education

Former BPO Executive V.Bharathwaj starts MyndGenie; An Emotional Wellness Management Company

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

V.Bharathwaj, till recently the global Chief Marketing Officer of 24/7 Customer, has started a new business venture, ‘MyndGenie Systems’. MyndGenie provides emotional wellness management to create, improve and sustain emotional wellness. It is done through self empowerment of working professionals, students and sports professionals. Bharathwaj said, “Emotional wellness management is a new space that completes and complements physical fitness. MyndGenie is a result of my passion to enable people to live up to their potential, everyday, using neuroscience methods. For the first time globally, emotional wellness management through brain science will be simplified and delivered using a unique combination of software and services”. MyndGenie will be based out of Bangalore and is set to launch shortly in major cities. It will provide services for the Indian and international markets.

Tagged as: accounting, disclaimer, education, graphics, great-angel, guest-columns, lose-something, password, popular-on-cloudstory-in, unsexy-startups

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India 6th Biggest Country in terms of Twitter Accounts : 19% ‘Active’ Users

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

Geolocation analysis of Twitter accounts by Semiocast revealed some interesting numbers and patterns. The U.S. still top at the 1st place on Twitter in terms of accounts with 107.7 million accounts. Brazil is now the second country with 33.3 million accounts, surpassing Japan now third at 29.9 million. Semiocast has analyzed 383 million of Twitter user profiles created before January 1st 2012. Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information (free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets). This study reveals that users from the Netherlands are the most active within top countries. 33% of accounts located in the Netherlands posted at least one public message between September 1st, 2011 and November 30th, 2011, making the Netherlands the top country with the highest rate of Twitter users posting tweets, before Japan. The global average is only 27%, as many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others. This number for India was 19% which is 8% less than the global average. Semiocast is a company based in Paris, France, providing data intelligence and research on social media.

Tagged as: accounting, education, graphics, great-angel, guest columnists, guest-columns, learning, lose-something, startup

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Facebook and Twitter More Addictive than Alcohol and Cigarettes :Study

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

A study by Chicago University’s Booth Business School has confirmed what most of us already knew – checking email or social network updates could be more addictive then cigarettes or alcohol. The results will be published in the journal Psychological Science. While sleep and sex might be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to social media longings. ”Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist” said team leader Wilhelm Hofmann speaking to the Guardian. 205 people in the age group 18-85 took part in the experiment. The subjects were ‘sent out into the wild’ in and around the German city of Würtzburg to measure their responses. The subjects received messages on their Blackberrys from the researchers asking them to message back their ‘desire episodes’ and cravings.

Tagged as: education, graphics, guest columnists, guest-columns, learning-market, management, password, startup, technology

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Attention to individual kid is the USP of Funtoot, an intelligentpersonal tutor

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

Rajeev Pathak, Suryaprakash Konanuru, Haris Poonthala, once part of Wipro, quit their respective jobs to give wings to their startup dreams. Haris says, “I was interested in teaching. I was teaching as a part of voluntary educational projects and am keen on educational aspects.” What they have on offer is FunToot, an intelligent and adaptive personal tutor that observes, assesses diagnoses, interacts, encourages and helps every child based on each child’s individual characteristics. Suryaprakash says that they started building this product to create a global education technology company out of India.. Even more important is their belief that ground up innovation has not happened in technologies for children. Another reason is giving back to society as the three of them are from a middle class background. Artificial Intelligence for individual kid development They had conceived five products originally for education space and took it to 100 schools across India through conferences. “We realized that we have to address fundamental issues rather than some superficial things. Static content, ERP and Interactive white boards are being done by a lot of companies. But we wanted to understand what the fundamental issues are in education system. We discovered, “ It was individual attention to each child, ” says Suryaprakash. He reasons why AI was used by explaining, “ Treating everybody as equal in a class is okay but not sufficient as every child is different. That made us think that we need to provide a personal tutor. If you want to provide a personal tutor there are ways to do that and we found AI to be the significant technology element.” Partnering with select schools, they started off their journey. A few products out of the original five fell by the wayside due to market research and user feedback. The partner schools adopted their products and gave continuous feedback. Explaining the challenges, Suryaprakash says, “ Ours is not only a disruptive technology product but it’s an intersection of education pedagogy, artificial intelligence and cloud computing . Complimenting strengths in pedagogy, AI, Cloud, and animation is important to build the product”. Suryaprakash points out, “Having the right skills in each one of the areas is the key – to bring the best teachers, best usability experts, to bring the pedagogy experts and the best technologists, has been critical success factor for us so far. Each has value and each has to work together. One cannot override the other guy.” Haris adds, “ children, by nature, like to experiment and handling children is a challenge. As more data is given as input, more intelligent our product becomes.” Finding a way to understand each child Using features such as ‘Discovery’, ‘Observation’ and ‘interaction’, FunToot adapts to each child’s unique characteristics. Suryaprakash says “FunToot knows the child’s characteristics and what the child has done until yesterday and until now. So, it has all the information about the child –, based on which Funtoot helps the child in the same way as a good human tutor will do in one-on-one scenario. How was Funtoot developed? Aided by a full-time pedagogy team to design subject matter, Funtoot is capable of self-correction of a problem thanks to the robust effort of the R&D team. Another USP of the product is “it can accept input in numeric form, text form and in geometric form, which is a pretty complex procedure. Three schools have signed up already and 20 more are in the pipeline for next academic year. So far, 1000 students have used the product. All the schools have given impressive feedback on the product. Science and English are waiting to be added to the repertoire of Funtoot, which now has content in Mathematics. FunToot is Device Agnostic eDreams is not focusing their effort in hardware, as the innovation in intelligent personal tutoring is the focus and not the devices. Rajeev says, “We are partnering with device vendors to take FunToot on to multiple devices like PCs, Tablets, Notebooks and Netbooks” and FunToot is device agnostics and can run on any device through private, public and hybrid cloud models. Trends in education as captured by eDreams About trends in education, Rajeev says, “One major trend which we are seeing is a holistic development of a child, rather than being traditional rote type of learning. Every parent expects their child to get best possible education. So the parent pressure on school and schools in turn changing themselves seems to be a good development.” Another interesting development is curriculum that matches global standards in good private schools, and students from South-East Asia and Middle East are coming to India for studies. The residential schools of this type are only in the premium segment though. Private schools are preferred even in rural areas. Big private schools such as Edify, VIBGYOR, and Euro Schools are setting a new benchmark in the educational space in India, according to Rajeev. Talking of rural forays, Rajeev says, “In future, we desire to work with Government, NGOs etc to localize the product and take it to rural masses. Rural primary and secondary education is constrained by the non-availability of good quality teaching staff. FunToot is our attempt to help address this issue. Learning Made Fun It has been a big challenge and lot of hard work for the eDreams team to build FunToot, but it gives immense happiness to the team when they see kids enjoying and learning with FunToot. FunToot is a bold venture in a niche segment of education and we at YourStory.in wish eDreams all the very best in their endeavours. Website: http :// www . edreamssoftware . com / In News : Recently raised first round of investment from Mumbai Angels. If you are an early stage education startup, then apply now to join the Edustars – a YourStory.in initiative powered by Accel Partners & Intel AppUp to recognize and showcase outstanding education startups.

Tagged as: account-details, disclaimer, education, graphics, great-angel, guest columnists, india, learning, learning-market, startups, tech

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When Are You Ready? – The risks of the Mark Zuckerberg strategy

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

What if Mark Zuckerberg were 40 Years Old? Throughout my past four years in the Indian startup ecosystem, first with mChek and now with my company ZipDial , I have had the honor of speaking at various entrepreneurship events at business schools and engineering colleges. Over just these few years, not only have the audiences grown in size, but also the average age of attendees gets younger by the year. When I’ve polled various audiences of students about when they want to start up, many aim to be an entrepreneur immediately out of college, and the majority of enterprising youngsters have goals to start a company within five years. Almost none plan to wait more than 10 years before starting up. The enthusiasm for entrepreneurship among students and young professionals in India is promising and inspiring. However, this trend also gives cause to stop and reflect on when is the right time to start up. In such scenarios, I immediately jump to quote Vivek Wadhwa , a technology entrepreneur and academic of global repute. Wadhwa’s research shows that the average age of Americantechnology entrepreneurs is 39 years old . Surprise and disbelief fills the room – What about Mark Zuckerberg?! Of course there are impressive cases that break the trend, including young successful entrepreneurs from the Indian market such as Vishal Gondal of Indiagames and Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts who both founded their first companies at the ages of 16 and 17, respectively. However, these unique cases are just that – unique. Learn on Someone Else’s Budget I personally believe in building up at least a few years of work experience before starting up, and I believe this is particularly important in India. In the American culture I come from, it is extremely common to start working early in life. For example, I had my first job at the age of 13 as a babysitter, and around the same age, my brother started a small business stringing tennis racquets for a few local clubs. By the age of 18, I had an internship in the International Marketing department of Gallo Winery, the largest winery in the world by volume produced, and this was before I even started college. By the time I graduated from Stanford I had completed a total of seven internships ranging from sales to legal to manufacturing operations to investment banking. By graduation, there was no doubt that entrepreneurship was in my future, but even after the exposure and experience I had, I knew I needed more, and it was only after working six more years in technology companies and startups that the timing was right to start up on my own. By contrast, the typical student in India only gets their first job after finishing college, and many go straight into an MBA program without any work experience. This path focusing exclusively on academics is also a good one, but like any path, it has its limitations. Working for someone else first means you get to learn and make mistakes on someone else’s budget, not yours. I personally believe it is essential to have work experience before starting a company, and therefore caution graduates to think hard about the timing that is right for them. What Are You Waiting For? Once you know you want to start up, what are you waiting for? Is it the idea, the money or the people? This is another favorite question I ask among aspiring entrepreneurs. The typical majority is split between “the idea” and “the money”, with the response of “the people” being a distance third. Again, I disagree with the majority! Running a company is never a one-person show, so whether it’s co-founders or founding team employees, I strongly believe that having the right people ready to start up with you is critical. The right people will attract the money to fund the company. Furthermore, the original idea for a business is very often takes twists and turns along the way, so it is the people who will not only innovate in the first place but who will continue to evolve the idea as the market changes over time. Power to The People Having experience before starting up is not only beneficial for learning but also for networking. This is important for success on a few different levels. Co-Founders Most first-time entrepreneurs, especially young ones, start their companies with friends. Second-time entrepreneurs are more likely to find the right people who complement their own personal expertise and skill sets. While trust, and the kind of trust that exists between friends, is incredibly important between co-founders, it is also important that members of a founding team bring distinct and complementary skill sets to the table. Startups don’t have spare resources for redundancy. While you and your business school or engineering college classmates are relatively homogenous, the more time you have spent in a cross-functional work environment, the more likely you are to build a network and trust with people whose skills complement yours. These are even better potential co-founders. Employees Trust in your early employees is almost as important as trust among co-founders. When your company is brand new with no customers and no revenue and no brand name, your first employees will be convinced to join based on nothing other than trust in you. People whom you have worked with or managed before may be the only people with sufficient exposure to your working style and potential for success to you know and trust you enough to join your brand new company. If you wish to hire people with whom you have no past working relationship, then your background and professionals success must be compelling enough to merit such trust. This only comes with experience and time. Investors If you plan to rely on more than your own personal savings and revenue to run your company, then you will need to convince investors that you are worth funding. The number one question that any investor at a Seed round or Series A round evaluates is the founding team. All investors will do reference checks on you and your co-founders, so having industry experience and a successful track record are essential for building this confidence. There are many arguments in favor of starting up early in your career, including the energy to endure the ups and downs, the lack of family and financial obligations, etc. However, I firmly believe that starting up too young or too inexperienced is unnecessarily risky. Building experience and a network is valuable for finding the right co-founders, early employees, investors, and ultimately for promising a more successful outcome for your and your company. Valerie Rozycki Wagoner Founder & CEO, ZipDial twitter: @valrozycki

Tagged as: account-details, education, guest columnists, guest-columns, india, learning, learning-market, lose-something, popular-on-cloudstory-in, tech, technology

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Why Startups should resort to Social Recruiting

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Every successful entrepreneur will tell you that hiring the right people during the initial stages of a startup’s lifecycle can be the difference between success and failure. “Ideas and business models will inevitably change and evolve in a company’s early lifecycle. But the right people will always create (and recreate) the right business idea,” says Valerie R. Wagoner , Founder & CEO, ZipDial. Most startups are on a tight budget, so a HR consultancy firm is out of the question! Posting an opening on a job search site is the most common practice, but the process of selecting the right person uses up a lot of time and resources. So how can a startup ensure that they have the right person without burning a hole in their pocket? Social recruiting is the answer! A Ma Foi Randstad Workmonitor survey revealed some interesting facts about the Indian workforce’s social networking habits: 84% Indian employees use social networks to learn about an organizations culture. 78% use social networks to keep a track of developments in a company before an interview. 75% are deterred from joining a company based on negative reviews on social networks. The number of people on social networks is currently large enough to constitute a credible pool of possible recruitments. Right now only 2% of all hiring are done through social networking sites. It is expected to grow to 20% of all hiring in the near future. A social network like LinkedIn or Facebook allows a startup to understand if the person can adapt to the work culture and ethos of the company. Also, it is possible to check out the various assignments that the person has worked on. This basically turns into a digital resume and the start of the pre-screening or filtering process. For the person being hired, he/she can keep track of current projects the startup is working on and understand if they fit in. Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2011 revealed: LinkedIn is the most preferred social recruitment medium with 87% companies depending on it. Facebook second at 55% and Twitter third at 47%. If we look at the Indian social recruitment space, Monster.com’s social recruitment app BeKnown, which has been designed for Facebook, is targeting to capture this space. Another initiative by Monster.com, called Monster College, works as an integrated placement platform. So colleges, students and companies can connect with each other. This can be the perfect tool for a startup to hire interns or even full-time employees. Tips for startups to become preferred employers Make use of your Facebook page or Twitter account to connect with your audience. Post interesting developments happening at your startup, on these platforms. Be part of LinkedIn groups and engage with possible candidates. It lets a possible employee/team member to be familiar with what the startup stands for. It could also get someone interested to apply. It is quite clear that ‘the team’ is any startup’s biggest asset. The fact that we spend a significant part of our time online on social networks (for both work and leisure) is also established. Social hiring takes both these realities into consideration and functions as the perfect recruitment process. As Valerie says, “Given the impact that every team member has on the organization, it is important to discuss ways to ensure that the people really are a strong asset rather than a risky investment.” We could not agree more.

Tagged as: education, enterprise, guest-columns, india, online marketing, startups, technology

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Bullets for your valentine (Fired from the internet)

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Bullet Points that might help you decide what to gift on Valentine’s Day We’d all want every day to be a Valentine’s day but reality always has an interesting take on things. This makes it mandatory for us to earmark a day for love. So, Valentine’s Day will always remain a day when hearts pound hard and so do the ring of the cash register (now replaced by data packets over the internet). With only a week to go before V-Day, one must have a fair idea about what he/she would be turning up on the big day. Lovers will gift flowers and chocolates till the times we run out of cocoa or something goes terribly wrong with pollination but with the advent of the internet, there are a gazillion other things to spruce up your love life. Here are some of the options followed by the ever green red options. Players like Chumbak or a lesser known but equally interesting Shopo.in come with a unique offering for Valentine’s Day wherein they add a lot more meaning to a gift. Shopo has an interesting serivce wherein LoveGuru Aisha would be online in the evenings to suggest gifts.” We’re celebrating the season of love which started from January 20 and we’re seeing amazing response which was very much expected. Usually it’s a wee bit difficult for girls to find something for their men but we have a special offering this time around exclusively for men as well”, says Krithika Nelson, founder at Shopo. Deal sites like Vouchersmate also have an interesting offer. “Our Valentine catalog for 2012 is exclusive greeting cards collection with selected flower bouquets and range of gift vouchers from top brands, a complete gift box for everyone you love and care” informs Amit, Founder Vouchersmate. And if you for some reason you don’t believe in gifts, you can do something special like go for a desert making workshop! This, if you happen to be in Bangalore, can be done at Chaipatty. And if your hormones within have started whispering about how experimenting can ruin it sometimes, here’s a more conservative list. Flowers The world’s flower trade is pegged at $100 billion which makes it very easy to believe that the first thing that would crop up in one’s mind when one picture Valentine ’s Day is a red rose (and a heart). You can always get a red rose on any other day but if you’ve woken up too late, you would be lucky to find a rose stem which could signify the purity of your love. Be prepared and get your flowers before hand from the likes of FernsNPetals. A TOI report says the highest price that a rose could fetch was Rs 36 last year. But the quality of these roses which have been stored and treated for the special day (to fetch rosy prices) is contentious. In this age where every Romeo, Laila and Majnu knows about the buzzword- innovation, flowers don’t fit in the bill. it always works as an accompaniment, but you need a plan A. Perfumes The market for perfume in India is huge now where a luxury mall can expect to do a sale of Rs 50000 on a normal day. And a well informed decision about a fragrance can definitely earn oneself some brownie points wherein the polished connoisseur part of you is to be showcased. There are a number of e-commerce companies like Perfume2order catering to this need where you can find perfumes from a Chanel to a Nina Ricci. Perfumes might burn a few holes in the pockets but it definitely mends the heart. Chocolates The chocolate market in India is Rs 2000 crore as of 2011 in which Cadbury has 70% and Nestle has 25% of the market share! But the dark horses (or the chocolates) in these race are the ‘home made chocolates’ which are no longer only made in homes but have a very high gift value. Many ventures including startups like Chocofthetown have special packages for Valentine’s Day which see huge business. Lingerie A bold option but for a fast moving India, certainly a hot topic with e-commerce players like Zivame and MyLace doing really well. The discounts for the Valentine’s season are as high as up to 85% which would surely be enticing. And the other plus here is that both the parties involved so this might be the option worth trying wherein both the parties would benefit. Zivame founder Kapil Karekar says, “We started the campaign in the third week of January and the response has been overwhelming!” Here is a compilation of the websites mentioned in the article (the list is solely an indicator to the possible service providers in the various segments): FernsNPetals (MD, Vikas Gutgutia’s romatic story about finding FNP), Perfume2Order , ChocOftheTown , MyLace , Zivame , Shopo , Vouchersmate and Chaipatty . Hope you find the match for your match! – Jubin Mehta

Tagged as: accounting, business, education, internet, learning, marketing, online marketing, social-media, unsexy-startups

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Tech Tots: Shaping kids to build bots

by Paul Joseph February 5, 2012 Featured

India stood at an appalling 72nd out of 73 participating countries in a study carried out by the OECD under the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To improve this situation, initiatives like Tech Tots are the need of the hour. Still in its infancy, Tech Tots is a venture by two students from D.J.Sanghvi College of Engineering, Mumbai which conducts workshops in electronics for students from grade 7 th -10 th . This venture which came into the spotlight at an event organized by the E-Cell at IIT Bombay, The Need Cofounders, Ankur and Nikita Electronic gadgets are like an extension of the human body now but most of us are oblivious to what goes inside. All are engrossed in enjoying the utility and fun element in the gadgets but miss out on the incredulous yet simple logic used to develop it. The current school curriculum in India does not have provisions for the much required practical aspect and the PISA report reflects this very point. How will Tech Tots do this? Tech Tots has been conducting workshops at college level up till now but would be reaching out to schools now. “We’ve signed deals with a few schools and are in talks with the Bombay Scottish school chain for the next academic year. We’ve received overwhelming response from across the country including a few corporates who’re interested in acquiring our services for their employees” says Ankur Thakkar. Projects The idea seems great but how do they plan to do it? “Our preliminary projects include a mini model of a piano, electronic dice, burglar alarms and many other projects on similar lines”, informs Nikita. TechTots being a student startup has a lot of momentum behind it with a strong of force of 50 volunteers behind them to help out. Talking to Ankur gives you a feeling that these young people want to make a difference. The exuberance he exudes will surely take TechTots a long way. Along with proper execution and a guiding hand, TechTots can make an impact. It is very young days for TechTots yet with zero online presence as of now but we expect them to make a buzz as soon as they go online and start taking bigger strides. – Jubin Mehta

Tagged as: accounting, education, guest-columns, investment, learning, lose-something, password, technology, unsexy-startups

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Have You Made a Movie Out of Your Facebook Timeline Yet? Facebook Presents timelinemoviemaker.com

by Paul Joseph February 4, 2012 Featured

For those of you who are still getting used to the ‘timeline’ feature on Facebook, here is a way to visualize the feature in a movie format. Timeline makes it easy for you and your friends to browse through your updates and activity. Facebook along with marketing agency Definition 6 has launched timelinemoviemaker.com which enables you to watch your previous status updates, images and activity in a movie format with background music. Take a walk down Facebook memory lane by flying across your timeline: http://www.timelinemoviemaker.com/ and do not miss the updates you get when it renders and loads your movie!

Tagged as: accounting, angels-india, business, education, facebook, guest-columns, learning, lose-something, popular-on-cloudstory-in, unsexy-startups

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BombayMerch: India’s largest online retailer of Officially Licensed Posters & Prints

by Paul Joseph February 4, 2012 Featured

BombayMerch is India’s largest online retailer of Posters & Prints that includes genres such as Music, Movies, TV Series, Cartoons, Comics, Sports, Humour, College, Iconic, Spiritual, Inspirational, Art and Photography. All BombayMerch products are 100% officially licensed products. The money you spend while shopping does make its way back to the Artist or the Brand Owner. BM is now dealing with 4 of the largest licensing/publishing companies in the world that have given them access to over 700 titles to offer across 5 Print Categories. They also have merchandise such as wallets, purses, key rings, tin signs, fridge magnets and playing cards. Akshay Butani “I always wanted to do something myself, something different. I guess it’s in the blood! My father is a business man who started his own business when he graduated and over the years I have seen him grow. There are people who know that they’d want to become a journalist, a lawyer, or may be an actor.. .I knew I wanted to start my own company but I never knew what it was going to be about! So, I just went with the flow..” says Akshay Butani, Founder of BombayMerch. We at YourStory find out more about his entrepreneurial journey. So how did the business blood manifest? “While in my final year of IT, a few friends and I got together and started an IT company which basically involved us grabbing a lot web application development jobs from the US. And this really took off well! I always favoured ideation & business development and that was my job. I knew I needed experience and thus got campus recruited by DirectI in their sales department. At the same time moonlighting with the IT company that my friends and I had started. A year of no sleep! After bidding goodbye to DirectI, I went back full time to working with the other company, but, things had changed and I felt I wasn’t working with the right people. At the end of the day a united approach is what leads to a company’s success, and this wasn’t happening. A year after graduation I had learnt a lot in terms of working and growing in both an Organized set up and a start up. But, at this point in time, there was nothing else to do, no job or business. But, I still knew I wanted to start something, which was really important to move on”. How do you go from IT to posters? I didn’t decide I wanted to start Bombay Merch, or something even close to it. I am a complete music buff and I used to collect posters. And the thought just crossed my mind that there must be a whole lot like me who would want all of this cool stuff and this is where it all started. Here’s when the search started for companies abroad to deal with to bring in Official Movies, Music and Sports merchandise into India! When I found a company, it took a lot of persistence as they didn’t want to deal with a 22 year old from India with just about $1500 to spare and didn’t even have a company name! Yes, my first email to them went out from my personal gMail ID! Haha! But, it all fell into place and I had around Rs. 60,000 left in my account and so I emptied it! As soon as the order arrived at my house, I started knocking retailers whom I thought would be interested in selling the products I had imported at their store. And I guess, I identified the right stores and all of my stock was sold out within 2 weeks from the date of import, which was fantastic! Yes, for 3 months, I was using my home as a warehouse, until my mother threw me and all my stock out And this is when I realized this is now serious business. So, I started with 1 company and 60 products and now I deal with 5 Licensing companies and currently stock over 2000 products! How has the growth been so far? It’s been great so far! We started as a distributor and launched our End Customer Focused portal in December 2011. We currently distribute our products to select stores in Bombay and Pune which include the likes of Crossword, Rhythm House, Granth, Danaii. We are setting up a stronger Distribution Network to support organized large retail formats with all of our products. Turn-over and Funding plans? Our second year turn-over crossed 25 lacs. We are currently looking for investors to take Bombay Merch to the next level. The last two years have been spent on learning the distribution business and a good amount of time was spent on launching our end customer portal as well. The ground work has been done, distribution rights acquired. We are looking at exponential growth by going Pan India both online and offline. We currently offer 2000+ products and we are looking at doubling this number by the end of this year. The team I’ve been able to build has contributed a lot to our little glory! We have the right products & the right team to keep our customers happy. The feedback we receive on our eBay store justifies that! Going ahead, how do you see you see your venture growing? I started with Rs 60,000 as mentioned earlier. This initial amount is responsible for much of our growth. Just as any start up, there comes a time when the unthinkable happens. What I mean is you realize you don’t have money to buy a “vada pau”! Haha! It was in these times, that my parents have been my angel investors. 6-8 months into the business, I faced a cash flow problem as retailers enjoyed a credit period against merchandise that was initially purchased outright, and whatever money came in was invested right back in. The money I received from my parents helped me keep the company afloat and also invest in new product lines for the Indian market. The goal is to be a company to be reckoned with when it comes to Pop Culture Merchandise in both, the retailer and distribution format. Along with this, I’ve planned our own set of product lines which will be launched later this year. BM recently won exclusive distribution rights from a company based out of New York for the Indian Sub-Continent. The company is called DynoMighty which designs and manufactures wallets that are 100% recyclable, paper thin, weigh just 17 gms, expand to your own personal needs, non-tearable, water resistant! I am really excited about this one These are the sort of products we want to introduce in India. We are looking at launching this product line by the end of this month. Please tell us more about BombayMerch Foundation. I personally believe knowledge is supreme. In the future we’d like to commit a set percent of our profit in providing free education or vocational education to kids/teenagers from families that can’t afford it. We do what we can now, there’s a Girl’s orphanage next to my house in Juhu where a little from the Bombay Merch kitty goes in to educating girls. And a handicapped school in Bombay Central that provides surgical support to kids from families that can’t afford any form of correction surgery or support instruments. At the end, the real pleasure is in giving. Bombay Merch was an accidental thought that crossed my mind. And it is just the beginning Click here to check out BombayMerch posters and merchandise.

Tagged as: accounting, business, education, guest-columns, india, innovators, learning, lose-something, non-tech entrepreneurs, password, robin-sharma, unsexy-startups

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