A peek into the current startup ecosystem

“It is the best time to live our dreams with the Government support and the opportunities galore.” says Mr. Anupam Misra, CEO and Co-Founder of Autotygr.

It was post mid-afternoon when Mr. Nelson Vasanth, Founder & CEO-Honey Technologies and me walked into the Indian-Startups organization for an awareness session on the Startup India Movement- Action Plan laid out by PM Modi.

The panelists were Mr. Anupam Misra, CEO and Founder of Autotygr, Mr. Senthil, an entrepreneur who mentors women in rural areas on mobile applications and is fostering women entrepreneurship and Mr. Nelson Vasanth, Founder & CEO-Honey Technologies.

The audience were a mix of established entrepreneurs, budding entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs on the brink of registering their start-up.

After a brief introduction of the Panelists’ startup ventures by Mr. Vasanth, the forum was open to the audience to ask questions regarding the startups, ventures, process, funding etc.

Mr. Vasanth encouraged the crowd to make the best out of this session, by putting across his own story as a growing entrepreneur who was a participant on the brink of starting a venture seven months ago and today being a part of the panel. He shared his part of the Start-up experience and provided a glimpse of the road ahead for the budding entrepreneurs.

In reply, to one of the questions about the major plan for the next four years, both Anupam and Senthil, highlighted the fact that there are plenty of opportunities to be tapped in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and towns in India.  Whereas the Govt. is concentrating on the Tier-1 cities, there are a lot of exciting forums and networking events which is bolstering the growth of startups.  Senthil is cloning the awareness events that are happening in the metro cities to the Tier-2 cities and towns, which he calls it as “Clonathon” to help the budding entrepreneurs out there.

Getting to the nitty-gritties, the budding entrepreneurs had the basic question as to what a start-up meant according to PM Modi- Senthil clearly stated that it is building a unique product or innovating an existing product and working on the Indian market while targeting sustainability.

Anupam mentioned that through “Make in India” we are removing the middlemen and making the products cheaper for the people. And startups are creating jobs and helping in having in-house products.

Senthil put across the process in a gist; Self-accreditation of your startup, apply for incubator centers (Mainly colleges in that particular region), getting certified by incubator centers, getting fund and space allotted for working on MVP for at-least 2-3 months. Once the Incubation centers certifies, real funding would be started from the Govt.(venture capitalists) with seed funding in the initial stages.

Thus, with the startup ecosystem growing big (Product/Service), the session was quite informative on the startup ideology and the process of creating one.

“The strategy is to first know what you don’t know, the tactic is to grind, and the value is to remember: there are plenty of places to innovate.” 
– David Friedberg, founder of Weatherbill