Saurabh Bhatia,Founder, Safew Technology Labs Private Limited

When an Entrepreneur starts out on the journey to fulfill their dreams it takes a a lot of effort and energy. An idea from the drawing board to the actual launch of the concept is no easy task.There are some individuals who have taken it upon themselves to make the transition from concept to venture a little easier.

A Young Indian Entrepreneur has come up with a way of making his fellow entrepreneur's ideas materialize . Saurabh Bhatia of Safew Technology Labs Private Limited says "Our company helps startups and Small businesses by providing them with solutions using Open Source Software. We help build healthy incubation of startups by providing the new entrepreneurs with our expert Web 2.0 consulting to Infrastructure Development.The team's diverse experience and expertise helps to provide an end to end solution to a client. 3 Web Application Developers, 1 Desktop Application developer 1 Website Developer and 1 Infrastructure Manager makes the team a complete package to any SME Need. "

"Our Partnership with Canonical Ltd, the founders of Ubuntu Linux makes us a key player in open source migration and helping people in bringing down the overall cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure. Our Ruby on Rails experience helps fellow entrepreneurs in building their ideas and launching them over the web. Qt application development helps bringing desktop applications to life. Finally a small business gains the best from a CMS powered website as it decreases the development time, effort, and enables easier maintainability, thus making the over all solution highly cost effective."

"Currently there are 4 running clients and we have served more than 15 different clients in the past 2 years on various technologies and across diverse domains, like

Education, Religion, Social Networking and most recently Office Automation services. Now we are working on IT Infrastructure projects too"

Yourstory asked them how they are different from the other software companies, aside from their target clientele, Saurabh answers "Our key differentiator is the technologies we serve in and the way we treat each work. We develop each piece of software as a product. We manage all the services and projects like our products which have incubation and maturity stages. The clients pay for our technical expertise and project management skills. We take the requirement, involve the client at every stage of product development and ensure we deliver their vision."

Safew is also planning to tweak their concepts to further extend their ability to serve, he says "Over the past 2 years we have identified pain areas for Small Businesses and how these problems can be effectively addressed as a software company. We are developing solutions to meet these needs of the Small businesses which are Robust, Scalable, Open, yet cost effective. These solutions will help us to take our business as well as the Small Businesses to the next level."

Saurabh was always a person who loved exploring the unknown and that very thing led him to become the Entrepreneur he is today. He says "I love adventures and exploring new realms of life. My job conflicted with my nature in a few ways. It didn't allow me to cut loose and do whatever I wanted with the technologies at hand and make commercial solutions out of it. The freedom at my workplace was curbed, no one was approachable and above all what turned me off the most was the Politics and sycophant culture. So I set out to make a politics free workplace."

Once the business was up and running, it also ran into a few hurdles , however faith and team support won the day."The biggest challenge so far has been keeping the show running during the delayed payment schedules and lack of cash. I am fortunate to have a team with me who, during this time understood the situation in which we were into and are now fighting their way back to the recovery. Their efforts have made this challenge overcome for us."says Saurabh.

Talking along the same lines he also confesses "As an entrepreneur the biggest mistake I have done is to not being able to keep a common policy to recover money from the different clients. Many clients tend to find flaws in the work and contract and get away without paying huge sums of money."

They used the savings from their jobs as the seed capital and kept reinvesting whatever they earned from the projects back into the company.Their seed capital was around Rs80,000. Starting with 1 employee and 1 project in 2007 they grew to 6 employees in 2008. At present they are a team of 5, with a corporate office in Mumbai and a development center at Hyderabad.

Saurabh commends the growth of his company to his work he says "I have conceptualized, and developed a solution for SMEs which will help our organization to reach the next level and establish it's brand image in the market."

"Our organization has been constantly appreciated by our clients in most of our work. Our initial clients digitalfaith.org gave us high accolades for delivering high quality work on their project despite it being one of our initial works."

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint hearted for one might be on top one day and languishing the next, Saurabh attributes the sustenance of his entrepreneurial dreams to his positive thinking saying "The thought that an entrepreneur is a person who can change the way world visualizes something. Every entrepreneur has been bestowed with the power to change the world in their own way. Now its upto us to do it. The urge to do this keeps me buckled to this ride."

"In 2010 we will be a diverse organization in terms of what we do, and we will complete the transformation from a fully services based model into a venture incubation firm which will incubate great entrepreneur's ideas till they mature. We intend to use our experience and expertise with other entrepreneurs and provide them with an incubation system where they can reach sustainability in lesser time."

Saurabh told Yourstory what award has meant the most to him he says "I got an award for acting in a play once in 11th standard. Other things that have mattered a lot to me are cracking the NID Post graduation exam which was a big challenge."

To his fellow entrepreneurs he says "The only thing I need to tell fellow entrepreneurs is, failure is the biggest teacher. We need to take it in the right way to make the most of it. Always keep 2 kinds of goals, short term and long term. Short terms keep changing, long term goals become your moral values. You reach one goal and then define a new set of goals. Thats what is going to the next level."

Yourstory wishes Saurabh Bhatia success in his ventures and hopes to see him make it to the next level of his dreams.