Just Do It!
Just do it. Go on, put that idea that’s been lurking in your mind to action. Be a scrapper, and don’t worry about the naysayers. At the same time, do take feedback from your mentors, friends, beta testers, and be flexible enough to change course as the situation demands. Those will probably be the takeaways from today’s Start Up Saturday meet up in IIM-Bangalore. I came to know about SS (Start up Saturdays) during a pretty freewheeling conversation about ideas, innovation, entrepreneurs, and start ups. And I was pretty excited to be attending my frist SS meet up and it was well worth driving across the city to be a part of the meet up. So what I’m going to do is write about some of the lightning pitches that were presented and a little bit about the panel discussion that followed.
InterviewStreet
First up was Vivek Ravishankar presenting his Job Interview service InterviewStreet. InterviewStreet (@interviewstreet) targets mainly the fresh-graduate segment or students who’re applying for job interviews. It tries to help them prep up for the placement process by setting up mock interviews with people in the industry. Vivek said his USP was that they can get feedback and an accurate idea of where the bar (for a particular employer) is set, and where they stand and this will help them improve. InterviewStreet makes money by charging the students who register for the service – 350 bucks for a single interview session. I have two major gripes with this:
- First, I’m not sure students would be willing to cough up that amount for an interview session with different industry ‘experts’. Students would typically be having contacts (alumni, friends) in the industry who, if not conduct a mock interview, would be willing to share notes on how to prep up for the interview process, what to expect, etc.
- The second gripe is that I’m not sure that it doesn’t constitute a ‘conflict of interest’ for the interviewers who register with the site. The site would be paying them for the interviews and that’s like making money off your employer. Well, the employer is not going to be happy to know about that.
That aside, I think it’s a pretty novel concept and may be worth watching. I would like to see the concept evolve from just setting up interviews to may be a more customized offering for a student – feedback from the interviewer and tips to improve specific areas: not only technical areas but also soft-skills. The market that they’re targeting is pretty huge: about half a million students graduate out of college every year. Even if they convert a fraction of this base for starters they would be do pretty well!
SportsKeeda Home Page
Next up were Porush Jain and Robin Chabbra demoing their start up SportsKeeda - a group blog on sports. Porush and Robin are final year students at SIBM. Their aim is to be the go-to site for sports enthusiasts; where the contents comes from the enthusiasts themselves. A look at their website shows a lot of content contributed by different bloggers. I am not sure how they plan to monetize the blog – obviously advertising could be one way, but I guess there could be other (and more exciting) ways as well: how about selling event tickets? (I don’t know if that’s possible in India, but just thinking out aloud.) I guess sustainability is going to be the key here – I know from personal experience that writing regularly is easier said than done! I asked them during the Q&A round if they’ve explored the possibility of going local – or even hyper-local – and writing about university/club/state level sports events. One key thing that helps a sportsperson is getting recognition at the junior/state levels. May be they could have a “Featured Sportsperson” section every month. That would involve a lot of travel and meeting up and talking to people, but I guess that should be an interesting point.
To be continued …
You can stay up-to-date with SS (and other HeadStart news) by following @HeadStarters on twitter!
Update: Here’s the next post in the series.
Filed under: start ups, technology Tagged: | innovation, solutions, startups
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Amit,
Thanks for writing a review. What you have said about the concept is correct, but how it’s executed is slightly different.
Firstly, you would specify your domain expertise and conduct mock interviews based on the fields you have mentioned – Surely a question like ‘Reversing a linked-list’ can’t be owned by any firm
. You are basically trying to mentor him and not reveal any confidential issues
Added to that, as you would have seen, employers waste a lot of time in interviewing people who are not prepared since they don’t have a clue – my idea is to get these guys well prepared.
Secondly, if the concern is an employer getting money – not too sure, how strict/lenient it is, but definitely I could gift you landmark gift coupons how many ever times I want
. And there are so many people who earn a sizeable amount through Google AdSense on their blogs – not sure if companies worry about that?
Candidates side : couple of things
1. The network of alumni, friends, etc. you had mentioned are only for the students who are in Tier-1 type of colleges, what about the bright kid studying in Tier-2? – am sure he won’t have any access to distinguished alumni, etc. and standing true to it’s category – there are a lot of Tier-2 colleges >>> Tier-1
2. As far as the cost, we are introducing a package interviews session also, wherein a student can take 2-3 interviews at a reduced price. Whether they are willing to cough up (or) not, only time should tell and there lies the success/failure of the startup
. But as you would know a trip to Forum + PVR and a popcorn also costs Rs.350 for a student 
Cheers
Vivek
Hey Vivek,
thanks for the comment
you’re right about the students in Tier-II colleges/institutes; as I said in the post, the segment you’re trying to tap into is huge. the only thing (and I’m not trying to dissuade you here!) is how you’d reach those students. I mean how does a student in say … Palakkad (Kerala) know that s/he can avail of this? Probably you’re already figuring this out (if you haven’t already!), but just thought would raise the point.
About employer’s side, I didn’t mean the employee revealing confidential info (that’s out of question), but the fact remains that he’s getting this ‘reward’ (whether in cash or kind) _because_ of his position at the particular company. So not sure how they (companies) would look at it.
I guess you have a novel idea, how to make it reach the people is obviously the key. Good luck, again!