AHMEDABAD TO KOCHI
- STARTUPS BLOOM
Small towns in India are beginning to see a surge in new-age
entrepreneurship. Lower costs, lower attrition, and technologies like cloud
that allow you to reach out to clients from any location, are encouraging
youngsters to establish ventures in their hometowns
Diwakar Chittora of Intellipaat is convinced that one of the best
decisions he took was to base his venture in his hometown Jaipur.
He was educated all over India schooling in Rajasthan,
engineering from SIT Tumkur and a Masters in IT from IIIT Bangalore. At one
point he realized that there weren't many Hadoop courses online and the few
that were there were expensive. Hadoop had become a hot skill and he saw a
business opportunity in training people in the open-source software framework.
He founded Intellipaat in 2011 in Jaipur as an online IT training unit. Today,
many of those who take his courses are from tier-2 cities, and he has more than
60 corporate clients.
“The cost of living in Jaipur is much lower, I get the best of
people to work for me because there aren't many successful startups here yet,
and there is less attrition and poaching compared to that in a city like
Bengaluru,“ he says.
Entrepreneurship in smaller cities in India is beginning to surge
as the cost of talent and living in metropolitan cities rise. And the push is
coming from those who grew up in these smaller cities, but have experienced the
opportunities that the world provides during their education or work stints in
metros.
“The way the world is evolving into cloud, the advantages of being
in metros are getting nullified. You can be with your clients over the
internet,“ says Ravi Gururaj, head of Nasscom's Product Council and an angel
investor. He adds that staying with family and in one's hometown increases the
quality of life. “Improving air connectivity also means that these startups can
always fly to big cities for events and networking,“ he says.
It's not easy to get any estimates for the number of startups
being born in smaller cities. But under Nasscom's 10,000 Startups programme (an
initiative to create 10,000 startups in India by 2020), 20% of the selected
startups have come from tier-2 cities and beyond. Ahmedabad, Kochi and
Chandigarh are seen to be the biggest startup hubs outside of the metros, but
there are also good numbers emerging in cities like Thiruvanathapuram, Indore,
Coimbatore, Jaipur, Vadodara and even Guwahati.
“If we want to move anywhere, it should be closer to our
customers, who are all in US,“ says Arjun Pillai, CEO and founder of
Profoundis, a venture based in Kochi. Profoundis has a product that helps in
scrolling details from the web with just an email address. Pillai says he
decided to stay back in Kochi because he wanted to develop the startup
ecosystem in Kerala. “If we think that we will be better off in Bengaluru, then
only that city will grow.“
Pillai admits though that the venture faces difficulties in
getting non-Keralites to move to the state. Some youngsters did not want to
join the company because they thought they would miss out on night life.
That is the same problem Belagavibased Vayavya Labs faced. Many
from big cities refused to move citing lack of good schools. “Once you grow
big, you need top rated talent in multiple verticals, which are unavailable in
small cities. Beyond your core team, you would not find people willing to
relocate,“ says R K Patil, founder and CEO of Vayavya Labs.
But he says if it's the core group that will do R&D over the
long term, small towns provide ideal conditions. “Attrition in our product team
is zero and the company has a peaceful campus apart from good connectivity and
power, all of which are good for our operations,“ he says.
Sharad Sharma, co-founder of software product think-tank iSpirt,
says he is cautiously optimistic about the startup ecosystem that is emerging
in smaller cities. He says startups that cater to the needs of non-metro
citizens particularly will come out of those very areas. “An idea of NewsHunt
or StayZilla won't occur that easily to people who get foreign degrees,“ he
says. NewsHunt aggregates vernacular news and StayZilla aggregates stay options
in towns across India.
Gramco Infratech is another such. The agri solutions company based
in Indore and founded by Raman Singh Saluja wants to focus on Madhya Pradesh
before going national. Gramco's end-to-end farming solutions model demands that
it be close to its client farmers. “So far we have piloted six locations out of
which three are in Ujjain,“ says Saluja, who has received financial help from
SIDBI's Samridhi Fund.
But scaling will be a challenge in the foreseeable future. Like
Patil, Sharad Sharma feels many tech startups will be forced to move to bigger
cities as they grow larger. “Special talents like UI (user interface)
developers and architecture engineers won't be available in smaller cities,“ he
says.
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Nandini Sen Gupta & Anand J |
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TOI17APR15
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