Helping Startups grow

On February 17, 2015 I went to one of the Nasscom 10000 startups event in Kolkata. It was good but not structured, pulled off at the mid of the event. Had a realization about a problem which is in India at the present. The spirit for startup or being an entrepreneur is very appreciable, the only lacking thing are the Mentors who guide to the person who wants to be an entrepreneur and make a successful startup. There might be some really good mentors but we need more numbers of them for the amount of entrepreneurs coming up each year.

Last day i.e. March 27, 2015 I was discussing with my friend Niraj about an idea that how can we help the budding entrepreneur to test their startup idea in an eight hour time frame.

I know, 8 hours is very less but will still try to accomplish that. Here goes the process:

• First we will have a site and a form to be filled up by the people who wants to be a part of the event. They can be from schools (class 11 & 12), colleges, office employees or the person who has already started the journey.
• We will tag each person capability like engineer, business guy, marketing domain, sales knowledge or the person with an idea.
• Once a person register himself/herself, we will send them a mail that how we are going to co-ordinate. If the person has an idea in his mind then he may start collecting market survey which will be used on the day of the event.

The event will be once in a month and taking up the responsibility of one idea only, not more than that. The flow of the event will be like:

• First we will discuss about the IDEA.
• From that idea, we will write down the Problem Statement.
• Now, validating the proposed Solution based on two questions:
• Do the problem statement really exist?
• Whether the solution really solves the problem?
• From the Market Survey, finding out whether the solution is marketable?
• Once the solution is validated, then tech guys can start to develop the Low Fidelity Prototype.
• In the parallel way, the non-tech guys can start generating (if market survey is not done yet) or analyse the Market Survey and find the potential customers.
• Creating Business Model.
• Creating a 2 minute Presentation for Investors (optional, future purpose).
• On completion of Low Fidelity Prototype, try to sell it to identified Potential Customer.
• Draw a Conclusion from all the above process (Market Survey, Selling to Potential Customer)
• Are the potential customer willing to pay for the low fidelity prototype?
• Finally, writing down what would be the future plan of each individual.

We need to wrap up all these things in 8 hours and by the end of the session asking for the feedback on what are their views on this session and how can we improve it?

Let's see how we implement it and by when.