Young Sabrina Pasterski, considered the next Einstein, built her plane and flew it solo at 14 

By Himansu

“When you’re tired you sleep, and when you’re not, you do physics,” says Sabrina Pasterski, ‘The Next Einstein’ as named by Harvard University. She flew a plane before she drove a car. She doesn’t own a smartphone. Unlike most millennials, she also avoids social media; you won’t find her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even LinkedIn. However, she does keep her website PhysicsGirl updated with her many accomplishments and accolades.

Image: Scoop Whoop

Sabrina Pasterski is a first generation Cuban-American. She was born in Chicago in 1993, then enrolled in the Edison Regional Gifted Center in 1998. She graduated from Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2010. Sabrina began taking flying lessons in 2003 and by 2006, started building her first kit aircraft, reports Inc. An MIT graduate and Harvard PhD candidate, she is  interested in answering some of the most complex questions in physics. She began experimenting with the subject at a very young age, which led to the construction of a single-engine plane she built herself and flew solo when she was just 14 years old. MIT Professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman recruited “PhysicsGirl” after watching the video of the plane she was creating on YouTube. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it. Her potential is off the charts,” said Haggerty. Even though she was initially waitlisted, she was accepted and graduated with a grade point average of 5.00, reports Latin Times.
Most high-achieving students graduate from high school with transcripts and resumes filled with lofty grades and test scores and a battery of extracurricular activities. Sabrina has soared past those accolades since her plane and solo flight. “At first it was really a challenge, because I was 12 when I started working on it. It’s an amazing experience that you really can’t get from textbooks,” she said. She is now a certified light sport air manufacturer.

Image: Scoop Whoop

What stands out to principal Eric McLaren of Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy is Sabrina standing as one of just 23 women named as a US Physics Team semifinalist, an honor afforded to a pool of about 300 students. The experience made Sabrina aware of the under-representation of women and minorities in the sciences. She is now working on a documentary to encourage them to study science. “She certainly has a lot of abilities in math and science and she’s taken what she knows and applied it to real-world things,” said principal McLaren. But the most compelling thing for me is that she is committed to creating a path for other young women and other minorities to pursue science, reports Chicago Tribune.
Already an accomplished speaker, Sabrina has given talks at Princeton, Harvard (including the Faculty Conference), MIT, and Forbes Summit Philadelphia. Apart from NASA showing interest in Sabrina, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and aerospace developer and manufacturer of Blue Origin, has also offered her a job.

This startup just became the first Indian investment for PayPal Co-founder 

By Himansu

Indian tax filing platform ClearTax on Tuesday announced raising $1.3 million in a seed round from 10 Silicon Valley investors, including big names like PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, serial investors Scott and Cyan Banister, Dropbox Vice-President Ruchi Sanghvi and WhatsApp’s Business Head Neeraj Arora.

Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO, ClearTax

The funds will be deployed to scale up the product and technology team from 65 to 150, while the rest of the proceedings would go towards brand building and marketing activities. This also happens to be the first Indian investment for PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin.
So how did ClearTax manage to rope in the investors? Archit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of ClearTax says that being a Y Combinator alumni helped to make the initial connects. But what really got them to invest was the organic growth and traction the platform achieved without any funding.
Claiming to be catering to almost three percent of the taxpayers in the country, ClearTax has close to 10 lakh users filing their taxes on the platform. The firm also has an active network of 10,000 chartered accountants and tax experts.
On the investment, Archit says,

We are fortunate today to have the best Silicon Valley investors come together to invest in us. The investors have seen startups grow at a large scale and we believe their mentorship will bolster our growth. We were also lucky since this round of funding was oversubscribed and we were able to choose the right set of mentors.

Investors Scott and Cyan Banister will assist the business in expanding into newer business areas, while helping the team get their basics right. Neeraj Arora will assist the business in building a lean team.
Apart from their B2C play, ClearTax is also a SaaS solution provider, offering ClearTDS (as a software) to almost 5,000 Indian businesses for preparing their TDS returns and quarterly withholdings.
In 2014, ClearTax processed tax return e-filings for three lakh individuals and was selected for Y Combinator’s summer batch of 2014. It claims to be the fourth Indian startup to be ever funded by Y Combinator and the first one with a focus on the Indian market.

The market

Although financial assistance services (for startups) is growing as a market, tax filing still remains to be a niche sector.  This could be owing to either the lack of domain expertise in this sector or the inability to envision disruption in this space.
However, some players like Makeyourtax.com and Taxmantra are already functioning in the space. ClearTax is dipping its hands into in B2B financial advisory through analytics along with handling the B2C side of the business. However, the firm doesn’t plan to leave its niche while continuing to disrupt the tax filing space.
The next obvious route for growth for the firm is the largely untouched tax savings market, while also introducing prediction capabilities through the analytics and data collected on its clients and customers.
Website: www.cleartax.in

With a $600 humanoid, Sirena Tech aims to make robots the ‘next smartphone’ 

By Himansu

Over the past few weeks, the world quickly went from going gaga to becoming sceptical about ‘virtual bots’ and their potential applications. But the world of IoT and robotics has been going strong for the past few years and it has the potential to make an even bigger real-world impact.

Indian company Sirena Technologies has developed a humanoid robot- with design, research and development (R&D) and manufacturing done in India at a low price tag of $600(eventually), while Libre Wireless has been developing a suite of wireless technology solutions which power WiFi speakers and LED lamps. With these innovations, Sirena Tech aim to revolutionise the world of education and research make robotics and IoT more mainstream.

Story so far

Hariharan Bojan with Humanoid robot- Nino

Libre Wireless was founded in 2013 by Hariharan Bojan (VP Engineering & India Operations), Hooman Kashef (CEO) and Jordan Watters (Chief Revenue Officer), a bunch of colleagues who had earlier built a streaming audio product- Bridge Co India. As it got acquired by an MNC, the trio chose to move out and build their next media streaming platform, with Libre Wireless.
Sirena Technologies, which is also backed by Libre Wireless solutions, is a high tech product company, designing and developing products like humanoid robots from scratch from their Bengaluru design centre. Talking about Libre Wireless and Sirena Technologies, Hariharan said,

I started Sirena Technologies and Libre Wireless with a vision to impact the education system in India through technology (robotics) and also to create affordable high-end products for the Indian market – WiFi speakers, power plugs, LED lamps with speakers and in general IoT (Internet of Things) products.

With their humanoid- Nino, soon to be launched in India, Sirena’s goal is to make it the most affordable global product in the niche robotics category it is going after. Sirena aims to position its humanoid as a teaching tool or assistant for technical colleges and universities where students can learn, experiment and develop new technology and innovations around it. For school students, the humanoid can assist the teacher by narrating stories, singing nursery rhymes etc. So, Sirena is also positioning its technology as a content distribution platform for publishers.
Talking about the tech side, Gurmeet Singh, VP, Ecosystem Management, explained,

We are the first company from India to develop a servo motor or actuator- SiReef, which is a key element in any robot.

Currently, SiReef 1.0 has been designed for medium torque(~2 Nm) and for personal robotic requirements. The team has laid out a roadmap till October 2017. Its long-term vision is to develop a more advanced servo that possesses higher torque and can be used for general purpose robots and also robots with special joints.
Coming to IoT products, Libre has designed and developed complete WiFi multi-room audio solution from India, which can be operated through iOS and Android apps. With the goal of bringing IoT to audio, Libre has seen great success with its products like LED lamps and speakers. While introducing GoogleCast for audio last year, Libre Wireless was recognised as the official system integrator. Then in September 2015, Marvell, a global producer of semiconductor products and Libre announced that they had joined forces to work on WiFi/Bluetooth IoT technologies and homekit applications.Hariharan said,

We are connected to some of the best ODM/manufacturing companies in China. We work with the very best of brands and partners, including Google and Apple.

With offices in Bengaluru, US, China and Japan and funded by VCs from across the world, Libre Wireless claims to be close to breaking even this year. There are about 100 employees and a huge ecosystem driving everything. The humanoid division at Sirena is being run by 20 employees from vast disciplines. Looking back at their journey so far, Hariharan said,

The progress in the last one year has been phenomenal. We have a working model now which we could start deploying in schools and colleges. No other company globally has built a humanoid platform within a year and at a price point (lesser than $600 eventually) that we are going to sell at.

Working on complex robotics and IoT systems with quick go-to market times of a few months can be challenging. So, Sirena Technologies and Libre Wireless have a seven-day weekend work culture with almost zero HR policies to give employees the freedom to work on their own terms. Libre and Sirena believe in open and flat organisational model, with minimal managers.

Sector overview

Robotics is considered to be a big disruptive technology with continuously increasing demand for both industrial and service robotics. A recent report by Research and Markets estimates that the global industrial robotics market was $28.22 billion in 2014 and is forecasted to reach $41.18 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 6.5 percent for the period.
Sirena Tech, though, is going after a niche robotic market that is still in its early stage with its humanoid bot. Alphabet, Samsung, Rethink Robotics, Softbank Robotics and Toyota are some of the established giants that have keen interest in this space.
On the other hand, McKinsey estimates that the IoT market could have $11-trillion impact by 2025. Utilising IoT effectively has the potential to reduce maintenance costs by upto 25 percent, cut unplanned outages by upto 50 percent, and extend the lives of robots and machines by years. So there are multiple synergistic areas where Libre Wireless and Sirena Tech can leverage their strengths.

Future plans

Nino

In the long term, Sirena envisions a world where we will bring robots into our homes as assistants and companions. Gurmeet said,

Our end goal is to make robots so affordable, that everyone would like to buy one, the way we own a smartphone today. We plan to bring robots to sub Rs One-lakh level, and then subsequently to Rs 50,000 as and when volumes grow.

Adding to its current range of products, Libre aims to come out with more products in its Wi Fi multi room portfolio, in the coming years with WiFi adapter for audio systems and WiFi power plugs, which are currently in design phase.
Sirena, on the other hand, has started signing MOUs with Indian engineering institutes, Jain University being the first, to build and maintain robotic and IoT labs for them. They have also started receiving orders for their humanoid bot- Nino and will be
Website- Libre Wireless and Sirena Tech

OYO founders admit, without reservations, there’s room for improvement 

By Himansu

It was 1 am by the time Ashwini S, a Bengaluru-based marketing professional, checked into the hotel in Mumbai. Business travel was routine for her and she wasn’t worried as, over the past few months, her OYO Rooms booking had gone through without a hitch. But this time around, she didn’t feel the same comfort. The room wasn’t clean, the hotel looked seedy and there was no hot water. It wasn’t the OYO experience she was used to. What had gone wrong, she wondered.
The past few months have been rickety for OYO. There have been negative reviews on room standards, Wi-Fi connectivity, quality of service and also about the bookings. The tipping point was a Facebook rant by Manoj Thelakkat, which went viral on social media, detailing his ordeal, right from the wrong hotel room booking to multiple shifts to rooms that didn’t meet basic cleanliness standards to the lousy breakfast he was served. The post ignited speculation of whether OYO had lost its focus somewhere along the way.

A lot riding on their shoulders

From starting  Oravel to changing it to to OYO and getting Softbank on board, Ritesh Agarwal just had one dream: making budget travel and stay easy for the Indian traveller.
“There was a time when we booked a hotel room and didn’t expect much. Today the world is different, and I would like to believe we have contributed to it in some way,” says Ritesh. He and Abhinav Sinha, COO, OYO Rooms, gamely took part in a candid conversation with YourStory on customer complaints and challenges of scale.

We conducted a 100 percent re-audit of every hotel in the country, run by both Abhinav and me. It wasn’t just (Manoj’s) post, but a complete purge exercise to ensure we get back on track,” says Ritesh. On its part, OYO refunded the money to Manoj and after due feedback, shut out the hotel from its operations the same day. He points out it was a bold move for the team, as the owner of that particular hotel happens to be the head of the Indian Hotel Associations.

A popular belief in the hospitality industry is that models like OYO don’t work because aggregators have little control as own the property. “The quality of all the rooms and selection of hotels cannot be ensured at all times, especially when you are looking at scale,” says a customer who doesn’t want to be named.

From 72 to 4,200 in a year

It has been a fast growth for OYO, which began operations in 2014 from one city – Guragaon. Today it claims to partner 4,200 hotels in over 170 cities, booking close to a million room nights a month. Quarterly cohort analysis puts the repeat rates at 20 to 25 per cent. The year the team stayed in Gurgaon, it ensured that hotel occupancies, reviews and repeat rates increased.
After the market validation in Gurgaon, the team decided to scale up and from January 2015, began to expand to other cities, starting with Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. By March 2015, OYO had already raised three rounds of investment — from Lightspeed Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks Capital — and by August 2015, raised another $100 million from Softbank. These investments went a long way in helping it scale rapidly across the country and even look at the Southeast Asian markets.
By December 2015, OYO had touched 150 cities. The number of hotel tie-ups, a mere 72 that January, rose to 4,200 by the end of the year. The bookings saw a growth of close to 110x. But such overwhelming scale and pace brought their own challenges and OYO began face problems and rising customer complaints.

Competition snapping at the heels

Simultaneously, from being one of the earliest players in the market, today it has stiff competition from other brands like Zip Rooms, Treebo Hotels, Stayzilla and even from Paytm, which is now entering the last-minute hotel booking space. These players are not only giving OYO a run for its money but are also making biggies like MakeMyTrip and Goibibo sit up and take notice.
With rising competition, many players are now realising the need to go that extra mile to impress customers with value and service. Zip Rooms, for example invested considerably in training and monitoring hotel staff and management.
Treebo Hotels has a ‘Friends of Treebo’ system, a crowd-sourced quality audit program which includes students, travellers, corporates, and even freelancers, who can conduct a mystery audit on any of its properties and give the feedback to the team. MakeMyTrip has gone that extra mile by creating a dedicated Value+ category to go head-to-head with these new-age brands. All the more reason for OYO to focus on customer service.

The curious case of room shifts

One of the common complaints was shifting of rooms. Customers would say when they went to the hotel they did not get the room they were promised, admits Ritesh. The team saw that close to 3.8 per cent of the total customer base had been shifted to another room, or had got one that wasn’t standardised as per OYO’s requirements.

The three core promises OYO upholds are ‘Availability, Predictability and Affordability’ and two of them weren’t being upheld. So in order to standardise the process, the team went back to the drawing board.

The purging process: shutting out 200 hotels

The team realised that close to seven to eight percent of the hotels, which took in 10 to 15 percent of the business, had 95 per cent of the complaints. “We felt that the easiest way to solve the problem was churn these guys out,” says Ritesh.
The team built a 3C (3 Crosses) scoring system, which measures complaints-based weightages. Each complaint against a hotel is given a cross basis the weightage given. If a hotel gets 20 crosses, it is removed from OYO’s system.
For example, Ritesh says, shifting a room is the biggest complaint with the highest weightage, and it gets saddled with four crosses. So if a hotel gets the same complaint five times, it is removed from the system. There are different deltas for each issue. Like, say, unclean rooms get between 3.5 and 4 crosses. With this 3C audit process in place, OYO Rooms today has shut out close to 200 hotels across the country.

Abhinav adds, We have a built an app for the owners, which is now used to effectively communicate every problem with the hotel. Only 200 of the 4,200 hotels needed to churned, because the others improved. We realised there was need for effective communication with the on-ground and hotel owners; they just needed the right information to see and improve.

Technology and data to the aid

With the aid of technology, the team does a root-cause analysis and educates hotel owners how mistakes can be rectified. There is an auditor for every 40 hotels, and each property goes through a strict audit every three to four days on a 30-point checklist. Each auditor has a dedicated app garnering intelligence from occupancy reports and customer feedback and tells these auditors what to do on a day-to-day basis. The auditor cannot file his/her report on the app until and unless he/she is on the geo-fencing of the hotel. Audit timings aren’t fixed.
Even as the fixes on the hotel and property side were being made, the team realised that customer service challenges needed to be addressed immediately. To ensure this, it began to keep a closer watch on the hotels, checking the number of calls made each day, the number of issues resolved and those that weren’t and why.

In cases where the issues aren’t resolved, I handle it with the team personally. In many cases, it is my call if I need to personally contact the customer myself or monitor the team during the conversation, says Ritesh.

Tipping the domino

After mapping every room and a 100 percent re-audit, the team has marked rooms that aren’t standardised, ensuring they’re not made available to guests. So now on the mobile app, people have an option of various different rooms while these ‘black rooms’ cannot be chosen.
Explaining this experience, Ritesh says that if the hotel has agreed to a green room 104 but gives the guest a black room 105, within 10 minutes the guest gets an SMS that states, ‘OYO is happy to host you in room 104 and we hope you’ve checked into your room. If not, please give us a missed call on the number.’ If the guest gives a missed call, the hotel is marked and crosses given under the audit. The auditor nearest responds immediately and helps the guest check into the right room.

Challenges of scale

The challenge of scale, however, was multi-pronged for OYO. The team started to notice that towards 2015 end, newer hotel owners, unlike their early predecessors, began to view the aggregator as a commercial partner. This meant that the team had to work even on the hotel owners’ side. So it began by holding celebration programmes with all staff whenever any hotel touched the 100-day mark of partnership.
All this, say Ritesh and Abhinav, helps build great chemistry both internally and with the partners. OYO is now building a stronger focus on technology and using data to create better customer experience.  Its mobile app, available on Google Play Store, already has one to five million downloads OYO is now eyeing the Southeast Asian markets and plans to penetrate deeper into different levels of hotel experiences and services.

Says Ritesh, We’ve made mistakes and, yes, there are issues. In hospitality, there are some very tough and subjective issues: the whiteness of the sheets and even water temperature. We as entrepreneurs take these very seriously and are working to ensure that the customers get the best experience.  There were mistakes made; we accept them and are ready to resolve them and change. Our focus even today remains on ensuring a traveller gets a decent budget hotel stay experience in every corner of India.

Ajit Babu: My father asked me to get a job in the railways or postal department under handicap quota. I said no 

By Himansu

Ajit Babu, who has cerebral palsy, said no to his father’s advice about taking a job under the handicap quota, and instead founded three startups in Bengaluru.

This is his story.

A little history

Roughly 26 years ago, in the month of July, a baby boy was born. It was not yet time for him to come, but he was in a hurry to see the world. The preterm child, who weighed 1.4 kilograms at birth, was kept in the incubator for over two months.
Soon the doctors realized he had cerebral palsy, as he did not grow as much as the other children his age.
Today, Ajit is just about five feet tall, and walks with a slight limp, but he studied in one of the better schools in the city, with constant help from the Spastics Society of Karnataka. He grew up to love journalism, psychology and English Literature, which is why he opted for those subjects when he joined Kristu Jayanti College.
Unable to cope with lab work, which was part of psychology class, he dropped out of college in 2008. But none of this stopped him from doing the things he loved.

His two startups in the media space

“My love for journalism and media egged me into beginning my first startup. I could write, I could speak, and the whole of South India was doing in-film advertisements, so I thought I should try my hand at it,” said Ajit.
He, along with his best friend, Harish Narayan, started Dream Click Concepts in 2009. They also simultaneously founded another startup, Street Light Media, which made TV shows, music videos and advertisements for clients.
“We are very passionate about the two media companies we [Harish and Ajit] have built. We are both huge movie buffs and love shooting photos and videos,” he added.
After three years, Ajit decided to do something in the entrepreneurship space.
“In 2012, I started doing consulting on branding, and began teaching people how to run startups. I gave motivational speeches. I was even making some money. Then, the idea for LifeHack Innovation struck me,” he added.

Eureka! moment

When the Nepal earthquake happened early this year, Ajit realized how difficult it was going to be for the country to rebuild itself from scratch. He bought some solar lamps and decided to send them over to Nepal. Meanwhile…
“I was sitting outside in my favourite café, where all the smokers sat. There are no power points there for charging. Everybody borrows each other’s power banks to charge their phones. I looked down at the solar lamp in my hand, and it looked like a power bank. So I thought, why not make a solar-powered power bank?” says Ajit.

Birth of the startup

Over the next six months, he remained confident about the idea, but he needed the money to build the first prototype and run the company – seven lakhs’ worth.
“I thought money would be a problem, but no. All I had to do was post on Facebook and offers for help poured in. I just said that I was building a renewable energy company, and random Facebook friends asked for my number, talked to me, and gave me cash,” said Ajit, who crowdfunded the money from around 15 to 20 friends.
He quickly gathered a five-member team of techies and legal associates, and founded LifeHack Innovations in July this year.

What does LifeHack Innovation do?

He also realized that sustainable energy was going to boom, and that the biggest challenge was to bring these sustainable and renewable energy products into everyday life.
LifeHack’s first product is the solar and wind-powered portable power bank, which also can be charged with electricity. The product will be available for purchase by October 2015.
The startup, which is incubated at the VelTech Technology and Businesss Incubator, Chennai, will be working on over 45 products (and patents) over the next three years.

He took a third leap, is he a serial entrepreneur?

Yes, he is a serial entrepreneur, but with strong opinions on entrepreneurship.
“Starting up is overrated, and calling me a serial entrepreneur is too much. Startup founders try to incorporate all their knowledge into one startup, and sometimes it doesn’t work. So they think the next one can be better, and start another. This goes on till they figure out their true calling,” said Ajit

What about the future?

“I will study more. I will finish journalism. I will even do a Master’s, maybe from Columbia too! After all, this field is the only one where you can make money out of the freedom of expression!” said Ajit.
When asked about his fundas in life, he says in a serious note,

When you have a choice between do or die, it’s easy to choose die. But when you wake up in the morning and you only have the option to ‘do’!

Ramesh Babu, the barber who owns a Rolls Royce 

By Himansu

Leonard Willoughby said, “As you begin to live according to your own guidance and your own daring everything changes completely.” Ramesh Babu, the barber who became a millionaire, did exactly this when he was shaping his dazzling destiny. Stories of personal perseverance, the ones where heroes overcome severe obstacles and achieve dizzying heights of success, have been around since the beginning of time but they never get old. They inspire us and inflame our passions, making us believe we too can follow suit. Ramesh Babu bought a Maruti Van with his meagre savings in 1994. By 2004, he had a fledgling car rental business with seven regular cars. In 2014 he has a fleet of 200 cars. What is even more extraordinary is the 75 luxury cars on the fleet- a range of Mercedes, BMW’s, Audi’s, five and ten seater luxury vans and, his ultimate pride, a Rolls Royce.

Much of Ramesh Babu’s early life was spent in a struggle for survival. Now, ensconced in the lap of success, he remains true to the vocation of his heart- a barber. Babu took up to sniping locks in high school, a profession he inherited from his father, to keep his family afloat. It is one that, even now, he does with great aplomb. He charges only hundred rupees for his services. He has been featured in television channels and newspapers all over the country. His phenomenal success coupled with his disarming humility has earned him the moniker, ‘Millionaire Barber’. It is the title he used while giving a TED talk earlier this year. This has made him something of an urban legend. Here Ramesh Babu, the Millionaire Barber, shares his utterly inspiring story.Difficult Beginnings:
I was born in a poor family. My father was a barber. He passed away in 1979, when I was just seven years old. My mother started working as a maid servant to make ends meet. My father had left behind a saloon business on Brigade road which my uncle took to running. He would give us five rupees a day from that. Five rupees, even in those days a pittance, was too less to see to me and my brother and sister’s physical and educational needs. We took to having one meal a day just so we could survive. From when I was in middle school, I took up various odd jobs to make a little extra cash. I would deliver newspapers and milk bottles and whatever else was convenient to ease my mother’s load a bit. This way I somehow managed to finish my tenth standard and joined evening PUC.
Breaking Point
Sometime in the nineties, when I was in my first PU, my mother had a bitter fight with my uncle. He had simply stopped paying us any money. I told her I should take over the saloon and run it myself. She was adamant that I prioritise my education, but I started working at the saloon too and learning the ropes of the business. In the mornings, I would be at the saloon and evenings at college. Then again at night I would return to the saloon, which would remain open till 1 in the morning. Since then I have been called a barber.
Breakthrough Idea
Later in 1993, I bought a used Maruti van. My uncle had bought a small car and petty pride made me buy one too. I pooled my tiny savings, took a loan and felt grim satisfaction at having bought a marginally grander vehicle than him. My grandfather had to mortgage his property to enable the loan. The loan interest was six thousand and eight hundred rupees and I was reeling from having to make the payments.
The lady whose house my mother used to work, Nandini akka as I like to call her, asked me why I don’t rent out the car instead of it just lying around. She taught me the basics of doing this kind of business. She became like a sister to me and remains a big part of my life even today. She called me to her daughter’s wedding and showed me off!
Building a successful business:
From 1994 onward I seriously got into the car rental business. The first company I rented it out to was Intel because that’s where Nandini akka was working and she helped arrange it. Gradually, I started adding more cars to the fleet. Till 2004, I only had about five to six cars. I was focused on getting the saloon business off the ground, so this was not my priority. The business was not doing well as the competition at this level was intense. Everyone had small cars. I thought of getting into luxury cars because that is something that no one else was doing.

On Taking Risks:
When I was buying my first luxury car, in 2004, everyone told me that I was making a big mistake. Forty lakhs in 2004 for a car, even a luxury car, was a very big deal. I was extremely apprehensive, but simply had to take the chance. I told myself that I would sell off the car if worse came to worst. Fortunately for me, the risk paid off remarkably. No other car rental service had luxury cars of this stature. There were ones who had purchased second hand models and the conditions of those cars were far from pristine. I was the first person in Bangalore to invest in a brand new luxury car and it did very well.
If you want to do business, you must be willing to take risks. When I bought my Rolls Royce in 2011, people warned me about the scope of failures against buying such a tremendously expensive car. I told myself that I had taken a risk in 2004, why can’t I take one again almost a decade later? It cost me almost four crore rupees, to buy the car. But once again, it was a risk that paid off. It’s been three years since, and it’s has proven to be tremendously popular. In December this year, the EMI payments will be over. Biggest Challenges:
Every business will face challenges and pitfalls. Last April, I had to pay over three crores in road taxes alone. I still don’t know how I managed to pull the amount together. I borrowed from so many people and put up property documents to get the cash. Every business will have recurring formidable challenges. The idea is to embrace them wholeheartedly and tackle them vehemently. I had been in the red for a while with the road tax, but in another year or so we will be free of that.
Ideas for the Future:
Earlier we used to pay taxes quarterly. As of now, I have had to put a hold on the plans for expansion because the taxes have become sky high. In 2015 we are going to buy some stretch limousines and other such vehicles.
Message to Aspiring Entrepreneurs:
Ramesh Babu reiterated the simple message to entrepreneurs that he told students to follow in his TED talk.

Work hard. Be Humble. Anything else is just luck.

The PepperTap Journey: our story 

By Himansu

The last year and a half have been nothing short of a thrilling rollercoaster ride, with ups and downs in equal measure for us at PepperTap.
Rewind to sunny September 2014, in Galleria market in Gurgaon. The coffee shops here were the conference rooms in which I pitched what was just an idea then, to potential team members. And what an idea we thought it was, simple as it comes – we were going to revolutionize grocery shopping. No more queues, no more parking hassles, no more bickering with sabzi-wallahs. We would bring the existing inventory of local stores online to our app and then deliver customer orders through our super-optimal, well-trained delivery fleet for a minimal charge.
Fast forward one year, our diverse team of highly intelligent and ambitious individuals was racking up the orders in 17 cities all over the country – by October 2015, PepperTap was one of the top 3 grocery delivery services in India with an average of 20,000 orders delivered daily. We were the only business in town to be operating on a 100% inventory-less model.
Customers seemed to be loving it – the app was easy to use and we had great introductory discounts and sales. Local stores that were live on our platform were thrilled – we were improving their sales by an average of 30-40%. With our mobile-first approach, geographic expansion was fairly easy – we could go wherever the smartphone went.

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The momentum at the top was intoxicating.
There was just one problem. The integration of our app with our partner stores was not great. In the race to pepper the whole country with PepperTap, we had brought too many stores online far too quickly. Our customers were, at times, unable to see the entire selection of items from a store and sometimes even essential items were missing from the catalogue visible to them. This was not an impossible problem and we set out to fix it right away. We had to convince the smaller of these stores to adopt electronic inventory management and billing systems. For the bigger chains and hypermarkets, we needed to take the data generated by their systems and plug it into ours. To give our customers up-to-date prices and availability, this needed to happen, at the very least, thrice a day.

And then, there came another problem. To keep enticing customers to buy from our platform, we were spending a lot of time and energy to devise clever sales and discount schemes. In a world where everything for sale through an app (think electronics, taxis, food) is synonymous with vastly cheaper prices than physical stores, this exercise often simply resulted in higher outright discounts with every passing week. This was not hugely problematic in itself – we had money in the bank and investors were on board with this plan. After all, we were in it for the long-haul and this was the way to build a loyal customer base by showcasing the quality of our service, and getting them to adopt it as a way of life. We told ourselves that the convenience we would bring to PepperTap loyalists would become of such great value eventually, that these discounts were simply a cost of doing business while we perfected our processes.
And then a third problem started to rear it’s head. We were in it for the “long-haul”. This meant we needed to constantly build buffer capacity in our logistics and operations teams. If we were going to stick to our 2 hour delivery promise (which was rapidly becoming a key differentiator in the markets for us), we needed to build spare capacity in every one of the 17 cities in which we were present. Compounded with the necessity for discounts, this meant that the cash we were burning on every single order was increasing rather quickly with no immediate end in sight. To us, this too was not insurmountable. PepperTap was born to be a logistics company – the one thing we could call our core competency was optimisation of delivery fleets, routes and general logistics. We just needed to revisit some of the basics of the business, this time with a stronger technology lens, and set the wheels in motion.

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Also read: No one is telling you the dark side of becoming an entrepreneur

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The most logical thing to do to solve all three of these problems simultaneously, was to halt operations in some cities. We decided on this list by looking at the size of our customer base in each city, and the pain we would cause to all stakeholders by shutting them down. Relatively new cities with a small customer base were selected for closure.
The impact of this move on the business, was profound. With some focussed work and really solid initiatives, we managed to increase the value of our average sale twice over and our retention rate (how often the same customer transacts on the app in a given period of time) soared 400%. We were finally beginning to build value and loyalty – the cornerstones of a sustainable business. We were still financing orders and discounts with capital but now this was a more concentrated burn with a clear goal, timeline and geography in mind. However the timeline and the path to profitability was looking long (very long in fact) and arduous.

The harshness of a pessimistic funding environment globally also started creeping in; and as the increasingly inclement investment climate began to become obvious, we found ourselves at the toughest node in the decision tree yet.

Losing cash on every order (no matter how small or how controlled or how goal-oriented the burn) meant one day we will run out of cash – perhaps we could slow down the process but mathematically speaking, this was a certainty. We couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were walking (not racing like some other companies) towards the edge of a cliff hoping that things will get better before we reach the abyss.
At this point, we were forced to ask ourselves whether our continuing to operate in the grocery delivery space was not, in fact, doing a massive disservice to our current investors and employees. Because the unique challenges of this business are not solvable in the short term and certainly not solvable without massive injections of capital, we would have to confront this issue sooner or later.

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Must Read: Why my first startup failed and what I learnt on that journey

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We decided that sooner (read: while preserving a large amount of the capital we had raised) was better than later (on the way down to the bottom of that abyss we talked about earlier). If anything, having a large chunk of equity capital from our last round still sitting in the bank made this decision infinitely harder. Had we tried everything? Were we convinced that this was not the space for us? Was hyper-local commerce finished as a sector? The answer to all these questions was a resounding “No.”. But let us be clear about one thing, we haven’t taken the task we set out to do in the late summer of 2014 to its rightful culmination in the limited time that we have had. And that’s the simple truth.

There are many lessons we have learnt from this journey but one that I would like to focus on in particular. Because our training and background was in running point-to-point logistics, it was clear to us from our expansion days at PepperTap that as we forayed into smaller cities, delivery networks got more fragmented and lethargic. This needed to be researched more and understood better. We found that while tiers 2 and 3 of Indian cities are being served to some extent by new-world logistics providers doing cool things like one-day shipping, there was a whole slew of tier 3.5+ cities which are connected to the world of ecommerce but, in simple terms, have to sometimes wait up to 30 days to receive their orders.
This was exciting – with our expertise in running logistics at Nuvo Ex, we knew how to get ecommerce orders to the closest hub quite easily. Having spent the last year at PepperTap developing and testing technology to efficiently run last-mile delivery networks, we realised we already have the tools to cut these delivery times significantly. We began to test some of these ideas at Nuvo earlier this year and the results were exciting enough for us to pitch to our existing investors as an alternative way to use the capital we have already raised. Could this be a new focus worthy of all the things we have accomplished at PepperTap? The answer to this question for us was a clear “Yes.”

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Read also: How my first startup ended in a loss of Rs 15 lakh and shut down in a year

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The journey so far has left us deeply humbled. But before we take our faculties in this new but related direction, I want to take some time to say our thank yous. I want to thank our investors for giving us the opportunity to create and run PepperTap and for their continued support in these new times. I want to thank our competitors – you have been more than worthy adversaries-in-commerce and I will eagerly follow your progress in the grocery consumer business. Most of all, I want to thank the PepperTap family. The family that stuck together through thick and thin to make 37,000 orders a day possible in less than nine months since inception; the family that shared my vision from those sunny Galleria afternoons and didn’t hesitate to chastise me when I was out of order.

There is one apology that I must make before I conclude this piece, and this is to the customers of PepperTap.

It is you who made this journey possible and I’m sorry for not being able to see this through to the end. You made it clear that the service we provided was valuable, perhaps a little before it’s time, but valuable nonetheless. We will miss the reviews and criticisms – some that emboldened us, some that made us laugh and some that made us cry.
And so we transition to this new project at hand. The PepperTap family marches on with learnings from our mistakes and from the successes that we have had, to work on a new problem – which we believe we have all the necessary tools to solve for good. To ourselves, to the friends whom we have to leave behind, and to all other stakeholders, we make this commitment: we will work tirelessly, without rest, shedding our sweat and tears if we must, until we have cracked this new problem that we have chosen.

We must, as we owe it to the people who have supported us throughout our journey.

[App Fridays] Mobstac’s app helps you automatically connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots around you 

By Himansu

WiFire automatically connects users to free WiFi hotspots around them without the need to enter passwords or fill out web forms. The app connects users to public networks that are added and socially verified by the community of users. It focuses on crowdsourcing and is not a hacking tool.
Currently, WiFire has access to around 1,000 hotspots across the major metro cities and some tier two cities in India. Through a map-based user interface, users can also navigate to and get within range of available hotspot locations.

Story so far

WiFire is one of the products of parent company – Mobstac, which was co-founded by Sharat Potharaju and Ravi Pratap in 2009. The startup initially focussed on helping publishers create and manage mobile websites, until it received funding from Cisco in 2014. They then shifted focus to proximity marketing solutions.

As the CEO, Sharat is responsible for crafting the overall strategy and execution of the company. Prior to founding MobStac, he spent several years working in investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York. He has a master’s degree in Engineering Management from Duke University. As the CTO, Ravi is responsible for technology strategy, product innovation, and engineering execution at MobStac. Prior to Mobstac, he spent four years at a Washington D.C.-based technology startup Hillcrest Labs as a Manager in its Software Products Group. He has a M.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. Ravi and Sharat both earned their Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras.
Currently consisting of a team of 24, Mobstac’s core focus is on iBeacon technology. They currently offer three custom iBeacon solutions (including hardware and software), depending on the need and scale of enterprises and startups. Prices start at $89 and go up to $699.

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Related read: Bengaluru startup’s beacons bring online-style customer intelligence to the offline world

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Though WiFire can be considered a side project, it has some synergies with what Mobstac is doing with their core focus. Their proximity marketing solutions rely on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals and WiFi.
Currently seeded in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and others, WiFire is adding more networks on their platform on a regular basis as their user base keeps increasing.

Mobstac is currently not looking to monetise through the app till they hit a certain user base. Their aim is to keep the app free for the end user and focus on B2B models to generate revenue. Mobstac is currently relying on a mix of digital and offline marketing and word of mouth to help them gain traction. They are also in the
process of adding more features and functions to the app.

Current USPs include

-Users get notified while they are within the range of verified WiFi networks, and can connect without needing to enter a password.
-At public hotspots, WiFire can automatically enter the users phone number, collect the one-time password (OTP), and auto-fill the web form.
-Gamification: Users can unlock badges and earn points for adding and sharing new networks.

Sector overview

Over the last few years, high-speed WiFi has become a need rather than a luxury. Most enterprises recognise this and coffee shops, restaurants, and airport offer free WiFi to their customers to get them to stay longer and earn additional revenue because of the convenience offered. Google India recently brought free WiFi to Mumbai Central railway station and aims to reach 100 Indian stations by end of 2016.
These developments have brought WiFi managers in focus. Stockholm-based Instabridge is a big player in this space and claims to have over three million WiFi passwords in its database. In late 2014, the company had raised a $1 million seed round led by European VC Creandum. Then there are other players in this space like WiFi Map, WiFi manager,Wiffinity and WifiMapper.

What we liked

WiFire is well designed and executed. Through the app, users get information about the closest available WiFi hotspot in their vicinity and can quickly pinpoint its exact location through Google maps. Simple to use, the ability to add unverified networks, give back to the community and get badges and rewards for the effort adds to the gamification and stickiness of the app.

What could be improved

WiFire currently has a small database of saved WiFi networks on its platform and hence it will rely heavily on its early adopters to help them achieve necessary growth. Although WiFire requests and guides people to only add public WiFi networks onto their platform, it is possible for users to game the system and add private networks too. Currently owners can email the team and request for their network to be removed or they can change their password. In the future interactions of the app, WiFire will let recognised people claim ownership of WiFi networks to make it easier and speed up the process.

YourStory take

WiFire is a well-thought out app and with mobile Internet users in India projected to increase to 500 million in 2017, there is a large market to be tapped. With mobile Internet networks sometimes becoming unstable, easier access to public hotspots makes the lives of people easier. It will be interesting to see how Mobstac grows this ‘side project’ and how they leverage it to increase their core business.
Website: WiFire

After Forbes, Flipkart’s Bansals now on the TIME 100 list 

By Himansu

Flipkart marches towards being a $100 billion company

The devaluation or even the recent rounds of senior executive exits don’t seem to have lessened the impact that Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal have created. The founders of Flipkart, which is ranked as India’s biggest e-commerce marketplace, have found a spot in the TIME 100 list – a list of 100 most influential people in the world.
Included under the ‘Titan’ section, the list has had some truly big names like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Wang Jianlin, Mohammed Bin Nayef, Tim Cook, Yuri Milner, Pope Francis, Pricilla Chan and Sundar Pichai to name a few.
A few months back, in September, the Bansals had made their debut on the country’s top 100 rich list as per Forbes magazine. It is to be noted that the Bansals are country’s first e-commerce billionaires as well. The Bansals made their debut at 86th position with a net worth of $1.3 billion each.
For close to 13 years now, the TIME list compiles the list of the world’s most influential men and women. Nancy Gibbs, Editor of TIME, states that while power is certain, influence is subtle. She added that as much as the exercise works towards chronicling the achievements made in the past year, the list also focusses on figures whose influence will most likely grow.
Speaking of being included in the list, Sachin and Binny Bansal say that this is a recognition of the Indian internet ecosystem and its role in using technology to solve Indian problems. They added that this acknowledgement comes as a validation of the work they are doing and it also reinforces the faith people have in Flipkart.
Some of the technology leaders who have been featured in the list include Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Travis Kalanick and Larry Page.
An excerpt of the list says:
“Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal (no relation) started Flipkart in 2007 as an online bookstore. For seed money, they pooled their savings: around $10,000. Their data center was their apartment in Bangalore. So it could have been the height of arrogance when the two Bansals, who had worked together at Amazon, told investors Flipkart could be worth $100 million in a decade.”

Techno Sat Comm to provide free Wi-Fi in Delhi Metro

By Himansu

Techno Sat Comm in collaboration with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation has been awarded a 10-year contract to provide free Wi-Fi service to commuters. The Internet facility would be launched in the second half of this year.

Source : qoalt

The company will invest Rs 250 crore to set up the infrastructure, Techno Sat Comm Director Jagdip Rana said. Ping Network is partnering with Techno Sat Comm as the main licensee for providing content.

Techno Sat Comm and Ping Network are coming together to roll out what will potentially be India’s largest platform to serve content to passengers and work with advertisers, keen to reach Delhi Metro’s 2.75 million passengers, the company said in a statement.

The free-to-consumer service will be launched in the second half of this year, it added. A DMRC spokesperson confirmed that an MoU was signed in October last year for the same. Rana said the service will be free for customers and it will generate revenue through advertising.

The company said Wi-Fi service will ensure a 50 Mbps (3 times 4G) minimum speed to passengers devices while the maximum speed could potentially go up to 1.6 Gbps. Techno Sat Comm, said it already runs Wi-Fi on the Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani Express train and will use a solution deployed on superfast rail networks in Europe to deliver high speed broadband internet experience. Nirav Dave of Techno Sat Comm. said,

We have adapted the technology to India keeping in mind adverse weather conditions including heat, dust, heavy rains, vibration of trains and large passenger loads.

Ping will be building the front-end customer interface as well as the content pipe. Delhi Metro passengers across the NCR region will be able to experience high speed broadband by logging onto the internet via a dedicated app. This app will also display the location, approach and destination stations on a real-time basis and help navigate between different lines.

8 Digital marketing tips for the recently funded startups

By Himansu

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It’s a no-brainer that getting funded is a great achievement. You can hire the best of talent, move into a proper workplace, and invest more in improving your product.

Also, now you can go all-out marketing yourself; and that is where the problem begins.

Once you get funded, there’s an irresistible desire to explore all marketing options which you were not able to afford previously. And that is perfectly understandable. We all want to grow and start marketing ourselves to our target audience, but a careful approach here will ensure that you reach them with maximum effectiveness while burning considerably less amount of money.

Let’s a dive deeper and find out how you can optimise your approach towards marketing so that you can get better results.

Hire a senior digital marketing resource

Instead of going for a digital marketing executive, I would strongly suggest that you go with a senior resource who has seven to ten years of experience in handling overall digital marketing for startups/brands.

You will be coming up with a marketing strategy at this time and his/her insights will help you a lot in charting a long-term plan. While hiring the marketing person, make sure that he/she is good with all the major digital channels like SEO, SEM, social media marketing, email marketing and digital PR; a good knowledge of analytics is also must.

From my personal experience, however, I have noticed that people who come from digital marketing agencies don’t live up to the expectation; possibly because agencies have different teams handling all the above digital channels. I would suggest that you hire people from other startups/brands that are in the same niche as yours or somewhat related.

PS: I am suggesting a marketing resource in digital because it has a low entry barrier. Traditional marketing channels are very expensive and you will blow up your money in no time.

Work on your branding

Once you have decided to kickstart your marketing activities, you need to start working on your communication.

Coming up with a brand personality will help you define an identity for your brand. This, in turn, will develop an emotional connect with your customers and also help you stand apart from your competitors.

Once you have this in place, you will find that coming up with a tweet, an ad-copy for SEM campaign, or even the copy of a landing page becomes lot more easier.

To read up more on this, please refer to my earlier column on why startups must have a brand personality.

Start creating remarkable content

Content marketing is the most reliable way to make an impact on your audience. Having good content writers on board will make sure that you are coming up with content that people like and share. More than that, it will ensure that people get to know you and adopt your product/service.

This is a very big playground and you can dabble with so many options here. From videos to infographics, to blog posts and downloadable content; there are N number of ways you can create and share content.

However, you should stay away from fluffy content if all it gets is page views but no leads/sales. There’s no point in having a blog that shares listicles on food and lifestyle while you are dealing in real estate.

So keep analysing the impact of your content strategy on your KPIs (brand awareness, leads, sales, etc.) on a regular basis. You should always see content as a way to increase more sales, and not just a channel to get more likes or pageviews.

Focus on product marketing

While the initial version of your product was about giving customers a good experience, you should now look at maximising your returns from the customer’s usage of your product.

We all know that product marketing is a good way to spread the word organically and it saves a lot of money; but many startups wait till they hire a good growth hacker to get started with this. However, this shouldn’t be the case.

Numerous case studies have pointed out that simple tweaks can lead to good returns, and your senior marketing resource should be able to pull this off (with some training, if required).

Work on your landing pages

Since you will be beginning with your paid marketing campaigns, you must have a landing page that converts like a charm. Being the first point of interaction of the customer with your brand, it becomes imperative that you focus on delivering a great experience to them.

Instead of going with a template and letting it run on auto-pilot, you should run A/B tests on all the aspects that are crucial to conversion (headlines, text, CTA, button, colour scheme, etc.). This should be an ongoing process and not a one-time affair.

Invest in great tools

Now that you have the funds, you should start looking at working with premium tools that do a better job than the free ones that you’ve been using all this time.

There are many good tools out there that can help you with SEO, lead generation, project management, and analytics. Give their free trials a spin and see which ones fit your requirements.

Suggested tools: Moz Pro, Crazy Egg, Webengage, SumoMe, Wishpond, Mixpanel or Kissmetrics.

Follow Pareto’s principle

In your eagerness to market yourself aggressively, it would be wise if you don’t spread yourself too thin here. You don’t need to do everything to build up your sales funnel. More often than not, you will see a handful of marketing activities giving you maximum returns.

Once you begin your marketing activities, you will start seeing the effectiveness of various channels. Invest in the ones that are more impactful than others. May be it is SEO, or SEM, or product marketing – it can be anything.

Running after every marketing channel is not going to help you. Stay focussed.

Work on your employer branding

Since you will only be growing more in the coming months, you should invest in branding yourself as a good place to work at.

Hiring is a lot of pain and trust me, there are very few talented people out there. This makes employer branding all the more important for you. Having a nice team page and a company blog always helps, but nothing beats tapping into the contacts of your current team via social media.

When people see their friends having a great time at their workplace, they start aspiring of a workplace like yours. This positive perception of your brand comes into force when you ask your team members to share the current job openings in your brand within their network.

I hope the above pointers were of help to you and gave some direction to your marketing aspirations. In case if you have any queries please feel free to comment below, I will do my best to answer them at the earliest.