STARTUP SPECIAL Thank God I Failed
2.
DEEPAK RAVINDRAN
Look him Up, yet Again
A lot can happen over coffee. And a
lot did happen when Deepak Ravindran met Twitter cofounder Biz Stone at a
coffee outlet in Silicon Valley in May this year.
Ravindran first met Christopher
Isaac `Biz' Stone three years ago in San Francisco, and this time around what
started as a courtesy call developed into the two exploring business
opportunities outside the US. Ravindran took Stone by surprise by requesting
him to mentor his startup Lookup. To Ravindran's surprise, the man who in 2012
cofounded Jelly Industries, which released the Jelly app (a Q&A platform
that relies on images), decided to invest in Lookup.
“It was almost surreal,“ grins
27-year-old Ravindran, a college dropout who texted his way to instant stardom
with his first startup Innoz, an SMS-based instant search engine.
In September 2008, Ravindran, along
with friends Mohammed Hisamuddin, Ashwin Nath and Abhinav Sree, dropped out of
Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Engineering in Kerala to found Innoz. Its
flagship product, SMSGyan, allowed mobile users to search the web by sending an
SMS. It partnered with leading telecom operators in India, offered the ser vice
for `30 per month for unlimited search for subscribers, and pocketed a 20% cut
from the telecom operator.“Between 2008 and 2013, we earned `150 crore from
this service,“ says Ravindran.
In April 2012, Innoz raised $3
million from Seedfund and within a year made its way into the Limca Book of
Records for being the largest offline search engine in the world. By October
2013, it had answered 1.3 billion queries from seven different countries.
That was as good as it could get. By
2013, the deluge of smartphones with easy internet access and chatting apps
were threatening to make feature phones and text messages redundant. Seeing the
writing on the wall, the cofounders decided to move on. Ravindran returned $3
million to Seedfund and gave the source code of SMSGyan away for free so that
operators in other countries could offer their own version. A successful
business had failed because of sudden change in the technological ecosystem,
and the young entrepreneur learnt the biggest lesson of his life: “Keep
innovating or else you will die. That's the only way to stay relevant in the
market and life.“
Ravindran moved to Silicon Valley to
study smartphone app development for a year. In 2014, he started Quest, a
question-and-answer app for the US market with inbuilt geo tagging to help
users find others nearby who can answer questions. The company planned to raise
$5,00,000 for the development of Quest. But only half the amount could be
raised; Quest was a non-starter, but Ravindran was just about getting started.
Yet again.
He returned to India in November
2014 to start Lookup, a messaging app that lets customers chat with local mer
chants without sharing their mobile numbers. Launched in Mumbai and Bengaluru,
the app is now being piloted in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kochi.“Chat is
exciting, calls are boring. And Lookup is set to disrupt local commerce,“ he
says.
Lookup, which raised $4,00,000 as
seed funding from multiple investors including Japanese social gaming firm
DeNA, Teruhide Sato, founder of start up platform Beenos, Infosys' cofounder
Kris Gopalakrishnan, and Switzerland's MKS Group, has had over 5 lakh downloads
till now. It has delivered over 1 crore messages, roped in 17,000 verified
businesses on its platform and just closed its Series A round of funding of $3
million.
“We are launching delivery through a
tie-up with Roadrunnr [a hyper-local on-demand delivery service in Bengaluru)
and integrating a payment module with [online recharge firm] Mobikwik this
month,“ informs Ravindran.
Ravindran reckons it's good to start
young and take calculated risks. “Make mistakes at a young age and people will
forgive you,“ he says. “It is necessary to fail to succeed. The sooner you do
it the better.“ Failure has also made the 27-year-old a philosophising pundit
of sorts.“Heroes are heroes not because of their victories but their heroism.“
Now that's something to look up to.
ETM26JUL15
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