The stage was set for yet another exciting Startup Saturday meetup on a spritely weekend morning. The theme for this month was ‘Celebrating the Spirit of Women Entrepreneurship’ which aroused the interest of a lot of working professionals apart from entrepreneurs. An all women list of guest speakers were ready to unleash their acquired GYAAN on the audience which had the largest number of women registrations this year.
Arti Agarwal, who leads Startup Saturday across India introduced Headstart and its various initiatives like Headstart Higher, Headstart Co-founder Search and Headstart Clubs, along with Headstart’s flagship event, Startup Saturday which was happening across 10+ cities on the same day, i.e. Second Saturday!
Thereafter I introduced our first speaker Radha Giri (Founder & CEO – iMidas Social). The audience was anticipation for some knowledge dissemination and Radha did an excellent job of it.
Radha started off by recalling in brief her education & corporate background and her eventual foray into the world of entpreneurship. The audience got further engaged when she educated them about ‘Personal branding’ and how using Social Media effectively can help doing that. Quoting some instances of online posts she explained the importance of building up an image which could be useful for founders in their personal & professional life. The numbers of questions posed to her reflected the amount of curiosity she had aroused and many seemed to have a solution in this regard.
Our next speakers were Uma Badve & Shruti Agarwal (Co-Founders at PICANTOS – Mexican Food Restaurant) and there was a loud encouraging applause in the audience since not many women have ventured into the field of hospitality especially a speciality food place.
Both Uma & Shruti mentioned about their educational & corporate background after which they explained why they thought of being co-founders in a food venture. The audience was amused as well as curious to know how they managed to do it. The next half an hour was purely inspiring as both recalled with gusto the challenges they faced before & starting PICANTOS and how they eventually were able to overcome many of those. They were very detailed about their work on planning & execution in the past year and the audience was indeed amazed at the amount of hard work they had put in ensuring all cogs in the wheels were tightly screwed in their venture. Finance, logistics, marketing and human resources management is where they stressed more. The engaging Q & A was indeed a source of real-time knowledge especially those who were seeking information about various aspects of this sector. A thunderous applause which followed reflected the sentiments of the audience which was clearly awed & inspired by these 2 energetic & colorful personalities.
It’s been a privilege knowing Suhasini Kirloskar over last few years and it was indeed a pleasure introducing her to the audience at the meetup.
A Marketing Strategist and Marketing Communications professional who specializes in B2B and Technology Marketing, she has been a keynote speaker at various corporate events and part of think tanks involving women entrepreneurs. Suhasini true to her style spoke few points about how entrepreneurs should know their customer, understand their requirements & design marketing strategy & solutions accordingly. Her vast experience both an entpreneurship as well as corporate leader showed as she explained &discussed some cases. People usually are good with technical information but lack in marketing techniques and this is what Suhasini seemed to have helped the audience with given her vast experience in various types of marketing. What was indeed amazing was the way she asked for issues/cases from the entpreneurship in the audience they faced and tried to provide real time guidance how to deal with them. This was indeed what the audience was looking for which was reflected by the highly interactive nature of the session over the next hour. The audience expressed their gratitude by at the end of the session by personally thanking her for the guidance.
It was indeed an event to remember and by far display of the highest amount of energy & participation by entrepreneurs.
Write up:
Headstart Pune Volunteer
IT Consultant (Software, Hardware & Networking), Technical Content Writer, Book Reviewer, Social Media & Promotions @PILF (Pune International Literary Festival)