Monday, November 28, 2011

My Experiments with Entrepreneurship

About a year and a half back, after I graduated from CEDT, I started my journey on the path of Entrepreneurship. It started with various experiments with ideas. First idea that struck me while attending the Solar products exhibition in Hyderabad was that of making standalone Solar streetlamps. Of course this idea was shot down by my mentor with the reason that there are hundreds of people doing it. That was the first lesson I learned. If you are making something new then you should be either the first or best or different. And my first idea wasn't fitting in any of these and so it was better to leave it there.
With this newly found wisdom we (me and my team) started brain storming again, and realized that instead of entering into renewable energy generation domain, which needs considerable amount of capital, we can enter into the energy saving domain, going by the saying "saving is nothing but earning". 

After few months of market analysis and lots of surveying we finalised on the idea of energy efficient lighting and decided the first product to be energy efficient LED lamp for commercial buildings. We did a small customer survey as well and received a very good response. 

The next question was where to make the product? how to prototype it? where to test it? And a single answer to all these questions was Incubation centre. So we started applying for various incubation centres. Out of these IIMB's NSRCEL was the quickest to response. They called us for a meeting, where they evaluated our B-plan and gave a very valuable feedback. We fine tuned our B-plan accordingly. Meanwhile we realized that for a technology startup it's better if the incubation centre have some technical background and facilities and the best option was IISc Incubation Centre. 

Me being an IISc alumnus (which is also a necessary condition to apply to IISc incubation) applied for it. It took around 3 months to come to the final evaluation meeting. Finally the meeting happened and we got selected for it.

The incubation includes office space for 1 year, a small seed fund, technical support and mentoring needed. Its truly a great support that we got. But this is not a reason to rejoice, getting incubated is like receiving hall ticket for the exam, the real test begins now. 

If anyone from IISc or IISc alumni want to apply for Incubation the procedure is very simple. Go to SID office and submit your B plan and they will start the procedure.