Starting up is not a moment of epiphany. It’s neither the moment of discovery nor a moment of halo glow. Instead, it is the deepest desire inside that transforms into action at one particular moment. Entrepreneurs come in different molds, belong to different breeds, hold different convictions, and have different make-ups. Their starting up moments are also different. Five different Chennai entrepreneurs, at different stages of their entrepreneurial journey, recount their moment of starting up.
Ashwin Ramasamy, ContractIQ: Actually I started with developing a social network for NRIs at Founders Institute, Singapore. I realized that it’s not my natural thing to do. I looked at other options. Outsourcing was where I was strong at. So, I looked at bottom-of-the-pyramid of outsourcing – connecting app development companies and small businesses and startups, who need mobile apps. I put in my thoughts over a two-month period and launched ContractIQ on January 1, 2012.[ContractIQ is a platform that connects buyers to a trusted developer network of mobile apps, products, and software development.]
Narayanan Hariharan, Effect Works: When I used to pitch to customers on how I could help them during my marketing consultancy days, customers used to ask me who did the presentations I made. When I told them I did, they wanted me to do similar presentations for them. I kept getting these offers and kept saying no to the initial three offers. Then I thought it’s a good business proposition I am failing to look at. Over a period of six months, I put my ideas in the direction of customer requests and started Effect Works in October 2009 to help people with sales pitches and investor pitches.[Effect Works provides presentation design and training to customers and specializes in data visualization, executive keynotes, product pitches and launches, sales presentations, and market research reports.]
Amrutash Misra, Life Online: Throughout school and college, I was entrepreneurial. I thought starting up is good option for my skill sets. But I took up a job right after college. I was discussing ideas with my close friends. We were looking to start something within our savings. We discussed a few ideas, including an online library. When I felt the time was ripe, I took a couple of months’ leave from my job for doing market research in March 2009. I quit my job in October 2009 and me and my friend Sahil Gore launched iloveread.in in December 2009. Actually, the coding started in May 2009 itself.[Life Online helps businesses go online. It is also the parent company for the online library, iloveread.in, which was incubated at IIT-M and now operates from Adyar in Chennai.]
Vivek Durai, Humble Paper: I wanted to start up since my law school days. But I ended up as a corporate lawyer. I was a technology and corporate lawyer. I was engaged in complex contract negotiations for businesses. And there was one bottleneck I noticed in almost every deal. The difficulty of handling multiple versions of documents and iterations and comments by several people. It became difficult to move a deal forward because of the ad hoc way in which iterations and conversations took place. I thought the tools used were in the stone age. When I started my own law firm I started learning to code as well and work on this project. I was negotiating contracts and coding almost simultaneously. One year ago, I decided to quit my law practice and we were incubated by IITM's RTBI incubator. By founding Humble Paper I want to bring open source to business documents and deal making in the way Github revolutionized software development by startups.[Humble Paper is a startup building a real-time contract negotiation platform for individuals and enterprises.]
Vikas Chawla, Social Beat: After working for 6 years across different industries and different roles I finally took the plunge into entrepreneurship. When I quit my corporate job in September 2012, I had lots of ideas, but no clue of which idea I would finally embark upon. The ideas revolved around media buying, skill development and some around digital marketing. I finally chose digital marketing after evaluating the market and seeing the dearth of result-oriented digital agencies who don’t focus just on the creative aspect of digital marketing but on the business aspect as well. So, with just one client and no website of our own, Social Beat was born in December 2012 with a focus to create business results through digital initiatives for our clients.[Social Beat is a digital media startup that helps businesses with digital marketing.]