Start-up an idea

An idea can change not just one life but many lives once an it finds firm footing, it moves rapidly and soon becomes a phenomenon. Among the many start ups in the country, here are a few which began as a simple concept.

SPORTS THE WAY
In 2003, Saumil Majumdar had a chance conversation with his friend who complained that his six-year-old son spent too much time in front of the television than on the playing ground. Knowing the importance of sports and physical activity in a child's life, Majumdar with the help of a four friends decided that attract children to play sports. As initial attempts like setting up a multi-sport facility, sponsoring inter school events, sports tourism etc. did not work, Majumdar and his friends figured out the right formula. They started Edusports, a venture which focussed on partnering with schools so that more and more children learn sports through a structured programme. "Out of the 100 schools we first approached, 90 rejected the idea, 7 showed some interest, three categorically said they were waiting for somebody to fix their school sports programme since they did not know how to do it," says Majumdar. From being rejected by 90 schools, Edusports in now practised in nearly 400 schools across 85 cities.
Although it is a successful venture today, Edusports began with its founders' desire to solve a problem as well as to create a successful business out of it. "After some initial validation, I believed we were on to a genuine entrepreneurship opportunity which would make a social impact," says Parminder Gill, co-founder, Edusports.

ONLINE MEDICAL AID
Another case in point is Practo — a website which helps patients find doctors by specialisation and locality, streamlines paitent-doctor communication, schedule appointments, and most importantly creates, stores and shares electronic medical records of patients if required. In early 2008, while trying to get across medical records of his ailing father checked by an an American doctor for a second opinion, Shashank ND wondered why there was no access to electronic medical records to share with doctors aboard. Or why he couldn't get adequate information about a doctor before trusting him. These questions and an academic background at the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, gave birth to the online platform. "The ranking of doctors in our database is based on a proprietary algorithm that takes multiple factors like relevance, appointment experience and patient preference into consideration," explains Shashank. The website has already served more than 25 lakh patients in India before going international in 2012.

WIZ QUIZ
Krishna Depura (IIT Roorkee), Mohit Garg (Stanford Univeristy), Deepak Diwakar (IIT Bombay) and Nishant Mungali (IIT Guwahati) started conducting on ground treasure hunts and quizzes on history, sports, music, geography etc. in their respective colleges. With the increase in populalrity, the friends decided to take these activities online. On understanding the ways of the virtual world, and the importance of structured learning, the group decided to start Mindtickle, a virtual learning platform for employees of different organisations. "One of our focus points is to help fast growing organisations enable their sales team with the right training as well as access to relevant content at the right moment," says Krishna Depura, one of the founders. The venture today provides custom made learning platforms which focusses on a niche problems faced by organisations while enabling them in sales enablement, new hire onboarding and operations enablement. Through our programmes, we have generated statistics which show considerable increase in learner engagement while reducing overall time and training costs," informs Depura

VIDEO TALK
Gopal Krishnan a student of computer science wanted to train people on entrepreneurship and start a business but didn't know how. "I got introduced to internet marketing through a friend who was making money on the web," he says. Krishnan researched this sector for a couple of years before telling his friend Anil Kumar who was an expert at making animated videos that there was a market for these videos. Kumar saw a few of these videos and immediately latched on the idea. Together Krishnan, Kumar and a couple of other friends who started mypromovideos.com in 2009. The venture creates marketing videos for companies like Flipkart and HCL. "We look at what the client wants convey through the video, their target market, the treatment they expect for the video etc. If the product is complex or new to us, we often get demonstrations," explains Udhaya Krishna, one of the founders. Apart from commercial videos, they also make videos for a social cause which in addition to giving knowledge also act as a publicity tool. "We realised that many of us do not know basic things about India. The idea was to create a series that would create awareness and would present facts without sensationalising or taking sides," says Krishna. Today, mypromovideos.com which began with zero investment is a thriving business and had a turnover of 1.25crores in 2013.
While running a successful business is obviously one of the main goals of these start ups, the desire to make an impact in society through their ideas and work is evident.