SLP Chennai : Week 2

Fellow Blog by Srinath Ranga Thanks for the great response on the first week's blog. The second week's session on September 27th was conducted at the MGM Eastwoods Resort on ECR Road and got underway with a quick game of 'know your fellow participants' and helped clear any identity confusions on name, product & company. Week Two was intended to give participants an understanding of the products & services being built or conceived by others with 30 minutes allocated per participant including Q & A. Getting this done early in the program will enable participants to guage what is happening around them and offer opportunities for collaboration & knowledge sharing. Good thinking on part of the SLP! Sabin Rodriguez, SLP Chennai Leader & past SLP Fellow was first off the block giving an overview of BigFday.com, a service for instantly finding the perfect venue for an event. Here is the complete list of Week Two presenters & my understanding of the challenges they face down the road. 1. Sekar Satagopan CEO, Golden Ray Analytics Product: Optima Collaborative cloud based admission management system to ease admission process for both students and educational institutions Status: Under development Challenge: Getting non IT savvy colleges & students on board. 2. Dhilip Chandran Founder, Travel Optimize Service: Travel & ticketing Guaranteed 7.07% savings in the travel budget of SMEs through a mix of proprietary algorithm and pre purchased inventory Status: Operational Challenge: Need to scale without increase in overheads and still pass on savings to customers. 3. Sandeep Founder & CEO, 9line.com Product: 9line Telehealth consultation - Helping connect patients via telephone with doctors, pharmacists and para medical personnel Status: Beta Challenge: Building a large network doctors & hospitals to try & test the system. 4. Anand Kumar Co-Founder & CEO,Theoandash.com Product: Theo&Ash Affordable & custom made leather jackets & accessories for the Indian & world market Status: Operational & also available at leading Indian online market places Challenge: Turn an unknown Indian brand into an International icon for custom leather jackets & accessories. 5. Thirukumaran M Founder, Prapanjam Product: Connected Hiring Intends to develop an end-to-end hiring platform that is truly open Status: Proof of Concept (POC) Challenge: Bringing together a wide range of applications in a fragmented industry with transparency & privacy concerns. 6. Nirmalkumar Sathiamurthi Founder, Insanelabs.in Product: Zenmob A lead management app that simplifies calling & note taking on leads Status: Operational and available for download Challenge: Scaling to non-construction verticals & competing with full featured CRM systems.  7. Srinath Ranga (me) Co-Founder & Principal Consultant, Ideyeah.com Product: opTEAMize Enables Operational and Delivery Heads of IT companies with decision support tools to select, estimate and quote for a project Status: Beta Challenge: Convincing IT companies of value of unifying data from disparate systems to improve resource utilization. 8. Sunil Kumar Chowdary Co-Founder & COO, Myfourwalls.com Product: Myfourwalls Interactive property portal that enables branding, marketing and sales of real estate offerings Status: Under development Challenge: Scaling to additional locations without sacrificing quality of service provided. 9. Praveen Kumar Co-Founder, Fego.in Product: Fego (Feedback & goals) Cloudbased employee performance management solution for SMBs with comprehensive suite of 360 degree feedback, goals and KRAs Status: Pilot Challenge: Bolstering marketing and sales as company is tech driven. 10. SS Unincorporated Product: TBD Clotheswap for younger female demographic (cannot provide more details!) Status: Ideation Challenge: Logistics, reverse logistics & addressing privacy concerns. 11. Ahshif Abdeen Founder, Koyyaka.com Product: Yoopush Instantly push text from laptop/pc/tablet to mobile Status: Beta Challenge: Build robustness into the product & developing a clearer value proposition for B2B/B2C users. The day ended with listing the various utilities, tools and applications used to manage tasks, support, issues, wireframing and other software development processes. Learning from the failings & successes of others is one of the tenets of any good learning programs and appreciate everybody for sharing information that could be potentially useful to others. There was some concern about traveling back due to the judgement on the Jayalalitha case, but thankfully everybody was able to reach home safely. Just another hiccup in the startup journey! The next session is on October 11th and will focus on go-to-marketing and product positioning amongst other things.