HedCet, a Student Startup with a Very Grown Up Offering

As the entrepreneurship wind blows across India, even Kerala has not escaped the wave. Students from the state -- the most literate in the country -- are also donning hats as entrepreneurs. Meet Sharan Thampi, one of the co-founder of technology product company HedCet. Sharan shares the concept and motivation, “We are a team of process designers, experience designers and management aspirants spread across two product verticals namely, Tinymail and Hornbill Studios. We started when we felt that the four walls of a classroom did not make sense at that point in time, nor will it make sense in the future. “

[caption id="attachment_2556" align="aligncenter" width="450"]

Team HedCet[/caption]Set up in July 2012, HedCet is co-founded by Teas Kumar and George Jacob, batch mates of Sharan at College of Engineering, Trivandrum. Their journey started when right from inception, the trio strived to create something different. They started working with entrepreneurship development cell of the college, tied up with IIT Madras and in the process met lot of people, which gave them the idea of HedCet. Initially they designed a few websites, made some quick bucks and then went on to build their two products.

Tinymail is a disruptive technology, looking to bring greater clarity to online communication, using mobile number as the single point of contact. Elaborating on Tinymail, Sharan says: “Everyone has to handle lot of communication through mails. We want to club them with a single point of contact i.e. mobile number. The operation involved here is the user enters his mobile number, validation code is sent to the mentioned number which has to be re-entered into the site. The site then takes you further where the user has to enter the email ID. The user can test it by getting on to any mail client, sending a mail to <your mobile number>@tinymail.in. He would have received the mail.” Hedcet is also entering the gaming sector with Hornbill Studios and Tripp’d.

Student start-ups require a lot of mentorship and guidance. For HedCet, it has come in the form of people from MobME and the Startup Village, Kochi – who have helped them, set up their business. HedCet caught the headlines when Kris GopalKrishnan, one of co-founders of Infosys, performed the first trial of the product – Tinymail (http://goo.gl/EwjF5). Sharan believes his company to be a people’s company rather a technology one, “We believe technology is just a means to make people’s lives better. So along with innovating in a technology sense, we study people.”

They have set up their office in the hostel dorm and currently have team strength of 15 people; HedCet is looking to hire more from the college itself. As a part of their hiring strategy, The HedCet Code Club was setup to impart free training in modern technology, coding languages and processes to bring in the next pool of talent for the company.

Being a bootstrapped venture, HedCet is looking for angel funding. With the launch of Tinymail product due in near future, HedCet is using all online and offline media strategy to provide maximum visibility to the product. George shares his vision for the company, “We want to be remembered as a disruptor with innovation. We want to see ourselves as a path breaking company by the end of this decade building products for the world.”

Find the link for the shortened URL:

Author Credit : Sanket Sheth