Brief on Kunal’s background

Kunal manages the strategic vision, key business relationships, fundraising and growth plans for Snapdeal.com. He is an engineer from University of Pennsylvania, with a business degree from The Wharton School and an executive marketing program at Kellogg School of Management.

Kunal along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal.com in February 2010, and has been instrumental in building it into one of the largest e-commerce platforms in India, with a wide assortment of products across various categories

His prior experiences also included product management and business development with Microsoft’s emerging markets group, and at Deloitte Consulting as a consultant in the company’s telecom practice in New York and Pennsylvania. He also launched a consumer product brand in the US. Kunal has won many accolades including QVC Consumer Innovation Award for a consumer product company. QVC is a $5 Billion home shopping channel in the US, owned by Comcast.

Kunal is passionate about financial markets, cults, politics and Yoga. Whenever he has time he spends lot of time in reading about travel literature, business drama, Leonardo da Vinci, and is also extremely fond of backpacking through remote parts of the world.

Do register for Delhi edition of TechSparks here.

In many ways, these project management tools aren’t really competing among themselves as much as they’re competing with the trusty old spreadsheet.

Enter BootStrapToday. It’s a product from Sensible Softwares that promises to comprehensively solve the software development management problem. BootStrapToday has all the features you expect from a well-designed project management suite – Collaboration tools, a Ticketing and workflow system, milestone tracking, timesheets and more. The interface is quite intuitive and well designed, and all the information that a project manager needs is present in the right places. For example, there is a nice graph that shows how many hours of work are completed and how many are remaining for each milestone in a project, giving the manager a quick sense of whether the product is on-schedule or expected to be late.

And there are some nice and thoughtful features on top of it too. There’s a nice little “Recent Updates” section that collects all the changes happening across all the projects that gives a quick overview of where the action is. There’s a convenient file-share feature to let team members share files with each other directly. BootStrapToday also features a neat integration with version control tools (Subversion and Git are supported), which makes the rest of the project management features like ticketing, milestones etc… that much more well-integrated. And then there’s an API that you can use to integrate with your other on-premise tools like continuous integration and other test tools.

While BootStrapToday is well designed and gets the job done, there is nothing really to differentiate the product from the 100s of similar tools out there. But don’t judge it just yet – BootStrapToday has an interesting angle to this that may just work out for them.

The future of project management tools is in analytics. Most software projects quickly become complex, and it starts becoming difficult for managers to understand what is going on. Leadership teams are even more clueless about what’s really happening in their development & engineering teams. Most charts and graphs that project management tools product are either too difficult to understand, or simply not representative of the underlying state of the software. There is no easy way to come up with one clear picture of how things are going, where the bottlenecks are, what parts of the software are likely to be delayed etc.

BootStrapToday is promising to add “intelligence” to the whole process of managing software. Basic intelligence has been missing in most tools – Like the ability to identify the source file that has the most bugs reported or identifying developers that fix the most complex bugs. BootStrapToday promises to add some of these features soon. But it doesn’t have to stop at that. What I’d really love to see is for the tool to come up with more intelligence that is useful to a product manager. Like which developers are the most efficient at estimating their tasks? Which components and projects are consistently delayed? What part of the software is the bottleneck, causing bugs and crashes across other systems? How does taking regular vacations affect programmer productivity?

And then there are questions that I’m just curious about – What day of the week is the most productive for programmers? Does code checked in late at night result in more bugs? Using data-mining and machine learning techniques, can the tool predict how late a product is going to be? Can it predict the piece of code that is most likely to end up with lots of bugs?

I think BootStrapToday is well positioned to push the boundary of analytics and intelligence in project management. In the meanwhile, if you’re using spreadsheets to track your software development project, give BootStrapToday a try. There’s a free trial available, and pricing starts at $9/month for 5 users.

Read their story here and more about the product on the website.

Rolocule Games previously received seed funding from CIIE, IIM A

Rolocule Games, a game development studio creating realistic, casual and social video games for tablets and smartphones, announced closing of its angel round of funding. The financing round was led by Mumbai Angels, one of the leading angel groups of India, along with Blume Ventures and other angel investors. The size of the investment is undisclosed.

“We are excited to have Mumbai Angels, for not just their financial support but also for the strategic guidance and enthusiasm, which I am sure will help us take Rolocule to a whole new level” said Rohit Gupta, Founder and CEO of Rolocule Games. “Continuing with our focus to create realistic and simple to play games, we are also heavily focusing on making games ‘purely’ social and accessible”.

With a strong portfolio of games clocking more than 1.5 million downloads in more than 100 countries, developed using company’s own proprietary game engine, Rolocule aims to entertain the world through interactive games that “everyone can play”. The company combines deep and realistic gameplay found in PC games with the connectivity, ease of use and portability benefits of smartphones and tablets. Its portfolio consists of “Flick Tennis: College Wars”, which recently won the People’s Choice Award at the 8th International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA) in Barcelona in March 2012, followed by “Super Badminton” and “Touch Squash”.

Ajeet Khurana, a serial entrepreneur and active Mumbai Angels investor, would join the board of Rolocule Games. He said “Gaming is the present and the future of digital entertainment, and Rolocule with their incredible game development capabilities has the potential to become one of the leading gaming companies in the world.”

“Even with a small team and limited budgets, we have a created a mark globally on iOS gaming. We wish to take this momentum forward and add more talented folks to our team as we also plan to launch our games on Android” said Anuj Tandon, Co-Founder and COO of Rolocule Games.

The company had earlier received seed fund from CIIE (Centre of Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmadabad). Pranay Gupta, Co-CEO of CIIE, quoted “Rolocule Games is one of the best gaming startups to have come out of India. Mumbai Angels investment will give Rolocule the right impetus to take the company to the next level.”

Read our earlier interview with Rohit Gupta here.

Assuming that you decide to take the plunge into data analytics, what can you expect it to do for you? In short, you will be armed with information that should ideally help you to

Primarily,

• Understand and anticipate what the customer needs
• Formulate effective sales and marketing strategies based on insights from data
• Build an effective digital marketing strategy

Secondarily,

• Assess usability and effectiveness
• Examine and understand the click trail of every visitor (for web analytics)
• Optimize conversions

These aspects can be facilitated through the measuring of key performance indicators and regular updates about levels of customer engagement.

Digital analytics sounds like a great idea when one takes a look at all the benefits. The magic, however, stops with the collection and recording of data. What you get then is a lot of data and very little idea of what the data means to your business or how you can put the information to use. There is also a fair chance that the data collected could be incomplete or inaccurate. Needless to say, when there are  inaccurate data, the secondary reports that are based on the original logs become misleading. Data that is neither actionable nor meaningful is of no real use to your business.

Data and information alone are not going to make any difference. What else would you need?

• Insightful analysis
• In depth understanding of the situation as depicted by the data
• Formulation of appropriate Plans of Action to improve/enhance the current situation
• Application of those strategies
• Measuring effectiveness of those strategies and making any changes if required

Data analytics should ideally provide cues and clues to where your business needs extra attention and help monitor the solutions that are being applied. But if all data analytics provides you is voluminous amounts of numerical data, maybe you’re better off without it.

Co-Founded by Annkur Agarwal, who at the age of 15 started selling stuff on Baazee and then went ahead to found OnlyGizmos, fueling the gadgets ecosystem in India, PriceBaba is a well-researched product. Annkur has been an retailer for close to 10 years, both online and offline which is an important factor a user might take into consideration while doing a credibility-check. Tirthesh Ganatra and Mehul Ved are the other two pillars of the lead team.

PriceBaba doesn’t give you the lowest price

“The price advised by PriceBaba is the best bargain price. What that means is that you may bargain for that price when buying from a local retailer in the real world. Our focus is not to push deals from merchants offering the lowest price, rather we believe in giving our users the most relevant prices in their city. In process of doing that, more often than not, we should be able to help you shop at the lowest price in you locality and at the same time ensure that you have a good experience shopping based on our guidance.” believes Annkur.

With its Mumbai launch, PriceBaba lists 110 locations from where consumers can buy, sell and exchange mobile devices. Each of these retailers has been rated on more than 13 varied parameters to help the consumers make a choice. PriceBaba also provides a mobile friendly price history tool that highlights the price fluctuations for a given mobile phone. ”With the onset of e-commerce boom, consumers find it easy to search prices from online stores. However, most of them still end up buying mobile phones locally. We provide unique intelligence about the offline market to the consumers” says Annkur. “With over 230 million mobiles phones expected to be sold in India this year alone, we have a large market at hand” he adds.

Try out the service here

Bharti Softbank, a 50:50 JV between Bharti Enterprises and SOFTBANK CORP focused on mobile internet, today announced that it has partnered with Gurgaon based mobile start-up firm Y2CF Digital Media Pvt. Ltd. (“Y2CF”) to launch the world’s only mobile device-agnostic location based service.

The BSB-Y2CF partnership plans to launch this service under the ‘hoppr’ brand name. 

Y2CF and BSB have developed the location based check-in service that works across all mobile devices, with the aim to build the hyper local commerce ecosystem in India, wherein consumers get to explore rewards and offers available with brands and merchants in their vicinity. Under the partnership, BSB has taken an equity stake in Y2CF with the option of acquiring majority stake in the company.

Commenting on the partnership, Kavin Bharti Mittal, BSB’s Head of Strategy & New Product Development said, “When we look at the e-commerce space in India, we see enough companies doing a good job of solving the problem of online retail. India has over 900 million subscribers that are always connected to a network but there still doesn’t exist a quick and simple way to find what they’re looking for offline in the world around them. This is the unique opportunity we see, in creating a bridge between the Online and Offline worlds. We believe such a platform could also help organize the vastly unorganized merchant base by connecting them with consumers who have such devices near them. We are delighted to see the passion and commitment of the Y2CF team and look forward to working with them to build out this vision and take ‘hoppr’ to the next level.”

Y2CF has already tied up with leading mobile service providers – Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Reliance, Tata Docomo and Vodafone – for ‘hoppr’, which will initially cover 3000 retail outlets/locations focused in top 4 cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru, and offer customers great rewards and special services on the go.

More about Hoppr on their website and about the announcement at BSB.

Developed by Shanmuga Subramanian (better known as Shan), PlayText is available on Android.

How does the app work?

• Just call             +1-888-666-4013       (Toll Free number in US. India will get its soon)
• Press 4 for Yourstory.in
• The sites RSS Feed titles would be read by IVR
• The user then just needs to press a number for listening to the article.

Shan has developed his own script which he had developed for his other apps – TextOnly Browser. “The main backend is Twilio API’s+textonly script,” he adds. A mechanical engineering graduate by degree, Shan always loved computers. “I was crazy about computers right from my childhood. Not taking computer science was more than a blessing in disguise as I have developed my own way of learning different languages. I got into developing apps and websites in 2006 when I was in my college Final year.” He informs.

His complete portfolio can be viewed here.

Having launched yesterday, the app is targeted at people who are not able to access websites; People who are not able to keep a tab on news due to absence of a data connection or may be also people who are not able to pay for Internet. “I will be soon trying to get a toll free number for India so that I can make it free over here as India is a really huge market for such a service,” he adds.

Monetization plans and The Road Ahead

Monetization is a must for apps but it should be done rather unobtrusively. “For this PlayText Voice service, I am planning to insert audio ads in between which would help local marketers to a great extent as they would be able to advertise their products easily and also it would help consumers to a certain extent as they would be able to find value for this money by listening to the ads.” believes Shan.

Moving ahead, “I intend to develop this as a service which would provide over content over call instead of relying on data connection. I see a lot of scope for apps like this as there are still lot of places where we would have no data connection (3G is available only in certain places, If somebody is travelling on train, PlayText is very convenient).” He says. Shan is also looking at scaling this and doing a lot more.

Download the app here and stay tuned for more.

In a sense, the term ‘email marketing’ can cover any email you sent to a potential customer, a current customer, or a public venue. There are three main strategies of email marketing: These are direct email, retention email, and advertising in other peoples emails. Direct email usually involves the sending of a promotional message in the form of a standard email, for instance a discount offer or a sale. This can be used to introduce new customers to your product or service. Retention email tends to take the form of a newsletter. These will include advertisements, but aim at building up a long term relationship with the customer. This means rather than a simple “50% sale now on!” message, the newsletter will be something the costumer will actually take the time to read, with contents that will entertain or inform its readers. Advertising in other peoples emails is just what it says on the tin: instead of producing your own newsletter, for example, you pay another company to place your advertisement in theirs.

Spam is obviously the downside. You probably have a folder in your inbox to deal with it. This is unwanted, unsolicited mail bombarding random addresses, and will NOT be a successful strategy for any email marketing company. You need an email address owner’s permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you ignore this concept of permission, your marketing campaign will be poor at best, and at worst, your website shut down, and your repetition ruined.  But what constitutes permission? This can be a very grey area, but here is a clear example. There is one important thing to remember: It doesn’t matter what YOU think is permission; it’s what the CUSTOMER perceives it to be. Get this wrong, and it could cost you your business.

So, how do you gain and maintain a customer database? You will hear a lot of advice flying around, but here is some starting general advice.

• Spread the word- Start by advertising in other people’s emails, and once you get enough interest, start asking for customer referrals. Offer referral incentives, for example a discount or a gift, to encourage people to do this.
• Ask for feedback- Not only is this useful for you, it builds a two way relationship with a customer, making them feel like they are valued and are being listened to, making them more likely to come back to you. A short feedback form is a good way of doing this.
• Offer incentives and gifts to existing customers- This will make them realise the benefits of becoming a long term customer, and also encourage others to do so.
• Ask for contact details- For instance, if you manage a website, ask for an email address at login or registration. This will allow you permission with the client. However make sure you make this clear to the customer, don’t forget the concept of ‘permission’.

This is only the bare bones on the vast and exciting world of email marketing.

On the other hand, there are hues and cries about e-mail being dead. Not as a means of communication, but in terms of getting feedback or support from the customer. This is what the author with an anti-email view has to say-

This might come across as a strong assertion but as a result of interactions with numerous business owners (startups), a clear result has surface, Email for sales support is dead. There are a few interesting anecdotes which point towards this.

There was this company that uses a typical ‘Contact Us’ form to stay in touch with their leads. The founder informed how one of their leads (let’s call him Joe) had come down to their website, spent some considerable time on the website and filled the query he had, in the ‘contact us’ form.

And, this entrepreneur wrote back to him answering his queries within the next few hours. After not getting reply back for few days, he tried to touch base with Joe again. But it went in vain. Joe never replied. And, couple of weeks later, he realized that Joe had started using a competitor’s product.

Does the story sound familiar?

So, what went wrong?

Joe spent considerable time on the website. He needed some hand holding and hence filled the form. He wanted someone to help him, when he really needed it.

Typically, Joe has to do 10 different things in a day. So when you take an hour to get back to him, he would have simply forgotten the context or your competitor would have helped Joe when he needed it and not when the entrepreneur got time.

And that is why we should evangelize real-time engagement.

This situation perfectly fits support or feedback mechanisms but when one thinks in terms of marketing and reaching out to the audience as well, is the lag an obstacle? For example, if you send a super engaging newsletter or an organized mailer which excites the user but he needs more assistance on it but as he can’t reach out instantly, he’ll sleep over it. Do we see new mechanisms evolving in this real-time engagement mechanisms?

There are two views in this article. The pro e-mail view was from Sofie Huber and the opposing view has been inspired from InteractEasy‘s blog.

Image credit: greenreview.blogspot.in

They crawl millions of pages and about a TB of data on a daily basis. They have provided more than 200 million reviews of products/hotels to clients across multiplre domains and multiple geographies like US (primarily), UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Spain, etc.

Based in Bangalore, PromptCloud was founded by Prashant Kumar. Prashant worked with Yahoo! after graduating from IIT-Kanpur with a dual B.Tech-M.Tech degree in Computer Science and before starting PromptCloud. Currently 6 people strong, the team also consists of alumni from IIT and CMU alumni. “I feel we have a good mix of business and technical acumen and we are just the right number to have ourselves occupied round the clock,” says Prashant, with a smile.

What differentiates PromptCloud is large-scale data (which is why they say Big Data made Small) on a customized basis. “There are many vendors who deal with data scraping or web crawling, but no one really offers this at a large-scale serving such high order of data needs. Other than this, our offering is customized for each client depending on data that they desire,” says Prashant.

They do both deep crawl which is one-time crawl of all past data on the site, as well as refresh crawl which means they provide data deltas as and when data refreshes on the site. “Since our offering is unique and we are currently in a niche market, we face near-zero competition in this space. The market mostly has vendors offering mass data crawling services with very little human touch. But sooner or later, we expect competition as technology barriers get lower and hence we want to establish ourselves as a brand in the DaaS space,” says Prashant.

Their business model is B2B and like other ‘AAS’ (As A Service) models, they have some initial cost and a recurring cost. “Other than this we also have certain one-time set up fees or template costs. Since each project is different, each one would need some setup before we can take off with the actual crawl and extraction. And due to the same reason, costs are never fixed and we offer our customers few knobs which they can tweak depending on the volume of sites and the frequency of data crawl. This model suits both big as well as small businesses and hence no constraints on the size of their pockets,” says Prashant.

Prashant believes that PromptCloud has a pretty big giant to feed in the market. “The reason being that our solution is vertical agnostic. So, anyone who’d like to get access to big data on the web and use it to gain a business advantage would be our target. We’ve already hit it right with e-commerce sites, review provider sites, businesses dealing with hotel and travel data and specifically market research firms. So as you can see we haven’t dived into a specific vertical but have kind of kept all doors open,” he says.

PromptCloud’s market strategy is mostly made up of targeted email marketing and inbound marketing for which they leverage social media. “Also a little amount of SEO just bolsters your image as a credible vendor. Referrals within a network and word of mouth suits us too since businesses with an urging need for data would only like to go with trusted vendors. And more or less, the number one marketing strategy is to make yourself as visible as possible since this effort never goes in vain, and people do remember you when that specific need arises in their businesses if you had made a decent first impression,” says Prashant.

Being one of the first few companies in this space, the challenges that PromptCloud faced were on two fronts – there was considerable technology barrier, but also, and more importantly for a business, they had to reach out to prospective clients and explain them the solution as to where they would fit in, in the whole eco-system. “I must concede however, that the technology barrier makes it easier to hire good people because they like challenges,” says Prashant.

Not too long ago, cloud computing technologies saw adoption only by SMEs due to the fact that they had business agility. Now, however, even the bigger players are shedding their inhibitions and coming in the foreground of cloud. “Another thing that we observe is increasing trend in DaaS after breakthroughs of SaaS and PaaS. This growing adoption is owing to the BigData world we live in these days. There’s so much data on the cloud and so much to explore with it. Both big and small players are fighting individual wars with Big Data analytics and technologies that could process big data in order to derive meaningful insights from data,” says Prashant.

PromptCloud is currently in the process of expanding to new verticals soon. “We aspire to be a one-stop shop for all data needs in a business and continue to be sole provider of large-scale data and custom analytics, while offering differentiation with respect to technology and our expertise. Although we’ve been successful in multiple verticals across geographies, Fortune 500’s could be the next big bite for us. We are one of the key players in the Big Data domain already and would like to continue staying ahead of the curve and keep adapting to the market dynamics,” says Prashant, signing off on a positive note.

On the surface, releasing the source code of your startup’s application/service to the general public might seem like a good way to advance one’s startup for a very low price, but in reality there exist a few pitfalls. As stated earlier, a startup’s strength lies in its community support, and open sourcing one’s startup right from its inception will mean that your progress is linked to the whims of the community. If the community around your projects begins to lose interest and dwindle, your startup will be in jeopardy. The developers not directly working for your company but contributing to your initiative may have different goals and objectives, and tightly controlling the direction of your startup will be extremely crucial in the first few months to ensure that it doesn’t lose focus. The community may disagree on a number of matters, such as scaling or implementing new features, and as owner of the project, it will be your job to mediate and resolve any such disagreements. Similarly, every time you decided to implement a major change, you will need to convince the community and gain their approval.

Moreover, since the code is open source, it is visible to all, which presents a potential threat that a competitor may use it to their advantage. If your startup requires confidentiality in its operations, for e.g. A financial or e-commerce startup, open sourcing the whole code is a bad idea as you are compromising on the security of your customers. (Even Mozilla, one of the biggest proponents of Open Source Software, does not release information about its security bugs for obvious reasons)Implementing deadlines may not be easy as many of the people working for you may be working remotely, on a volunteer basis. Things like documentation and translation are tasks which are not very popular with the community, and get people to take up these tasks will present a challenge as well.

Open Source can be suited very well to certain kinds of startups and can be a great way to popularize your idea early on. Having a community will only propel your initiative to greater heights, but it’s important to keep in mind some of the potential pitfalls. One needs to be really careful and if you manage to do that there’s every possibility of making it big like a RedHat which brings home more than a billion in revenues. One can always open-source after launching, and there is a strong business model in place which is independent of code, it is worth going for.

What are your thoughts?

Starting Up

The idea of providing Legal Services struck Dhruv in early 2011. “Initially we wanted to provide legal plans to employees of different companies. These plans let employees have access to basic legal documents and advice.” Post this and numerous twists and turns later easylaw is what it is today.

Another reason to startup this venture is the current state of the Indian Judicial system. “The judicial system is slow and the legal services market is highly fragmented with a lack of large law firms due to regulations. This means that often people have to spend significant time and effort to understand costs associated with getting legal advice and  legal documents executed.“ adds Dhruv.

The team is led by its two founders – Dhruv Jain and Ridhish Talwar, who’ve both worked in the financial services industry in London. “Tariq Kamal, with 6+ years of experience in the field of contract drafting and management, is heading the legal services and Saurabh Kumar who is a qualified Company Secretary is heading the business services. Our total team size is currently 8,” Dhruv informs.

Popular Services

• Company incorporation is our most popular service and this is aimed at assisting young entrepreneurs.
• We also do document drafting which is drafting of legal and business service documents. The idea here is that if clients can make sense of quotes then they feel more comfortable ordering for legal docs.
• Besides these two, we also provide Marriage Registration services, although this currently only provided in Delhi.

The procedure to avail their services is simple. The client, upon visiting the site, is provided with access to legal/business information, forms and procedures allowing him/her to make an informed decision.

Certain questionnaire and forms are then made available to the client to collect relevant information for execution of the easylaw services.

”Once we have the relevant information, a domain expert (legal/secretarial/etc) is assigned who executed the order as required,” adds Dhruv.

Revenue model and marketing

The revenue model is based on the pricing policy for legal and business services that are provided. “We charge our clients for these services on a per order basis, but would like to add that as far as possible, we include all fees, govt. duties etc. in our prices so that the client knows exactly what they need to pay at the very beginning,” Dhruv says.

“We marketing our services the in the usual ways start-ups do, i.e. via SEO, pay per click, social media and word of mouth.” Even though the site was launched in Jan 2012 there has been an encouraging growth and currently, it generates about 300 new visitors a day.

Obstacles Faced

As the sector is a fairly complex and high risk one, Dhruv is asked about the legal qualifications of the founders or the years of experience of his team. Dhruv clarifies, “EasyLaw.in is not intended to provide complex legal solutions to high net worth individuals or multi-national companies. We wish to provide legal services to individuals and small businesses that currently do not have easy access to affordable and quality legal services. In fact, we are entrepreneurs ourselves and feel we better understand the needs of our target clientele.”

“Additionally, as with any startup the biggest challenge is getting the word about your service offering out to people who are looking for them. Fortunately, due to the increase in internet penetration this challenge has been softened a bit, as many clients are able to locate us online, but there still remains a large section of the population that could benefit from our services whom we would like to reach out to,” says Dhruv.

Give them a look-in here.

Redwood Associates, an emerging analytics company, researching the application of analytics in the social space, have just launched their first product -LookBeyondResumes.com. Every organization often has a “picture” of an ideal employee based on perception rather than information and this is the problem that LookBeyondResumes is aiming to solve.

The process employed by LookBeyondResumes utilises the information, technology and powerful data mining algorithms, to search and shortlist superior talent based on success patterns which are relevant to a role, function, company and an industry. These algorithms developed by LookBeyondResumes enable an employer to shortlist smarter and a job seeker to apply better.

The engine also keeps adapting itself to changes in the environment, getting better at identifying the best with each new hire. “What you get is your personal Google to help you make better employment decisions,” says Pavan the COO of Redwood Associates.

Redwood associates is an analytics company whose aim is to empower people through Intelligence.  Redwood Associates has empowered over 10, 000 students and 120 Corporates in the last 5 years. The organization started out as a training center called “Analytics Training India” which was launched in the year 2007.  Later in the year 2008, they launched their analytics firm called Redwood Associates, which is committed in developing intellectual property.

Check out the website here and stay tuned for an in-depth interview to know about Redwood Associates.

But do startups need to be managed the same way as large companies? Heck, no! Steve Blank, the co-founder of E.piphany (also a professor of entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University, Columbia University and the Joint Berkeley/Columbia Executive MBA program), postulated that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. According to him business practices that make sense for large companies are not appropriate for startups.

Startups evolve and go through different stages to finally arrive at the stage of a large enterprise. Every stage differs in goals and challenges. Steve Blank lists these stages as:

1. The Scalable startup stage
2. Metamorphosis – the Transition stage
3. The Large Company stage

Steve’s postulation also indicates that each of these stages requires different combinations and flavours of:

1. Management Style
2. Work Culture
3. Sales & Marketing Strategies
4. Technical Skills

Think of a situation where you want to hire the best tech talents for your startup. Would you go through the regular route that either Microsoft or Google would take? People would strive to join the larger established companies as they can provide an employee practically everything that she wants – the culture, the salary, the bonus, the exposure etc. But as a startup you will have to go the unconventional way to attract the best developers. The prospective employees and the co-founders must possess different sets of managerial skills in order to traverse into the next stage successfully.

But why is it necessary to define what a startup is? It is for the simple reason that 99% of startups fail and have life expectancy of five years only (being optimistic here). Therefore, if you understand the anatomy of a startup you will be able to take care of it and nurture it with the right set of nutrients – the people, the skills and the processes. In his dissection of a startup, Steve Blank has conceptually explained it well.

You can infer from his explanation that startups are the ventures that are designed with intent to grow big but being at the startup stage means being on the lookout for scalable and sustainable business model. Co-founders go through a variety of versions of the initial idea to arrive at the one that best fits the market over a span of one or two years. Once the business model is found and the repeated revenues flow in, (you can say that your startup has reached the tipping point), the startup is ready to grow and transform into the next stage – the transition stage.

Here is another reason why it is necessary to define a startup. This one is very important and needs to be understood in order to turn into a billion dollar business. In an ideal situation you would want a VC (Venture Capitalist) or an external investor to invest in your startup. So, here’s a little secret pulled out from some of Steve’s wisdom: VCs view startups as an organization used to search for a scalable business model. Once the scalable business model is found, the VCs pitch in and the startup usually grows big. With external investors this scalable startup undergoes a metamorphosis. It progresses into the transition stage and finally into a large company. It is also often at this stage that the co-founders are fired. The reason is that as the startup progresses into the next stage, it needs different set of managerial skills.

If you want to start up on your own then you must evaluate whether you have the kick to thrash out various ideas, work obscene hours and ultimately evolve into a scalable startup, so that you can seek external funds to grow really big. If not, then you may not want to leave your professional job career. Instead look for more entrepreneurial job opportunities. Many companies have the startup culture and offer entrepreneurial work opportunities that are equally challenging.

The post was originally posted at BootStrapToday. Read their story here.

Key Points the company vouches for-

• Social shopping
• Visual shopping experience
• Enhanced customer service (A significant step towards making deliveries predictable is the ‘Express Shipping’ option of Fashionara, which offers guaranteed next day deliveries across 6 cities (currently) in India)
• Content

Globally, the online fashion industry forms one of the biggest pies of e-commerce. A research study conducted by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) reported that the global online fashion retail industry demonstrated exponential growth of 2,000% from 2001 to 2011. Fashionara.com comes at a time when this sector in India, while still at the growth stage, is showing immense potential with growing internet penetration and the availability of fashion brands online. Arun Sirdeshmukh, with experience of over 2 decades in fashion retail, has spearheaded the growth of brands like Indus League and Madura Garments. Darpan Munjal, has spent over 18 years in building internet companies in the US and in India. He has led the online / e-commerce initiatives of companies like Sears Holdings, CMC Ltd, as well as Indiatimes Shopping.

Speaking on the launch, ArunSirdeshmukh, Co-founder and CEO said, “India currently lacks true-to-fashion, full price, online retailers that provide the fashion experience customers have come to expect in good offline fashion malls. We hope to bridge that gap with kind of fashion content, innovations and customer centric features built on Fashionara.com.”

“We believe that the customers now want better online experiences, seamless offline interfaces with ‘unexpected’ customer service. Our promise is to present a premium online fashion mall that will offer choice, convenience, superior value and a world-class user experience to customers in India”, added Darpan Munjal, Co-founder and Director, Fashionara.com.

More about them on the site

Whenever I come across startup entrepreneurs, I am usually told about the obstacles, hitches, funding constraints, infertile ecosystem for new ventures and the difficulties they face to put their idea into action. If one goes deeper, one will realize that most of these difficulties are self created. The real life situations become worries, as we fail to design solutions. The moment we are able to design a way out of the same situation, it becomes an opportunity. Yes, startups and even established organizations don’t realize that these mental boxes translate into major organizational bottlenecks. The only way to come out of these limitations is to “Dissolve the boxes”.

Let’s analyze entrepreneurs who have tasted success on their way vis-a-vis those who met failures. The situation remaining the same, it is found that those less boxed have greater designing intelligence to absorb the shocks and design a way out compared to those who fiercely guard their boxes. A good case is Sarathbabu who started FoodKing unlike another entrepreneur Gaurav who wanted to start a similar business but gave up citing “unfavourable conditions”. In 2006, Sarathbabu decided to turn into an entrepreneur with just Rs 2,000. That was the start of ‘Food King’. Today, it’s a catering business across various cities and generates revenues of Rs 8 crore. SarathBabu’s story is about determination, a mother’s hard work and enterprise and a family’s fight against the odds. But there is something more behind all this and that is the ability to design solutions. This ability tends towards infinity if we are not hooked to our boxes but keep dissolving them. And this separates success and failures.

The case is similar with established organizations too. Take the example of Air India – the box benefitting the self is so dominant that it does not allow the organization to actually take off. Pilots are thinking of their own benefits, ministers are thinking of their own and the ground staffs are hooked to their own benefits not allowing them space to think of the organization, as a result the organization is suffering.

When entrepreneurs are boxed they have a narrow vision and fail to see the big picture. Some fail to scale-up, some scale-up but are not integrated with the society and some are integrated with the society too but only at the superficial level. These are the enterprises which fail to go global and sustain in the long run.

Entrepreneurs set the mood, capabilities and the grand design for their enterprise because they are the chief architects of their enterprise. If the DNA is healthy the immunity is stronger and therefore they overcome obstacles. But if they are hooked to something say corruption, then they tend to engage and employ people who are corrupt and this ultimately trickles down to many aspects of the organization infecting them.  In many organizations you will only get bosses and not leaders so they promote bossism all around by trimming creativity.

Set the Universal tone for your enterprise by dissolving all your boxes. This will make your enterprise relevant, intelligent and sustainable in the short, medium and long term.

Visitors can initiate chat/call/tweet or like from a small proactive popup while the agents can answer directly from their preferred IM – Skype/GTalk. This allows the agent to help even while they are on the go.As a next step in the direction of multi-channel engagement, “we have added ‘Help desk’ as the new channel for communication – without the bells and whistles you find in full-blown enterprise grade helpdesk systems but only the absolutely necessary features suitable for our customers (Startups and entrepreneurs) to help their web visitors quickly and efficiently.” explains Sreedhar when it comes to a differentiating factor when compared to Zendesk or Freshdesk.

Founded by two BITS Pilani alumni, ClickDesk has more than 20,000 businesses. A huge chunk of their clients are in theUS(36%). 17% are from Europe and 34% from SouthEast Asia (primarilyIndia). With a cumulative corporate experience of more than 2 decades, Manohar Chapalamadugu and Sreedhar Ambati founded ClickDesk.

Pricing

Upto 50 chats per month – free forever plan – suitable for customers to get a feel of the product

Unlimited chats/calls/emails – $9.99/agent/month

Unlimited with white labeling - $14.99/agent/month

“The pricing is per agent which works out best for our customers and us. Most of our customers start from startups who grow their agent headcount as their business grows. As a startup ourself, we want all the startups to have a chance to provide stellar answers and convert as many web visitors to happy customers and we would like to grow with their business.” believes Sreedhar.

With over 30 million chat impressions per month, ClickDesk is growing fast and you can try out their service here

In Asia, it is not very uncommon for Founders with great ideas to either run their companies in boot strap mode or relocate to Silicon Valley. Even great talent is expected to take huge pay cuts when they plan to join a startup. We dont need a scientist to figure out the primary cause of this issue. This is primarily because of the scarcity of risk capital in Asia. Good ideas have to slog for cash. One of the key factor that gives wings to the dreams of most Silicon Valley startups is the free flow of capital that lets them dream big, really big. Silicon Valley is blessed with excess capital. And, that is probably why failure is embraced. How do they get that kind of money? What is the source? Who are these Limited Partners (LP)?

As per Wikipedia, the sources of funds are Public pension funds, Corporate pension funds, Insurance companies, High Networth Individuals (HNI) / family offices, Endowments, Foundations, Fund-of-funds and Sovereign wealth funds. In addition, there are many cash rich corporates that have their strategic investment arms hunting for opportunities.

Compare that with the sources of funds in Asia:

1. Do you think any government in Asia would allow pension funds to become LPs in Venture Capital funds?

Certainly not. At the most, governments would allow use of pension funds to be invested in real estate and approved listed equities. CPF Board of Singapore allows a portion of provident funds into property, gold, selected equities and top 25 percentile managed funds. All the usual suspects of low risk investing. Nothing wrong with that. I also view that as prudent considering the fact that venture capital industry as a whole is a loss making industry. Of course, we hear everyday about the success stories of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. But we choose to ignore the stories of failures. I read a report recently that mentioned that the average VC fund in US fails to return investor capital after fees.

2. Do we have foundations and endowments who can risk a portion of their money?

No. Most endowments and foundations outside America would choose to place their money into fixed deposits with highest rated banks or managed funds. In Singapore, the three local universities (SMU, NUS and NTU) together have about $2.7 billion in endowment funds plus another $1.7 billion in accumulated surpluses and operating funds, some of which is actively managed. Portfolio allocation to venture capital is probably close to zero. Compare that with Yale and other educational institutions in USA. Yale allocates 33% of its portfolio to private equity (venture capital and leveraged buyouts). Average actual allocation of an american educational institution to private equity is around 10.5%. Since 1976, Yale participated in a number of startups that helped define the technology industry including Compaq computer, Oracle, Genentech, Dell Computer, Amgen, Amazon.com, Yahoo, CISCO, Red Hat, Juniper, Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Zynga. Its investment policy document says : Alternative assets, by their very nature, tend to be less efficiently priced than traditional marketable securities, providing an opportunity to exploit market inefficiencies through active management.

3. Do HNIs have any incentives to back risky tech startups?

Not at all. High net worth individuals are so busy doubling and tripling their money every year in emerging economies and traditional sectors that no one has any bandwidth left for technology. Recently met some HNIs who were busy buying hotels and warehouses in Myanmar and Srilanka. What kind of IRR can GPs offer to beat emerging market returns? What I mean to say is that the traditional sectors are growing at such a fast rate that HNIs have no incentive to look for other alternative investments. The society is highly entrepreneurial but unfortunately no incentive yet to try out tech entrepreneurship.

So what are we left with? How can tech entrepreneurship flourish in Asia?

In my view, corporates can play a big role here. In South East Asia, SingTel has shown leadership by launching their fund Innov8 and sponsoring an incubator called JFDI. If top 10-20 corporates in each country can launch similar funds and sponsor incubators, it would certainly create a demand. And may be that demand for investment opportunities would act as a catalyst for some of the wannabe entrepreneurs as well as angel investors.

In addition, if University endowment funds can also allocate 5-10% of their portfolios toward venture capital, it would be a great boost for the entire tech startup ecosystem.

About the Author :

The WoW story:

WoW was initially formed with the aspiration of enabling youngsters and adults to fall in love with the English Language and also making them explore the body, the mind, the spirit and the connection between the same. It all began with Megha Bajaj, the founder, receiving an overwhelming response to start off with an online training series on the skills of writing.

She adds, “This is when I started realizing that life skills and language skills could somehow be woven together and help people significantly. The workshop kept growing by word of mouth and Facebook marketing and soon enough we felt workshops should be taken to a school level so that many more lives can be touched.”

“We were able to reach out to 20,000 odd kids last year itself.”

Team WoW:

Besides Megha, the founder, the core team consists of Saloni, an MBA grad from the US, Nandhitha Hariharan, a Chennai based student, Jamuna Rangachari, formerly the assistant editor of Life Positive, Prity Gandhi, the web solutions head and Nidhi Gupta, a physiotherapist who works part time at WoW .

“As you can see, we are an all girls team,” Megha points out. “Besides this, we have a lot of people whom we hire as and when there is a need for training programs or otherwise.”

Services Offered:

WoW offers services that include a number of online workshops, which are for all ages, and also attempts to bring about a radical change in the way English is taught, with the development of an English workbook on Attitude development, called I AM WOW.

WoW conducts training programs, primarily in three areas, Teachers training, corporate training and student training. “Our training programs have been deeply appreciated and all those involved stand testimony to the immense positive impact of these workshops.”

Besides this, they also offer web creation courses. “A website is the most important mass media advertising portal for your company,” says Megha. “Therefore right from conceptualization, planning, producing, post-production, research, and advertising, WoW will show you the path to success by having a beautiful website. “

One very interesting aspect about the WoW experience is the presence of spirituality that is intertwined along with learning experience.

“The two ‘spiritual’ workshops we have are: A New Beginning, which is for adults and is to do a lot with expressive writing and Ten Attitude for kids, which is an experiential workshop that again aims to help kids understand their world better.”

“We have had enquiries from companies like Lakme and Merck and hope to have our first corporate training program by November.”

Revenue Model and Marketing

Megha says, “All our online workshops are priced at 10,000 INR for ten sessions (each session has about 3 sections). The way it works is, we send participants a session – they complete it in their own time and space and send it back to us. Within a week we re-send it to them with suggestions, ideas, tips and the next session.”

Also, the ‘I AM WOW’ workbooks are priced at Rs. 200 each.

Referring to the growing popularity so far, Megha says, “We have a facebook page that has over 8000 fans. We get about 15,000-20,000 hits per week on our page which we feel is great considering WoW is just a 1.5 year old baby and we began most of our marketing efforts only in August 2011. We have several events and competitions on this page making it very interactive and exciting.”

Challenges and road ahead

One of the biggest challenges for the team has been to get more schools to understand the dire need for children to be taught life skills. “Most principals see their job as a role – as something that gives them money, power and a designation. Unfortunately, some of them aren’t visionaries who genuinely care about the welfare of kids. WoW booklets are extremely economical and yet, to convince the schools the need for life skills for kids has been a herculean effort. In the same breath, I can’t help but mention – how wonderful and forthcoming certain principals have been. People like, Dr J. Arawindhan, CEO of Achariya Group, Pondicherry and Gayathri Ram, Principal of Sri Natesan Vidyasalya Chennai have made me believe that there is hope. Much hope,” adds Megha

Megha remains optimistic though, and hopes that WoW becomes a subject in many schools in India. “Every week, one period should be a WoW period where kids are taught life skills,” she asserts.

With the evidence of growth so far, the road ahead only seems positive. “We are already on our way to buying a space which we shall be calling The WoW Center. This is going to be a body-mind-spirit space whereby various workshops will be conducted for kids and adult.” 

The online sessions are also to be transformed into contact classes. “The aim is that WoW should become a part of people’s lives even beyond the ten sessions. We hope to have a lot of scale-able workshops and ongoing talks and discussions so that WoW becomes a culture for people.”

“We have to create a world where ‘I, me, myself’ starts changing into ‘we’, and the next generation thinks of the world as a family. I know it sounds very idealistic – but we have to begin somewhere. Cynicism is not an option any more – each of us, in our own little way, will have to start creating a better world, one student at a time. WoW is our humble effort,” says Megha signing off.

Incidentally, Megha Bajaj is also the acclaimed author of the book, ‘Thank you Cancer’ and writes for several popular publications.

Do check out the website and the movie here.

“Every Entropy t-shirt is hand designed, which makes it impossible for any two of our t-shirts to be identical. We’ve tried to put things we see around in our designs which are inspired from life itself,” says Shruti. “Entropy designs are random and most unique, as every t-shirt here is specially hand designed,” adds Shradha.

Starting up

Based currently in Jodhpur,Rajasthan, Entropy was started on Facebook in October 2011. The webstore recently took off in Feb. this year.

Shruti informs, “Ours is a team of two at present. Shradha, my sister, and an engineer by profession, is our designer who also takes care of online marketing and I manage the accounts, content, stock, logistics, shoots etc.”

“Though we are as different as chalk and cheese, we share this common passion for anything creative and beautiful.  That gave us the idea of hand designed t-shirts and coming from a business family, carrying it forward as a venture came naturally to us. What propelled us forward with the venture was the lack of t-shirt brands (especially for girls) in the market which are cool yet not screaming for attention. We are trying to fill that gap and create our own niche,” adds Shruti.

The venture is currently self funded. The initial stumbles included procuring good quality and well stitched t-shirts at reasonable prices. “We tried samples from all over India, and finally got a manufacturer in Bangalore- Dash n dots, who provides us t-shirts of our requirement and all thanks to them, we could start,” informs Shruti.

Products and services

Some of the products that are on offer include good quality cotton (180 GSM), great fits (slim and regular), soothing pastels and light coloured tees.

“We do bulk orders as well for colleges/corporates/friend groups/events. Our tshirts can also be asked for a gift wrap with a personal note. For people who wish to gift their loved ones on time, we have also keep the option of ordering a gift in advance (within a month), and we make sure that its delivered around the mentioned date,” adds Shruti.

About the clientele, Shradha says, “The major chunks of our customers are in the age group of 18-25 age brackets but for our designs, age is actually not a bar. Anyone who likes wearing simple, smart and interesting clothes without looking like a message board or a graffiti wall could grab one.”

Also, Entropy has tie ups with several e-commerce players in the industry today. “There are so many online markets which provide a great platform for new products and handmade goods. We are selling through many online and offline stores. Entropy t-shirts are available on Rangiru.com, Craftsvilla.com, Shopclues.com, Unwrapindia.com, Indiologie.com, and Tadpolestore.com,” adds Shruti.

Some of the competitors are other online brands like esbe, bootika etc., which sell handmade t-shirts. “Our USP though, is our unique designs which are interesting yet not flashy. Also the fact that every t-shirt is handmade adds value to our products,” says Shruti.

Talking about expansion plans, Shradha says, “Our next step would be to introduce tshirts for men. We have plans to introduce accessories and lifestyle products later this year.”

Do check  their website out at – http://www.entropystore.com/

After 2 Years, 20 Apps, 250 Release Cycles, 4 Global Awards and much more, SpiceLabs crossed 50 million downloads. They have created an infographic for the same.

Q – What are the things to be maintained in books of accounts?

Ans – Books of accounts constitute of  Journal, Ledger book, Trial Balance, Original and carbon copies of bills/invoices/receipts /, Cash Book, Profit and Loss A/c, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statements.

Q- Is it a requirement to maintain books of accounts under the Income Tax Provisions, or Company Law Provisions or for that matter provision related to LLPs?

Ans- Companies and LLPs are required to maintain books of accounts as mandated by their governing statute, namely Companies Act, 1956 and LLP Act, 2008. Further, Income tax also casts an obligation to maintain books of accounts, irrespective of the form of business, and has separate provisions related to it. Thus, there may be a situation where a private limited company is required to comply with provisions of Companies Act and Income Tax as well.

Q- If I’m recording all my transactions (incomes, expenses, purchase, sales, etc) in an excel sheet and keeping records of bank accounts/pay slips/vouchers, am I accounting all my transactions?

Ans- Yes, you are going in the right track as you are preparing a part of Books of Accounts. But it does not cover all your transactions, so in order to keep records of all the transaction you need to maintain additional books of accounts like Journal, Ledger, Trial Balance, Cash Book, P&L A/c, Balance Sheet and Cash flow Statements in commonly accepted accounting software, such as Tally or Oracle.

Q-    If I maintain accounts via a professional firm, is it mandatory for me to get accounts audited? If yes, what is the frequency of audit?

Ans- Maintaining or not maintaining books by outsourcing it to a professional firm does not determine whether you need to undergo audit or not. Furthermore, audits are of different types-internal audit, cost audit, tax audit and statutory audit. Each audit has its own statutory requirements, thresholds of being conducted with relevant deadlines and due dates.

Q- Is there any difference between accounting and accounting standards?

Ans- If accounting is the product, accounting standards are its prescription. Accounting standards are enacted and published by The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, meant to be followed by businesses for true and fair view of their activities. All accounting standards are not mandatory for all forms of businesses. Simply put, bigger is your business, more are the accounting standards which needs to be followed.

Q-Do I have the option of not maintaining accounts if I’m incurring losses in the initial phases?

Ans- No, you don’t have that option since you need to maintain accounts mandatory whether you are incurring losses or earning profits. Not earning revenue cannot be an excuse to non-maintenance of books. Infact, as long as you are entering into transactions, you need to account for the same. The interesting thing is that if you maintain accounts in the years of losses, and file tax returns for the same, you get the benefit of setting off losses in the years of profit generation.

Q- Can I have the option of accounting my transactions manually or is it obligatory to get it done by any dedicated software?

Yes, you have an option of accounting your transaction manually. It is not at all obligatory to get it done by any dedicated software. But it’s always advisable to maintain accounts on dedicated software to eliminate any errors or miscalculations.

Q-I am a salaried individual in a MNC and a director in a family owned business. Can I account for the ‘transactions made in employee capacity by me’ and ‘for the business as a director’ in the same books of accounts?

Ans-No. An individual and a business are two completely separate legal entities. Though you may be a major stakeholder of the business, you cannot mix your own account with the accounts of the business. It has to be made very clear that once you transfer anything owned by you in the name of the business, it will from then onwards be treated as property of the business. Hence, separate accounts have to be maintained for individuals and businesses.Its a prudent practise to maintain separate bank accounts also, in order to ensure transparency and flexibility.

Please feel free ask us any query, if you have. Just send a mail to – alokpatnia@taxmantra.com

Startups and other businesses feel free to visit Taxmantra.com for comprehensive accounting, legal, regulatory, taxation and other compliance related assistance.

1) Learning to learn

One of the biggest short-comings of the Indian educational system is that it fails to teach its students how to learn. Students coming from the Indian educational system are very good at cramming up and memorizing things, but don’t have a sense for how to learn about a new topic. Asking a typical Indian engineer to learn about renaissance art is likely to cause far more fear than excitement. Learning how to learn is an absolutely important skill that students have to unfortunately pick up outside of the formal education system. Irrespective of who’s to blame for the lack of this skill among employees, you need to make sure that the people you’re hiring have this very important skillset. Employees, especially in a startup, need to learn about lots of new areas – Legal, Marketing your product, User Interaction, Patents and tons of other areas – on a regular basis, and they should not get stumped by a new task that they have to learn everything about.

2) Expertise

For some reason, becoming an expert in a field is not something that people place a premium on. Becoming an expert in a field – any field – demonstrates a real commitment to learning, and is the ultimate result of focus and dedication. Mediocrity is a big barrier to innovation and creativity that you need to protect your startup’s culture against.

Another hugely positive thing that comes from becoming an expert in an area is confidence. The confidence that comes from knowing that you can learn everything there is to know about a topic is invaluable. It gives sufficient confidence for a person to know that they can tackle new and unknown challenges, and learn everything there is to know about a problem. I’m not particularly worried when a candidate doesn’t have the expertise in exactly the field we want, but that they be an expert at something – anything. Becoming an expert in one field is hard – but once you’ve done it, using that to gain expertise in related fields is significantly easier.

3) A Sense of Ownership

A sense of ownership is very important in any prospective candidate you are interviewing. A big red flag in some interviews is when the candidate declares that “I didn’t work on that” or “I wasn’t responsible for that feature” in response to a question slightly outside their CV. Working in a startup usually means that everyone has to wear different hats at different times, and you can’t risk having your employees say that “It’s not in my job description”. A strong sense of ownership over work is an essential personality trait that you must test for before hiring anyone. I don’t know what it is, but I see that this sense of ownership is mysteriously missing in a large majority of candidates that I’ve interviewed. There is this annoying tendency to do just what they’re told, and blame the lack of instructions for not completing a task. This tendency is probably cultural, but it doesn’t work very well in a work environment, where we need people to think through what is needed to get the job done and then follow up and do it.

Of course, you also need to ensure the usual traits – Smartness, culture fit, soft skills etc… match, but I think startups need to pay particular attention to the above three criteria to ensure that employees who come in will fit in well with the culture and succeed at your company.

These are the Top 3 things you should look at while developing a technical team and why building a startup team is equal to reaching Nirvana. If you are an entrepreneur looking to hire the best for your startup, use our Startup Job Board.

Rocket Internet plays an active investor role for the ventures. Besides the seed funding, it also helps with the IT and physical infrastructure that is required to get a company off-ground initially. The important thing with an incubator is that there is a healthy flow of best practices and learnings between ventures so one doesn’t end up reinventing the wheel and moves much faster towards execution.

FoodPanda’s value proposition is to make ordering food for home delivery fast and hassle free for the consumers. “Instead of hunting for the number of the restaurant from where you want to order food, and going through the whole process of repeating your contact information and delivery address, you just call on our central delivery number or place the order online or through the mobile application, and we’ll get the restaurant to deliver the food hot and steamy to your door step,” explains Akhilesh.

Akhilesh Bali

Co-founded along with Amit Kohli, the two member team has a strong technical background. Amit comes with 7 years’ experience as a consultant with McKinsey and is passionate about the online space. While Akhilesh is an ISB alumus and has previously run his own start-up Mithaimate.com, which is India’s largest online Sweets Store. Besides the two, there’s a strong 15 member team comprising sales, marketing and operations.

“We have a few more revenue channels that we may look to tap into as we build scale and expand into more cities. Given our aggressive marketing plans, we’ll generate healthy incremental business for the restaurants partnering with us, in lieu of which we’ll share revenues with them on the orders originating from our end,” says Akhilesh about the revenue model.

The operations were launched in Singapore followed by other countries in South-East Asia. Currently, FoodPanda is live in 8 countries with plans to add a few more in the coming months. “While the operations are run independently in each country, there is an active sharing of learnings across countries. This helps in a big way to capitalize on the cross country synergies, and makes sure we learn from each other’s success and mistakes,” adds Akhilesh.

FoodPanda had a beta-launch in Gurgaon last month and some BTL marketing to generate some business. The promotions at a full-scale begin in the month of June as FoodPanda expand their offerings to all of Delhi-NCR and subsequently to other cities.

More about FoodPanda on their site.

Last date: August 17, 2012

What’s on offer: Each regional winner in the 8 countries (Brazil, China, India, Israel, North America, South Korea, Western and Eastern Europe) will secure $100,000 USD in convertible note funding and will earn the opportunity to participate in the Grand Finals competition which offers an additional $150,000 USD in prize funding.

Judging Criteria

• Merits of innovation
• Market potential
• Management capabilities
• Realistic financial projections

What should the business plan include?

• Executive Summary
• Management/Founders Biographies
• Business Description
• Market Analysis
• Competitive Overview
• Business Risk Summary
• Financial Projection

You can apply for the competition here

For any queries please get in touch with Chandan +91-9986198806 / Samridhi +91-9740196885

Please read the following Rules & Regulations carefully before applying:

Contest Description: QPrize is a seed investment competition designed to provide early stage funding to entrepreneurs and start-ups that have innovative ideas that can significantly impact the wireless ecosystem. The contest offers $1Million in total seed financing to contestants in eight regional geographies: Brazil, China, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, India, Israel, South Korea and North America. Qualcomm Ventures will select eight finalists from each region to compete in eight separate regional finals competitions whereby the winner in each region will receive US$100,000 (€100K in European regions) in convertible note funding and offered the opportunity to come to the US to compete for an additional $150,000 (USD) in our Grand Finals Competition. The competition officially kicks-off on May 21^st and runs until August 17^th. Regional winners will be announced in September. The Grand Finals will be held in the San Francisco region in November.

Eligibility: QPrize is open to all persons who are 18 years or older and who are citizens or legal residents in any country in any of the eight regions where the competitions are being held. Contestants may only submit one business plan and must select the region in which they will set-up and operate their business. Winners will be required to incorporate their companies prior to distribution of funds. Entrepreneurs and start-ups that have raised less than $2 million may apply to this competition.

QPrize Funding: All winners will issue a convertible promissory note to Qualcomm in exchange for funds received. Each regional winner will receive US$100,000 (€100,000 for the European winners) and the Grand Prize Winner will receive an additional US$150,000 in funding.  The exact form of the note will vary depending upon the winner’s country of incorporation, but all notes will be unsecured promissory notes that convert into the equity securities issued by the winning companies in their next significant equity round of funding (i.e., Series A). The conversion of the funded amount will be on customary seed round note financing terms.

Entry Mechanics: Qualcomm and its sponsors are not responsible for late, lost, delayed, damaged, misdirected, incomplete, illegible or unintelligible entries, which will not be accepted, or for any problems or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer online systems, servers, service providers, computer equipment, or software, failure of any e-mail or entry received by Qualcomm on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet, problems with any Qualcomm’s website, or any combination thereof, including any injury or damage to the entrant’s or any other person’s computer resulting from downloading any materials in connection with the Qualcomm Ventures Business Plan Competition (the “Competition”). Additional, multiple, and/or mechanically generated entries will be disregarded and may result in total and permanent disqualification from the Competition. There is a limit of only one entry per business entity (or by an affiliated group of business entities).

No Confidentiality; License to Entry: All entries become property of Qualcomm and will not be acknowledged or returned. By submitting an entry, each entrant agrees (a) to abide by the terms of these rules and regulations (the “Rules”), (b) there is no reasonable expectation that the contents of its application are confidential information and that none of the sponsors, Qualcomm, the Competition judges, and/or panelists will be under any obligation to treat such application and its contents as confidential information, and (c) to grant Qualcomm a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license and full right to use, reproduce, modify, conform, adapt, publish or transmit such information submitted, but solely in connection with the administration and promotion of the Competition.

Indemnification:  The entrant agrees to indemnify all Sponsors, Qualcomm, the Competition judges, and/or panelists for all damages, liabilities, claims, costs, charges and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable attorneys’ fees that sponsors, Qualcomm and/or Competition judges, or panelists may incur as a result of any claims brought relating to any application, including, without limitation, its contents.

Participation: Employees of Qualcomm are ineligible. Participation in the competition constitutes an agreement by each entrant to comply with these rules. All decisions of Qualcomm, competition judges, and panelists regarding any and all aspects of the Competition shall be final and binding in all respects. Qualcomm reserves the right to cancel or modify the Competition if it determines, in its sole discretion, that fraud, technical failure, other errors has compromised the integrity of the Competition. Qualcomm and the sponsors will not be responsible for typographical, printing or other inadvertent errors in these Rules or in other materials relating to the Competition.

Limitations of Liability: By entering the Competition, each entrant agrees that (1) any and all disputes, claims, and causes of action arising out of, or in connection with, the Competition, or any award granted shall be resolved individually without resort to any form of class action; (2) any claims, judgments and awards shall be limited to actual out-of-pocket costs incurred, including costs associated with entering the Competition, but in no event attorney’s fees; and (3) entrants hereby waive all rights to claim, (i) punitive, incidental or consequential damages, (ii) any and all rights to have damages multiplied or otherwise increased, and (iii) any other damages, other than damages for actual out-of-pocket expenses, or any award of equitable relief, including injunctive relief or an award of specific performance.

General Release: By entering the Competition, each entrant releases Qualcomm, the Sponsors, Competition judges, and panelists and their respective parents, affiliates, directors, officers, employees, representatives, partners and agents, from any liability whatsoever for any claims, costs, injuries, losses or damages of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, the Competition or the acceptance, possession, use or misuse of any award (including, without limitation, claims, costs, injuries, losses or damages related to personal injuries, death, damage to, or loss or destruction of, property, rights of publicity or privacy, defamation or portrayal in a false light).