The July edition of Startup Saturday Delhi had three entrepreneurs share their candid and inspiring stories with the audience. The Shullick Hall at the American Center was packed to the brim with avid listeners. In addition, the first open house discussion session was also hosted.
Aditya Sahay began with an insightful account of the predecessor to his product RadBox. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, he had co-founded the very niche B2B service called ClipWeave in 2009. It offers video indexing and analysis, primarily targeted at television production houses, news agencies, filmmakers and advertisers. Sahay says most media archives have tons of digital video content that can be put to good use, except for the major snag that videos aren’t indexed and searchable. One cannot search to locate a particular shot or event within a video clip, unless one manually looks for it in a linear way.
The core business proposition was using their technology to automate the video indexing process. This posed several technical challenges for Sahay, including the extraction and recognition of text from speech and news headline scrolls, detecting commercial breaks and tagging of video clips. Apart from these, he had to step out of his comfort zone and plunge into marketing and sales where he quickly improvised and improved his skills.
Twitter quote:
“Translations turn out to be bizarre and funny — when videos are
turned to a set of pics and text #SSDEL” — @nichetechie
Sahay also demoed Radbox, a simple bookmarking service for online videos that evolved out of his original idea. It lets users queue up videos and watch them later. All queued videos play within the Radbox interface, which is clean and straightforward. Signing up for the service has been made easier with the implementation of Facebookconnect.
Sameer Guglani and Nandini Hirianniah shared an engaging and conversational narrative of their first startup — Madhouse, a movie rental service. The duo are movie buffs and were loyal users of Netflix during their stint in the US. Impressed by the availability of rare movies on Netflix and the immediate delivery, they decided to adapt the same model here in India, starting with Chandigarh. They bootstrapped the venture along with Ankur Agrawal. Adapting the Netflix movie rental model was not without its challenges, most of which were unique to India and other developing countries. A dominant hurdle was the lack of internet penetration. Initially, they chose to focus on a phone-line based system for placing orders. They built an extensive inventory, often adding multiple copies of popular movies. First rate customer experience was their linchpin, so much so that when a DVD could not be delivered, a hand written note and a plum cake were sent to the customer. This was also how their first angel investor noticed them and got interested.
Twitter quote:
“Customer experience has to be impeccable else there won’t be customer
abundance #SSDEL” — @nichetechie
Madhouse later went on to be acquired by Seventymm. After eventful experiences launching and running Madhouse, Sameer and Nandini joined Seventymm as Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Vice President of Community Services respectively.
The Madhouse story was followed by an open house session on funding for startups. It saw enthusiastic participation from the audience. Different ways of securing funding, and the pros and cons of early stage funding were discussed. Participants almost unanimously agreed that a well built product or service would have no trouble attracting the right investors.
