It automates activities like handling the enquiries from clients, dynamically creating self serviced customized packages on website, dynamic hotel inventory management, all the payments, customer movement tracking and follow-ups along with a host of business intelligence and other things to improve the experiences of travelers.

Shiju Radhakrishnan, the man behind iTraveller shared his comprehensive information about his business with Startoholics.

What Motivated this Startup?

Process automation and workflow has been a part of my career for the last 10 years. Automation has got a huge amount of scope in the fields which are purely manual in nature. The travel and tourism industry in the country has about 2.5 lakh travel agents but not a single automation platform, an ERP platform which could help in improving their efficiency. After studying about the industry for about one and a half years, I have come to a conclusion that this industry is very disorganized and there is huge opportunity in terms of automating it.

There is a huge scope in improving the way our next-door travel agent can deliver his work and handle his operations. Being experts in process automation, we are good at decoding the complex workflows that travel agents perform and capture all of them on a platform.

Has iTraveller got the feedback and growth you expected since launch?

We did a pilot of almost about a year. In Sept 2011, we registered our company iTraveller. We created a small pilot prototype version of the product which was unfortunately not successful. I resigned in Jan 2012 and came back to India from Singapore to form a team. Then for a year we worked as a travel agent to learn the process, to create the workflow and algorithm and build the product parallelly.

It took one year to create 6 modules of the product, to make it completely live and functional for the industry. We did our beta launch on 1^st April, 2013 and till the month of May, did not charge and offered the platform free of cost. But from June 1^st, we started collecting set up fees from customers. Right now we have 21 travel agents on-board. When we worked as a travel agent, we did a performance testing for the platform to see if it can really function well for the travel agents. Our platform is the result of more than yearlong worship and diligence in blending travel & technology. 

Would you like to tell us about your Revenue Model?

iTraveller is a Pay Per Usage platform. If you are a travel agent and want to use this platform, you just have to come to the website and sign up. Once you sign up, you can start using the platform. There is also a 7 day free trial period where you can use it the way you want, without any restrictions. After 7 days, you will have to pay a set up fee which is Rs. 8, 435 + taxes which comes to something like Rs.9, 478. After the payment, the platform is all yours.

There are also 4 modules which are monetizable right now i.e. Planner (Quick tour package creation module), Reservations (Performs hotel & transportation bookings), Client Experiences (Helps efficient ground handling of clients during travel) and Sales (Helps track & monitor monthly sales & incentive management). You have the freedom to add each of the modules, based on the nature and size of your business at the time of configuring the application.

How involved are you with fundraising?      

For the last couple of months, we are actively looking for raising funds but have not been substantially successful yet. But there are few people with whom we are interacting and in the next couple of months we should be successful in raising some funds.

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced?

The last 1-2 years have been an amazing roller coaster ride. If you don’t have patience, you’ll probably get a heart attack every day. It’s been a very exhaustive and tiring journey. The biggest challenge has been to find the right kind of guys. There are millions of engineers, sales people and talented professionals in the market who can really do a bang up job. But you don’t find people who are willing to put their efforts right now and wait for the results which may come after a year or two. You don’t find commitment and perseverance in a lot of people.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

To be honest I’m not quite content with what we have right now but then they are some joys that we get on a daily basis. When you successfully launch your product, you have achieved something substantial by overcoming various hurdles. When you get the first few customers, you feel satisfied and confident that people are willing to use your product. I’ll be excited when we reach about 5000 businesses in the next 5 years and that is what we are targeting as of now.

We are depending on Facebook, blogs, email campaigns to promote iTraveller. We are looking forward to participate in Travel trade fairs where most of the active travel companies join together. This one way of offline promotion through which we are planning to reach the target segment.

Shuji believes that in a startup, you can’t work from 9-5 and then forget about your work. You should be willing to dedicate 24/7 of your time for a startup journey. You can’t make 10 million in just 2-3 years and becoming rich is the last priority of a startup. If you think you have an unwavering perseverance and the capability to withstand pressure from family, society friends and employees, only then you should enter in the field of startups. Before jumping into entrepreneurship, you should ask yourself if you are ready to risk 5 years of your life without any guarantee of earning sufficient revenue and if the answer is Yes, you are certainly bitten by the entrepreneurship bug!

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Started last month, Work Art Fun is a new way to advertise your products and services- by sharing pictures with the world. The site allows companies, professionals, service providers to post pictures of their work which can be discovered by the end user.

Startoholics caught up with the man behind this innovation, Mr. Arvinder Singh Sahni who gave us some valuable insights and information about Work Art Fun, here it is for you:

What exactly is Work Art Fun?

According to Mr. Arvinder, WAF is a product display platform for companies and for end users it is a product discovery platform where they can discover things and services which they are looking for. For ex: If you are an architect, you can post pictures of your projects on WorkArtFun and if you are an end user, you would come to WAF and see pictures of different architects. The process takes place in a social environment and so people can leave comments, share pictures on Facebook and Twitter. Users can also leave testimonials and share their experiences with other users.

However all posts do not appear on the Discover page as they are first moderated by the WAF team. If a person posts 5 pictures and the team puts 3 on Discover, the remaining 2 will anyway be in the user’s profile which can be seen by anyone.

Though it is a work-focussed platform, it doesn’t lack the fun element as it sends the message that work itself is fun!

On the Differentiating Factor

Social media platforms like Pinterest post pictures of your interest whereas WAF is more work related and deals with sharing your work with the world. There are different categories like Architecture, Art/Paintings, Books/Magazines, Cars/Motorcycles, Decor/ Furniture, Education, Electronics, Events, Restaurants among many others, where you can post your content.

For a company, opening an account in WAF leads to publicity as it is directly linked to their website which helps in creating traffic.  The team also provides statistics of the traffic. The content provider is also an audience which enables them to look at pictures of other service providers.

Challenges Faced

Some people procrastinate while some are tentative as they fear that someone else might copy their design. But if they can share their product information on their websites and Facebook, they can share it at WAF, which is purely emphasizes on work. Taking this message to the masses, to larger no. of people and companies without spending big bucks is the current challenge they are facing.

Mr. Arvinder believes that Indian content sites haven’t lived up to the standards. “All over the world, there are equivalents of world leaders. Russian VK, is the biggest social network service in Europe. In America, IT means Pinterest, Snapchat, Google, Facebook, Innovation and not outsourcing whereas the case is opposite in India. Indians are becoming passive consumers of great content rather than active creators.”

Team WAF

Feedback and Growth

After one and half month, more than 200 users have registered with the site. The team has noticed that whoever has been using the platform has been coming back to it again and again. Some companies are posting content regularly and end users have been commenting on it. People are of the opinion that such kind of a platform is needed.

Team WAF plans on giving a kind of a board stating “Check us out at WAF” to people, which can be displayed in their offices. Mr. Arvinder believes that if people can look out for companies on Facebook, which is basically a site for staying connected with friends, they can certainly look out for companies at WAF, which is a work-focussed platform.

They are also planning to do offline activities like using boards, placards and convince website owners to put an icon of WAF on their website which links visitors to company’s profiles on WAF.

The site has enough functionality and the team doesn’t want to add anything more just because someone else is updating something or the other. The only thing they wish to include is providing more analytics to the user and to have an Android and an Apple app.

On Raising Funds

According to Mr. Arvinder, there are no fundraising plans as of now. Work Art Fun is a part of a company named Spacecom Technologies Ltd. For traditional advertising, they would require fundraising and but the team wants the platform to grow slowly and steadily. The numbers are actually growing everyday and the main efforts of team include – writing to companies, posting content on some blogs as well as being active on Social media.  They don’t want to create a hype and want the startup to take off gradually.

Mr. Arvinder believes, if your idea is unique that’s only 1% of your work and the rest 99% depends on executing your idea and believing in it yourself. “If you believe in your idea, people will. Take genuine feedback from people, preferably not from friends. Talk to strangers and ask them what they feel about your endeavour. One progress day by day but not take it too seriously. One should not go to venture funds too early unless there is no option. For genuine good content, for genuine good companies and for genuine good people, sky is the limit.”

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― C.S. Lewis

Keeping up with technology and developing modern techniques in the field of education is not only a step forward into the development of the present generation but it also paves a more solid ground for the scholars of tomorrow to walk with their head held high without having to wait and trip at every loose stone. By scholar, we don’t mean just an engineer or a doctor but every child who grows up into a creative genius when the breeze sweetened with the fragrance of the flower he/she loves most invigorates the passion within that child to be something, reach somewhere in life.

And Aurus Network is one such organization that comes with a vision to make quality education accessible to the masses at affordable prices. Founded in 2010, it pioneered the use of internet-based, live 2-way HD classes which connected the best teachers with students across the country and eliminated the need for costly hardware-based video conferencing or VSAT (satellite based) equipments and networks.

To get into the details of such a wondrous initiative, Team Startoholics got in touch with Jaya Jha, Head of Marketing & Product team, Aurus Network. She gave us the following inputs.

How would you describe Aurus Network to a person who has just heard about it?

Aurus Network’s flagship product is CourseHub. It is a video creation, management and delivery product for education. It is used by educational institutes to deliver live classes online and also to make their lectures available to the students for the purpose of revising and reviewing after the class.

As such it may seem trivial, and for the different kinds of tasks that we do, there are alternatives available in the form of VSAT-based solutions, video and web conferencing, or some dedicated lecture capture solutions. But CourseHub triumphs over them by being a complete product for the requirements of educators and learners and by being optimized for them. The USP of the products are

• HD-quality video delivery at speeds as low as 100 Kbps (unlike any other alternative in the market)
• A complete solution for education with live and on-demand delivery of classes, as well as content and learning management systems (as opposed to generic video streaming, video conferencing and web-conferencing providers)
• Cloud-based, automated, non-intrusive and deployable at a fraction of cost of the existing lecture capture, video-conferencing and VSAT solutions

What motivated the idea of Aurus Network?

Piyush Agrawal, our founder, had used a lecture capture solution while he was doing his Masters at Stanford University. He and other students found the system to be extremely valuable. But the implementation at Stanford was high of cost and resources. Although many other institutes could benefit from a solution like this, most of them won’t have that kind of resources. His thesis was also related to video processing. Recognizing the market needs and seeing a technical fit with his interests, he decided to come back to India and start Aurus Network with a vision of making quality education accessible to all.

What differentiates Aurus Network from the other online/distance education portals?

We are not an education portal in the sense that we are not selling content. We believe that good teachers and educators are the best people to decide how and what to teach. We enable them to reach out to more students and to capture the valuable content they create while teaching a class and use it in various ways later. In serving this need, we have created a product that is complete, works out of the box, doesn’t need the teacher to change his natural style of teaching and delivers classes in high quality even at a bandwidth as low as 100 Kbps.

How is the response from the customers? Is the Indian market open for this new type of education?

We have about 30 customers and the number is increasing continuously. For test preparation and training institutes, this is the right technology to help them scale their business without establishing physical presence and hiring new faculty in every city they want to cater to. Instead of a teacher going to three to four centers within the city to take the same class repeatedly, they can deliver classes to hundreds of centers or students all over the country without the teacher having to travel anywhere and that too at one go. The sophisticated interaction features lets the students and teachers interact with each other to get full advantage of the teaching session.

We have customers like Career Point, Career Launcher, Academy of Commerce and Crack Verbal using us to deliver these classes. Corporate training segment is also picking up and the system has been used by people like Kemin India and TalentEdge for this purpose.

Apart from the test preparation and training, we are now also getting an encouraging response from higher education institutes. We have institutes like IIT Kanpur and IIT Patna onboard and many others in the pipeline.

Overall, it is clear that the market needs a solution like this, the response has been more than encouraging and we are very excited about the future.

What challenges have you faced in your entrepreneurial journey? What has been the toughest decision you have had to make lately, if any?

The company was bootstrapped for the first two years. It was good in a way, because not having external money makes you look hard into your business model and ensures that you focus on a sustainable, profitable business. Despite a glaring need for a product like this, selling technology is not easy in the market. Customer education has been another big challenge. But we also see this as an opportunity to do things right.

Team of Aurus Network

What are your plans for promoting Aurus Network? Also, do you have any tie-ups?

Currently we are doing most of our business development directly, because we have figured that a lot of what we are trying to do is concept selling. Finding and training partners for that kind of involved selling is difficult, especially for a startup. But we are open to partnership opportunities and might scout for them more actively in future.

How do you see Aurus Network as in the next 5 years?

We are looking to become leading players for delivering online classes and deploying lecture capture, not just in the Indian market, but in international markets too.

What more do you wish to include to take Aurus Network to the next level?

We wish to include more team members and some more money. 

What are you most excited about at this moment regarding Aurus Network?

What is exciting for us is that the customers are ahead of us! Once they get into the platform, they find creative usage and request new features all the time. We don’t have to push anything on them. The large market potential and high engagement of the customers with the product is gratifying and exciting.

So it seems like the days of drab black and white ‘teaching-learning’ sessions are nearly over. So on a day will come when education would be more than just rote-learning and instead it would become more and more interactive, interesting and every bit worth acquiring ( the easier way)!

Education has no end, so to all those who think – ‘Lord!  Why didn’t this happen when I was studying and slogging so much with my stuff’; do not lose heart, life is too short and yet we all have a long way to go! Tread on!

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Voonik is a site that helps you to look your best by recommending what kind of clothes and accessories would go well together. It also gives daily recommendations on what to wear from your personal wardrobe. We got a chance to have a chit-chat session with Mr. Sujayath Ali, CEO & co-founder of Voonik. Read out what he has to say:

Could you shed light on your life before Voonik? What was your previous work?

Prior to Voonik, I was a VP at Visa heading their eCommerce checkout product. Prior to Visa, I spent more than 7 years at Amazon.com as a product manager. I started my life as a software engineer and have my MBA from ISB, Hyderabad.

What motivated this Startup? And what is the legend behind its name?

Starting their own company is a dream for all the techies. And “unable to dress well” was a personal problem for me and I couldn’t find any existing solution to address that. So, I left my job to solve this problem.

“Voonik” is a play on the word “unique”.  The core value proposition for Voonik is in getting you to find your unique style statement and hence we wanted our brand name to be a play on that word. 

What differentiates Voonik from the rest?

Voonik is India’s first in many aspects. We are India’s first personal shopping assistant that recommends clothing based on a user’s body type and style preferences. We are India’s first stylist-hand-picked store where each item is handpicked by the stylist keeping the user in mind. And best of all, we are all online and completely free.

How does the company generate revenue?

The services are free for consumers. We take 10% to 20% commissions from merchants for the purchases that happen through our website.

What challenges have you faced in your entrepreneurial journey? What has been the toughest decision you had to make lately, if any?

Primarily, there is a negative sentiment around eCommerce-related startups in India. I strongly believe this is the right time for our idea but the general misconception is that it is not. This has not hurt us yet but might play a role when we raise our funding. However, I am glad that we have achieved enough traction to prove the nay-sayers wrong.

I make all the decisions based on data and don’t allow myself to get attached to anything. So no decision seems tough, even in retrospect. 

What are your plans for promoting Voonik? Also, do you have any tie-ups?

We are primarily relying on Facebook to amplify word of mouth and to generate awareness. We are also creating few press articles to get the word out. We have started few tie-ups. For example, we have tied up with a well-known fitness centre franchise to help their members improve their clothing and grooming through Voonik.

What more do you wish to include to take Voonik to the next level?

Voonik, as a product, still has leaps and bounds to go, to achieve its mission of making a common-man fashionable. I believe that building a remarkable product is all we need to do to take Voonik to next level and that’s what we are heads-down focused on.

Finally, what advice would you like to give to other entrepreneurs?

Startup is nothing but a bunch of experiments. Most of the ideas fail. The key is to try out a large number of experiments, pick the successful ones (through unbiased metrics), and double down on them. Some experiments need time and volume; recognise them and experiment accordingly.

The entire process takes place within a fraction of seconds. All you needs to do is, sign up and complete a 30-second style quiz about yourself. The site will then recommend outfits that suit you and answer all your style related queries. You can even buy items that you find interesting and get it delivered at your doorstep!

Want to discover your own unique style statement? Visit their website! Voonik

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We got a chance to interview Satya Krishna Ganni, Founder and CEO of MartMobi, here it is for you:

Could you shed light on your life before MartMobi.com?

I have always been a Technology Entrepreneur all my career and MartMobi is my Sixth startup. Prior to MartMobi, I co-founded LearnSocial with Pramod Nair last April. After a successful exit in October, both of us started MartMobi early January of 2013.

Since our official launch on June 7^th, 2013 we have received great customer interest ( primarily from eCommerce community) and we signed  5-6 paying customers with many others in pipeline.

What Motivated you to do MartMobi?

Since the iPhone launch a few years ago, we observed the gradual shift of consumers to mobiles and tablet devices. Initial days were focused on content consumption, email and social networking. As the eco-system matures and consumers gain confidence , commerce transactions are starting to happen.

We observed globally that eCommerce sites get 20-30% of their traffic from Mobile devices. However, they do not have an optimized site or app , which in turn affects discovery and conversions. We saw this “Gap” as an opportunity and that laid the foundation for us to solve this problem with MartMobi Platform.

How did you take your first step towards MartMobi? Did you receive any funding from angel investors?

First step was to validate the market need. We build a mini app and site for a leading eCommerce site and talked to many customers in India and abroad.

We haven’t taken any Angel Funding, although we are approved a small grant from IIIT, Hyderabad which is where we are based out of.

What challenges have you faced in building the platform?

The primary challenge was to find the right talent who has expertise developing front-end for Mobile. Unlike the web, where the standards evolved over 15 years, the mobile eco-system is very fragmented, diverse and has many other challeng                                                        

How do you intend to promote MartMobi?

We are getting strong traction from domestic market, this will help in serving domestic customers as well bring robustness to the platform.

Once we have 20+paying customers, we intend to spread our wings to other geographies.

What more do you wish to include to take MartMobi to the next level?

Right now hiring and building the team, Product Innovation and Traction are key priorities.  We already have a US presence and will start serious outbound efforts in the next few months. We are very focused on our vision to be the “Worlds No.1 Mobile eCommerce Platform”

Finally, what advice would you like to give to others who have come up with web based startups?

First it is very important to come up with a unique idea with good differentiation. Second, early validation is paramount to help make the right tradeoffs. Finally, the team .

The world is gradually shifting towards mobile phones and so it makes sense for every eCommerce site, Brand and Retailer to get on the mobile bandwagon.

Do take a look at their Innovation! MartMobi

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Could you shed light on your life before FarsanKart? What was your previous work?

I graduated in MSc in International Management in 2009 from UWE (University of West England). As a teenager, I always had the urge to be independent and work for myself rather than being dependent on my parents. I worked my way through college as a DJ while pursuing under-graduation from Vadodara. Later I went abroad to pursue my masters and worked for four years with a leading MNC before quitting the job to come back home.

What motivated this Startup?

In India, I joined my family business of packaging but was never satisfied doing “the regular stuff.” And then, entrepreneurship “clicked”. Being the foodie that I am, I was clear that I wanted the business to revolve around food. A business in the QSR segment did cross my mind, but then I decided to leverage my family’s expertise in the packaging space. People around me were surprised when I declared that I have plans to sell farsan online. Because we have all heard of selling books, clothes, accessories and flowers online, but farsan was something very unique. I am optimistic that in the next few years there will be a complete change in the way people shop and e-commerce is sure to play an important role in the whole space. With increasing traffic and congestion on roads, soon people would not want to visit shops for trivial purchases.

How did you take your first step towards FarsanKart? Did you receive any funding from angel investors?

Farsankart is a completely self-funded business as of now. We did have offers from the investors but we have not thought about the process as of now and we would wait for the right investor at the right time to scale up the business.

We have loads of other plans kept in pipeline for Farsankart and we are taking it step by step. After launching www.Farsankart.com, we launched http://www.global.farsankart.com/ and as of now we serve USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Dubai.

What differentiates Farsankart from the rest?

Farsankart is a unique concept where we want to serve the best delicious Gujarati Food across India and the world. Service is our top priority and it will always be, it might sound cliché but we want to stick to the basics. Sometimes companies make a start and eventually they forget the service to their customers and only think about growing their business. At farsankart we have selected products which are dry and have a long lasting shelf life; it has been scrutinized very well before we have kept it on our website. We do not want to just be a store where a customer sees 10,000 products listed online but can’t get them to their doorsteps on time.

What challenges have you faced in your entrepreneurial journey? What has been the toughest decision you had to make lately, if any?

Setting up a new business was a big challenge in itself. When you are self-funded and have to take care of every minor detail yourself, it can be quite a task. But I am not worried, because the joy of getting up each day to do something I like, keeps me going. The journey from a DJ to becoming an owner of an e-commerce business was a hell of a ride.

Every decision from day one has been tough, from selecting products, launching the websites, selecting the packaging, choosing the right vendors. I guess everything is just worth it all when you hear a good feedback from your customers.

What are your plans for promoting FarsanKart? Also, do you have any tie-ups?

The biggest platform for a start-up is the Social Media Websites and the Search Engines and that’s where we have started promoting farsankart. Today we have more than 20,000 fans that follow us on Facebook alone. We have tie-ups with different Gujarati and non-Gujarati portals with the help of which we can reach over 10 – 15 Lakh customers. For us every one is a potential buyer as everyone loves Gujarati delicacy.

You have an international portal too, is it doing as well as the Indian FarsanKart?

Yes we do, it is www.global.farsankart.com. Initially we started serving in USA, UK and Canada which started very well. And after a great response and request from customers we launched in Dubai and Australia as well. Globally there is a huge potential as we have a lot of people who are Gujarati food fans and when it comes to food they are really choosy, this is where we come in picture to serve them. We have tie ups with renowned courier companies where we get great service which is the most important part for us and the customers.

How many products have you sold in India and abroad till date?

We never thought we would get such a tremendous response from India, it’s a huge marketplace and Gujarati food lovers are spread all across India. We have got customers who have shopped 19 – 20 times now. For us repetitive customers are important as that gives us confidence that we are doing well. We are adding over 100 new customers every month. A customer when buys from abroad , they take more than 5kg or more of farsan as the shipping charges goes really down for them. We have done quite a good business abroad and have built customers who make repetitive purchases which is the best part. Word of mouth for us has worked really well. I would say in 8 months it is a great progress for Farsankart.com.

What more do you wish to include to take Farsankart to the next level?

We would include a lot more new and unique products which customers demand from us, but this will all take time. So for now we are focusing on serving our customers with what we have on farsankart. Talking about the global website, we want to start catering to different countries and start expanding.

Finally, what advice would you like to give to other young entrepreneurs?

I believe in what I do and always do things with sincerity and 100% dedication. Being an entrepreneur is not easy as you will face a lot of road blocks but if you learn to face them and put them behind you and focus on what you are there to achieve, you will be a winner.

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