India's Quirkiest Startups (2)
CONTINUED
FROM PREVIOUS BLOG
INTRODUCTORY
PARA REPEATED
It's ingenious but, er, does it make
money? Perhaps all the entrepreneurs who feature in this special package would
have been asked this question at some point in their startup journey.
Kalyani Khona, who has started up
Wanted Umbrella, which she claims is India's only matrimonial agency for
differently-abled people, may have had observers wondering where the money will
come from. Her quick answer: “I have married a social cause and business.“
It's ingenious but, er, why on earth
would people want it? That's a query Alpana Agarwal, co-founder of Con Affetto,
which makes edible bouquets -think cupcakes, cookies, truffle -may be used to
by now.
Ask her about who are the potential
customers and she just might tell you about the good lady who placed an order
in New Delhi for her grandson's first birthday and carried it to Jaipur.
It's ingenious, but will it fly?
That's what Mrinal Pai must be asking himself on the odd bad day. His start up
is a farsighted concept that offers custom drone products and services. Pai
sees a (near) future when drones will be used to transport organs between
hospitals, flying over gridlocked roads; and when you could use his service to
drop a quick personalised note of endearment to your beloved. Yes, but will
regulations -which have yet to be framed -allow his drones to keep flying?
These are just three of the 10 offbeat startups we've deep-dived into; just
three of the 800-odd startups added every year; and just three of the over
3,000 startups that are trying to make it big in India.
The 10 that we've picked are novel,
but being different or a first mover is no guarantee of being the best mover
-or moving at all a few years later. After all, success rates in the world of
entrepreneurship are notoriously low, as low as 10% in the tech world. And
funding is no guarantee of success. CB Insights, a US-based venture capital
database, reckons that companies typically die around 20 months after their
last round of funding and after having raised $1.3 million.
For the 10 featured over the next couple
of blogs, being unique is a good starting point. But as Sanjeev Krishnan,
partner and leader (private equity and transaction services) at
PricewaterhouseCoopers, explains, the markets for many such differentiated
offerings are not large enough. “So unless the market expands exponentially, a
shift in focus would be essential to create a new market segment,“ he points
out.
There's something else that may work
in favour of these newbie risk-takers: the proverbial fire in their bellies.
When you hear Nikunj Jain, co-founder of Frankly.me, talking about being
“Darwin's children“ and that “we run faster and kill harder“, you will get a sense
of the fire burning.
FIRST
5 IN THE PREVIOUS BLOG
6TH
TO 10TH FOLLOWS
1. Marrying
Business and a Cause
Last year, when Kalyani Khona
approached a differently-abled man with a marriage proposal, he was taken
aback. Reason: Khona was 21 and the man double her age. He didn't of course
know at that time that Khona was the founder of Wanted
Umbrella, positioned as India's only matrimonial agency for
differently-abled people.
“With over 40 million disabled
people in India, only 5% or less get married,“ says Khona who started Wanted
Umbrella in July 2014 in Delhi.
When she started up, there were
sceptics galore who wondered aloud whether a young girl could handle a subject
as sensitive as marriage. Her progress so far would have silenced more than a
few of them. The startup has a strong base in Mumbai and Delhi NCR. It now
plans to foray into Bengaluru and is developing an app as well. And for those
who think Khona is running an altruistic, not-for-profit setup, think again.
The revenue model for Wanted
Umbrella is simple: subscription fees and money from organising events. “It's a
huge and untapped market waiting for somebody who is passionate to tap into. I
have married social cause and business,“ she says. Now that for sure is a match
made in heaven.
2. Toeing
a New Line
After seven years of elbow grease at
Infosys, Reetesh Rao, Rajesh Acharya and Kotresh Chatriki decided to listen to
their hearts -quite similar to what three friends did in the blockbuster Three
Idiots.
The trio resigned and started Caricme, a personalised caricature-gifting service
for individuals and corporates. The products can be tweaked to be made into
trophies, photo-frames, certificates or showpieces.
The long stint at the IT giant was
threatening to bore the trio out of their minds.“We were not enjoying what we
were doing,“ says Reetesh Rao, CEO of Caricme.So in January 2013, the three
friends took the plunge. The first year was difficult, personally and
professionally. Their par ents were disappointed, their spouses took long to
get convinced and outsiders found the business idea weird. “Most people think
caricatures are cartoons,“ says Rao.
Although people were not taking them
seriously, the friends followed their passion seriously. Initial orders came
from colleagues, word-of-mouth and Facebook posts. While tying up with small
online players helped in getting regular orders, biggies such as Amazon and
Snapdeal gave them traction. Now they get 12 orders every day and want to scale
up to 25.
But can their business reach a scale
to lure investors and survive? Reetesh sounds confident. “When passion meets
business, you scale heights.“
3. Happy
Feat
Johny Stephen hasn't quite followed
in the footsteps of his father, who was in the Air Force. Two years ago, the
34-year-old geek left his lucrative job with Akamai Technologies, a cloud
services provider in the US, and returned to Bengaluru to start his own
venture.
“He [his father] is yet to come to
terms with the fact that I am into foot massages,“ chuckles Stephen, co-founder
and CEO of TheHappyFeet, a startup that
provides feet care services and products on a call or a click.
Sounds outlandish? Not to Stephen,
who believes in the saying that proudly flashes on the Facebook page of his
startup: `If you are going to be weird, be confident about it'.
Starting with a seed capital of `50
lakh raised from family and friends, TheHappyFeet works with therapists who go
to customers' offices or homes to provide feet-care services. The venture has
broken even, says Stephen who is now in talks with investors to fund an
expansion. So how did the idea of feet-care come about? On a flight to London,
Stephen told a friend, Sharath Kishan Keshavanarayana, about a soothing foot
massage he had had in San Francisco. That led the duo to discuss it as a
business, culminating in them founding TheHappyFeet in January 2013.
Stephen has few doubts about its
viability. “Ola got recognition in India when Uber entered the country,“ he
says. “We are also waiting for an Uber-like thing to happen.“
Clearly Stephen won't be bargaining
for the controversy the ride-sharing app plunged into.
4. Frank
and Ferocious
He is driven by an animal instinct.
“We are [Charles] Darwin's children. So it's survival of the fittest,“ says
Nikunj Jain, co-founder of Frankly.me, a mo
bile app that enables users to get answers from celebrities and experts through
video selfies.
The 26-year-old Delhi lad has not
only survived after selling mobile app development company InoXapps last year
but is clearly also thriving by raising a cool $600,000 from Matrix Partners
for his second venture.
Jain's poster boy is Peter Thiel
-tech entrepreneur, cofounder of PayPal and one of the first investors in
Facebook.“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. And the next
Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network,“ says Jain, quoting from Thiel's
Zero to One. “If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.“
Jain, who swears by the future of
mobile video, is putting Thiel's lesson into practice by starting up a venture
that he claims doesn't have direct competition in India. The nearest rival
would be Twitter, he reckons. So does it help to be the first mover, and
offbeat? “It does,“ he says “but offbeat sells only when you know your beat.“
Frankly.me claims to have 35,000
registered users and over 100 celebrities on board, including Arvind Kejriwal,
Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and lyricist Javed Akhtar.Jain says he is adding
over 3,000 users daily. And he isn't fazed by potential me-toos. “We are ruthless.
We run faster and kill harder.“ Ouch!
10. Coming into Bloom
I your girlfriend is Marwari, the
easiest way to earn her wrath is to gift her a bouquet of flowers, reckons
Alpana Agarwal. “For Marwaris, flowers are a waste of money,“ insists the
co-founder of Con Affetto, a startup that
makes edible bouquets by using cake pops, cookies, cupcakes and cake truffle.
Last September, Agarwal, 32, started
this venture with her younger sister Upasana with a seed capital of `10 lakh in
New Delhi. With a starting price of `600 and a maximum tag of `3,000, the
sisters have been selling over 15 bouquets a day in Delhi and the NCR and soon
plan to open kiosks to push their products in other cities, including Mumbai.
While being in a segment where there
is no direct competition definitely helps, expanding the market is a tough task
for the duo. However, the biggest challenge is luring people to shun flowers, a
task easier said than done.But the sisters are not deterred and take
inspiration from numerous instances that have given them hope.
Agarwal recalls one such episode. A
woman who got to know about the idea when the sisters were researching the
business waited for a year to place an order for an edible bouquet on her
grandson's first birthday. “She carried the bouquet to Jaipur,“ recalls
Agarwal, “and it gave us immense wordof-mouth publicity.“
Con Affetto, which is yet to make a
profit, plans to scale up operations by tapping venture capitalists. But will
it blossom? The sisters are convinced that the venture will flower soon
-without any help from the petalled species.
|
Rajiv Singh
|
ET 25JAN15
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