health information resources?

We have close to 3000 registered users on LifeMojo. We think there are multiple reasons why our users prefer LifeMojo

1. LifeMojo offer the most comprehensive collection of calories for Indian Food Items.

2. All content on LifeMojo comes directly from Nutrition or Fitness Experts.

3. All the tips on LifeMojo are Home Remedies.

We think these set a very strong basis for quality of things on LifeMojo, which is what everyone is looking for.

How do you bring users to your website? What is your advertising strategy?

We have never spent on Advertising, except the Laptop Stickers and 6 LifeMojo T Shirts that we got printed for us founders.

On a serious note, we have tried to keep all our content SEO friendly and thus we see close to 60 % of the traffic as Organic Search Traffic.

We try and be active on Social Media and try to market LifeMojo there to get more users.

Our partnerships with Media Houses like IndiaTV and Avantgard Life (a Hyderabad based Lifestyle magazine) where we power their Health content, have been very helpful to get more eyeballs on LifeMojo.

Blogs, Internet reviews, Newspapers, people who use LifeMojo; they all have been nice enough to say nice things about us and get a lot of users to us.

You were lucky enough to become part of a mentorship program early on in the life of your startup. How has this helped shape your venture?

MVP has been a great help in shaping up this venture. They helped us a lot specially with the Social Media Marketing front, about which we had absolutely no clue.

The mentorship has helped us structure things right and focus on the right aspects of business.

Being a community website, we are very interested in the Share Your Progress aspect of LifeMojo. Can you share some details about this feature? Is this a social network for healthy people?

LifeMojo is not a social network for healthy people. Our Share your progress comprises of your public profile page and an RSS Feed of your updates. Both these help you share your progress with the world. For wellness and fitness, motivation is the key. And the more you share your progress, the more it motivates you to do better.

What is LifeMojoPro? How is it different from the portal?

LifeMojoPro is our B2B offering for Health Experts (like Nutritionists) that helps them run their business efficiently and helps them in scaling up. It is a SaaS based CRM and ERP for Fitness Centers.

What is your revenue model? Are you profitable? Can you disclose a few statistics like number of users, employees etc?

We have revenues coming from LifeMojoPro Deals, advertising revenue from Content from LifeMojo and revenue share that we do with our Media Partnerships. Going forward we would have additional revenues from Nutritionist and Fitness Consultation Services on LifeMojo.

Did you have to conduct a lot of user surveys to figure out what people wanted from your health portal before launch? How has user feedback helped shape lifemojo.com’s business model?

No, we did not do a market survey before getting into LifeMojo. It was more of a personal itch that drove us to create the solution i.e. LifeMojo.

After we launched, we have not built a single feature until users asked for it. User feedback has been a tremendous help in shaping up all aspects of LifeMojo, the content, the features, the soon to be launched services.

User Feedback has become core of our daily routine, we interact with at least one user daily to keep a tap on what they want.

Have you been able to make any strategic partnerships with doctors, hospitals, or vendors that has helped your startup grow?

Our First customer for LifeMojoPro, Dr. Shikha Sharma was a great help in shaping up the initial B2B product and our view of the preventive healthcare industry.

Is there any other information that you would like to share with us?

There is one service in particular that users appreciated and use a lot. It is “Calorie Search on GTalk” (http://www.lifemojo.com/features/calories-gtalk) . You can add calories@lifemojo.com as a friend to your GTalk or Gmail chat and to look up calories in any food item or activity, you can simply send the name of the item as chat message and you get the reply instantly.

This has been quite popular with our users and has spread like a viral.

Any tools that you would like to recommend to our startup tools section?

Pipl.com

Search anyone, anywhere.

Do give it a try.

My views

Fitness is currently a hot trend in the Indian marketplace and I believe that LifeMojo provides very interesting connections between fitness professionals and those looking to implement a fitness regime in their lives. By establishing strong partnerships with traditional media channels to distribute their content as well as creating interactive services that work on chat and mobile channels, they have succeded in creating a brand name that has strong visibility as well as a product that is accessible to a large consumer base.

Namit is a member of theindianstartup.com’s community of entrepreneurs.  You can see his profile here.  If you have any questions for the LifeMojo team, please post them in the comments here or contact him through his profile.

Our first interview on this blog is with Harshad Joglekar, co-founder of Uproot.in, an online classifieds portal.

What is the size of your team?

We are a gargantuan team of two! My partner in crime is Dr Ameet Patil, whom I knew from my college days. After a “long time, no see” span of 10 years, we met over Orkut one day, and found that we both had an urge to start a company from our hometown, Belgaum. We started out small, to better manage our time and resources.
We do have plans to grow the team, as we pan in more features and products. We are on the lookout for competent developers who are well versed with system level programming as well as web technologies and are willing to work from Belgaum.

Can you tell me briefly about the background of the founders as well as their roles at uproot.in?

Ameet and I are both software engineers, who have predominant experience in system software, particularly embedded system software.
At uproot.in, we are trying something new; web services. We shoulder equal responsibilities. We both design, code, make decisions (and argue) with equal flair.

What is it like to work in Belgaum.  Are there any challenges/benefits to starting up in a smaller city as apposed to the larger business centers of India?

I have tried out the classifieds service. The application is very fast and simple to use. How was the technology behind uproot.in developed?

There are many frameworks out there that help build web applications quickly. The trade-off with most generic frameworks, however, is lesser flexibility and/or lesser performance.
At uproot.in, we chose to develop our own web framework; a tailor made suit that fits our needs, and is optimised for performance.
For some technical background you can see my blog entry here:

http://hrj.wikidot.com/blog:14

Other websites may want to have a classifieds section. Any plans of licensing the product?

Frankly, we hadn’t planned it! Nevertheless, it’s a great idea and we are open to it.
Collaboration with us is also possible via other means.
For example, a quick integration is possible via Atom/RDF feeds. There are already some websites that have requested this.
A more closer integration can be done via direct API calls to our website.
We would love to hear other ideas as well.

Can you describe some of the challenges your company has faced in starting and running a web startup?

For a web startup, cheap yet reliable hosting is highly desirable. Even after a month long search we couldn’t find suitable enterprise grade hosting options within India, which fit our budget.
If someone manages to provide such a service, I think it will be a big boon to web-startups within India.

How did you get your first users/customers? How do you market your product/services?

Our very first users were our not-so-innocent friends. They gave us a lot of feedback (positive and otherwise) and literally drove our design decisions.
The site has been getting a steady stream of users by its own.
In the near future, we would like the site to grow organically at its own pace. Word of mouth and search engines will be our primary means of communication/marketing.

What are your plans/challenges to scaling up?

We take one step at a time and try not to think too much about scaling up. On the technical front we are confident that our framework will scale up well. On all other fronts we will rely on income from our services to drive the growth.

What are the immediate and long term plans for the future of uproot.in?

Our current focus is feature parity. The site is very much usable right now but it can do with helpful enhancements such as text formatting, custom notifications, or profile photos.
In the longer term we aim to monetise from premium Ads on the website. The core functionality will always remain free.

Is there any other information that you would like to share with us?

If your readers are interested in working on exciting embedded and web technologies, they can send their profile description / resume to jobs@uproot.co.in

My views

I think Harshad & Ameet have done a great job with uproot.in.  The portal has a fresh look and is easy to use and the fact that it is very stable & responsive shows that they have designed a great framework from the ground up.  TheIndianStartup wishes them luck with their venture and thanks them for letting us interview them.

Harshad is an active member of theindianstartup.com’s community. You can see his profile here.  If you have any questions for Harshad, please post them in the comments or on his profile.

I am excited to launch TheIndianStartup’s very own startup interview blog!.  If you would like us to interview your startup, please send us a message from here.  In the next couple of days, we will be putting up our first startup interview.

Hopefully, this will become a weekly feature.  If there are any questions that you would like to get a response to but which were not asked as part of the interview, please post them in the comments under the interview article and we will ask the interviees to respond to you in the same manner.

P.S. This is also TheIndianStartup’s first featured blog.  To vote for the featured blog you want to see launched next, see this post.