The July edition of the Headstart Startup Saturday was a four-city event held in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad
The second Saturday of July witnessed the coming together of budding entrepreneurs in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. While in Mumbai finance was the flavor of the month, in Bangalore it was the Lightning Pitches that stole the show.
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Mumbai’s preoccupation with finance was apparent from the very first showcase. The first Startup Showcase was PayMate, an innovative mobile payment platform. Ajay Adiseshann, founder and managing director of PayMate, explained that the basic motivation to offer a product or service was to ‘kill someone’s pain’. He said that the initial market research he did before starting up was to ask his friends and relatives about the viability of mobile phones as a payment platform. The collective answer was, “yes,” and there he had his big idea. Another great insight he shared was about getting the first buy in. As a payment platform, he had to deal with banks, some of them over a hundred years old. The mantra he followed was to believe in your product, and you will manage to get a buy in. After Ajay, Sanjeev Tamhane, an industry veteran with 25 years of varied experience across different sectors, spoke about opportunities in the finance sector. He gave the audience an overview of the different avenues available for an aspiring entrepreneur in this vertical. The last startup of the evening was Rupee Talk. This portal aims to advise and facilitate Indian consumers in matters relating to personal finance.
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The Bangalore edition of the event was an equally exciting one. It showcased six startups in a session called Lightning Pitches—a platform for promising startups to showcase their products and services to the startup community. While Nandini spoke passionately about connecting people through her Marrygold Matrimonial Services, Nagesh, a risk management consultant running Indigo Stripes, queried the audience to suggest ways to approach target customers. On one hand, there was LetsOlla campaigning for ‘increasingly cashless transactions’ through their barter platform, while on the other, ‘Rang De’ quietly compelled people to encourage honest livelihood by lending their money to microcredit. The next in line was Nataraj, a senior gentleman, passionate about his self-customizing ERP product. Rounding up the set of six was Brains N Skills, an HR service provider, keen to help startups and SMBs with their human resource needs. The Hyderabad Startup Saturday was a networking meet, with rich interactions among fellow entrepreneurs.
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