UnPluggd -An awesome event for startups in India

 http://www.unpluggd.org

The second edition of UnPluggd was over yesterday (Oct 30 @ Indiranagar Sangeet Sabha -Center of Performing Arts,Bangalore ).It's an event where we can meet  India’s top notch geeks, entrepreneurs, angel investors and VC.

• In the first half of the day, we had talks from successful entrepreneurs. Five talks by successful entrepreneurs – about their startup journey and the challenges they faced.
• Second half of the day we had pitches from startups (India)

Pallav Nadhani (Fusion Charts)
Pallav is the co-founder and CEO of FusionCharts, which he started at the age of 17.

FusionCharts is the industry’s leading Rich-Internet charting component, which has over 17,000 customers (including LinkedIn, Microsoft etc) and 330,000 users across 110 countries, including a majority of Fortune 500 companies.An interesting fact about FusionCharts is that the company hired the first sales person after their 10,000th customers.

Fusion Charts is used in Linkedin/Facebook polls ,Weather.com,Money Control ,US Federal IT Dash board

Pallav shared a funny incident where they tried to put a tag line for their buisness.So they looked around and saw that Nike is using "Just do it" and McDonald's is using "I'm loving it".So they thought and came up with a tag line combining both - Just love doing it :) and we all know why the tag line didn't reach the market :)

Key points

• Build something you are passionate about.U r your best focus group
• Let customers guide U ,but doesn't follow them blindly .Listen to them ,figure out value,usability & feasiblity
• Focus on why more than what and how (Benefit Vs Features)
• Make it easy for customer.They will love you for it.
• Marketing starts before product
• It's hard to get first PR right.So try and make urself PR worthy.Make sensational news  & controversial topics
• Be personal (People believe in people)
• People like behind scenes
• If U r not having fun ,stop doing it.

Saloni Malhotra (Desicrew)


Saloni  has been nominated for BusinessWeek’s Asia’s Youngest Entrepreneurs, MTV Youth Icon 2008, E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 and also facilitated in the presence of the President of India by the CII. Saloni is the founder of DesiCrew and handles Marketing and overall direction of the organization.
Desicrew is a rural BPO company, incubated by RTBI of IIT- Madras. They set up IT enabled service centers in rural areas, employ and train local people to meet the back office demands of clients.Nice idea of helping people around as it surely gives jobs to hundreds of people in rural areas who are otherwise reluctant to come out of their nativeplaces in search of job.

Her's is one initiative i found which is related to helping people and related to social entrepreneurship..Great idea and the sole lady speaker for the event..Saloni really deserves an applause..

Congrats and my hearty wishes to you..


Alok Kejriwal (games2win & rodinhood.com)

Games2win has created over 350 original flash games that are played on games2win.com, on social media sites as well as thousands of long-tail sites. In just about two years of launch, games2win is amongst the top twenty gaming businesses in the US (and world) as ranked by comScore (current data).

His blogs at www.rodinhood.com. is worth a read and i am following his writings from along time now as his blogs are usually related to topics we should know as an entrepreneur. Keep it up Alok..This really helps the people who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs..

Key points

• Entrepreneurs board trains to unknown destinations
• Entrepreneurs walk paths never walked before
• Entrepreneurs live interesting lives ( hahaha :) not cosy though )
• Entrepreneurs get into nuts and bolts (they know their business in and out)
• Entrepreneurs create value using creativity  (Alok has shared an incident where people steal their game and show it on their web page and they tried to protect this using creativity ..Like in case if it's not from games2win website ,they used to enable lots of advertisement which will show on the screen and make it difficult for the people to use the game. So handling issues using creativity :) )
• Entrepreneurs assemble great teams
• Entrepreneurs are relentless in their battle (Every day they are dying ..they have many things to handle)
• Entrepreneurs win big always
• Entrepreneurs create legacy ..yes this can be carry forwarded..

Really got inspired by his talks..Entrepreneurship is not a bed of roses...

Manish Sharma (Printo)
Printo provides businesses with world-class printing solutions.

Key points

• Listen ,listen and listen to ur customers but go ahead and do what U really want
• Team is everything and culture is more than everything
• People jump on to moving trains (VC's are not interested in concepts .They will put their investments on ventures which are already in shape though there are some exceptions for few VC's in India)
• First modules are most likely to be crap
• Large companies are not necessarily be great customers
• It takes nearly 6 to 9 months to raise the funds if you are awaiting external funding
• Ur investors can include angel investers ,friends & family members
• Finally Business is a pickle.So marry well :) 

I was surprised to hear that Manish tried his luck even in fashion industry(textiles) and then finally landed here..He quoted a funny incident which happened before he was planning to start Printo. He told his father about his idea. In his father's days ,if a person is not doing good in studies ,the family will set up a xerox shop for him so that he can survive on running the shop and if he is very very bad ,then family will set up a printing press .So when he asked his father for money to set up Printo ,his father was surprised and was little worried :)

Manish's Printo is one startup which i always admired as i used their services from the time they started their first shop @ Koramangala .The service is good and customer service is what i should appreciate a lot..and every time i visit them ,they would have improved their services or made it more easy for customers. Whenever we had a printing requirement , even if it's a difficult task ,we remember Printo and we are sure that they will sort out an option for us..That's the confidence they created and that's what i believe is the base for buisness.

Great work Manish and the time and money you are spending on the employees to smile and say "Thank U " and "Please" is worth the effort..

Naveen Tewari (InMobi)


Inmobi is into Global Mobile Advertising and is the second largest mobile ad network in the world
 

Naveen is also the Founder and Chairman of a US based non-profit organization, India School Fund (ISF), which has been formed to set up schools in rural India.

Key points

• Get a team who is passionate about your idea
• Keep going whatever happens
• Believe in what we are going to do
• While getting a VC ,make sure that VC buy ur vision as wrong VC's means life in hell
• Talk to other entrepreneurs to get idea about bad VC's and good VC's .Yes there are Good and bad

Nice concept .Dedication and passion played a role here as they had a phase where money ran out and they were surviving by taking money from credit cards..Even the team members were also willing to utilize the credit card for this ..So see the dedication and commitment of everyone involved...Really appreciable.

We had about 10 demos by start ups..Nice concepts and i hope atleast few of them would have got VC funding as VC's were available in the venue.Following are the start ups

• www.eyesandfeet.com
• www.adaptive3d.com
• www.appcanvas.com
• www.kookoo.in
• www.capillary.co.in
• www.nuggetize.com
• www.dialify.com
• www.bizosys.com
• www.wix.com/danielshobhan/daniel-power-systems
• www.dataresolve.com

I should appreciate http://www.pluggd.in/  for setting up a platform where entrepreneurs can share their ideas or experience which will help others..

There were few timing issues ,the event started about 30 mts late and the tea break had to be made longer as tea was not available and yes lunch hour also got lengthened as lunch counter was only one and more than 300 members..But overall it was a success


One more thing i noticed is that all of the speakers were health conscious..Thats what atleast showed off...So though they were struggling to set up a name for them ,they did spend time on themselves too..That is really appreciable as nowadays we can see young IT guys -being fat and having health issues due to negligence..So yes ,these speakers for the event even set the trend that entrepreneurs has to be health consious and it really helps you in long run...Yes majority of the crowd who attended the event were also looking great --not too fat :) So world around us are getting more conscious about their heath..Coolll...It's going to be a world of heath consious people :) I think i would be the only one who noticed this :)

So finally am done...Will surely add if in case i missed nything