What you missed at YourStory’s Indore meetup

With the intention of reaching out to the young players in the startup ecosystem, YourStory made its way to India’s ‘cleanest city’, Indore.

Initial discounts can give you the first push, but they’re not really the way forward. Also, when you venture into entrepreneurship, the first thing you need to do is determine whether you’re solving a genuine problem that needs addressing. These and many more takeaways emerged from the May chapter of the YourStory meetup, organised at Incuspaze Indore.

There were more than 80 startup representatives sharing stories about their ventures and debating over what works for Tier-II startups. With the burgeoning startup ecosystem taking over big cities, taking the culture to Tier-II and III cities was one of the main agendas of the meetup. The event welcomed new people to the growing startup community, allowing individuals to share and discover opportunities and connections.

Speaking on the occasion, Maalgaadi Co-founder Saurabh Raj shared how he and his friend Aniruddh Garg left their jobs and thought of starting up in the segment of loading vehicles due to a personal pain point. Saurabh pointed out that startups need to view and test various kinds of customers and focus on one city at a time before scaling up.

"At the same time, if you are an aggregator, you need to sort out your tech first since you should be prepared to handle the load as soon as your application or idea picks up in the market," he added.

The second speaker, Saurav Srivastav, Founder of Indore’s first organic café Mangosteen, spoke about his journey of becoming an entrepreneur and then thinking of a concept café.

"It was a bold attempt back in 2009 because Indore was not prepared for concept cafes. But I persisted and introduced many new twists into our recipes apart from experimenting with ambience, a co-working space, and concepts such as that," he said.

The third speaker was freelance writer Mukti Masih, who has herself written on the topic of Tier-II startups for YourStory. She outlined three important elements of startup storytelling. First, startups must give their stories a personal touch, a unique personal pain point that led to the finding of the solution. Two, it is important for startups to use the products or services of their competitors and have a great spirit for their competitors so they can clearly distinguish their own USPs. Three, they must have a strong user empathy which is the heart of design thinking.

"Use your pain-point and self journey to add empathy to your product, a personal touch works wonders in startup stories," said Mukti.

Among the startups that participated were utility aggregators like Sabkuchrepair and Washit; services startups like Techturningpoint, HiringBuddha, Loadmee Logistics; a social network for education called Educratz; and a healthcare delivery startup called A4 Clinics, among others.