The 5th edition of the TiE Mumbai Smashup was a smashing success with a historic 900+ turnout of attendees and over 11 of India's biggest entrepreneur names, multiple accelators, VCs and Angel investors, recorded over the last 5 years! Following the mantra of “No big Boys, no VC’s making speeches and the no suits” code whole heartedly, the event regaled the audience with Start-ups tales, experiences and lessons from some of the most successful start-ups in the city.
Co-hosted by VC Karthic & Lavin Mirchandani, the theme for this year's SmashUp was 'The Journey of an Entrepreneur', with the panels centering around the actual life cycle of a startup, coupled with selected speakers to match the bill. To keep the entrepreneurial streak in you always on the go, one looked forward to a range of events from speed-dating the investors, panel discussions, start-up tales, educative workshops, awards session, interviews with accelerators and food trails. The legendary opening remark was given by Mr. Dhanpal Jhaveri,TiE Mumbai President and founder of Everstone Capital.
365 days of an entrepreneur: The first 365 days of an entrepreneur is the most crucial phase in the journey of an entrepreneur. This panel investigated what startups need to do right in the first critical 365 days of their existence by calling upon entrepreneurs who are new and have successfully passed their 'first year' test. Featured on this panel discussion were the founders of Taskbob - Aseem Khare, Diabeto - Shreekant Pawar and Coupon Dunia - Sameer Parwani (Sameer Parwani also won the SmashUp Award 4 years ago at the same forum).
Most Memorable Conclusion: Hardships may come and go, but the best advisors would be experienced entrepreneurs who have already been through through the process of starting their own venture, “Real life learnings from ex entrepreneurs helps a lot more than reading books.' - Aseem Khare”.
Creating new business categories: This session was presided over by the founder of Hola Chef - Saurabh Saxena, the founder of Truly Madly - Sachin Bhatia and the founder of Haptik - Aakrit Vaish as they helped with more insight on creating a new customer base with respect to their own businesses. For instance, Hola Chef is an online portal featuring dishes from different home-chefs in the city, hence tapping into a new database of customers who like to order home. The honesty of every entrepreneur caught the audience’s fancy. The Truly Madly digital campaign #breaking stereotypes aimed to showcase that love can dispel communal, economical, religion or status based stereotypes. They also launched a TVC concept aka Boy Browsing as a real and relatable phenomenon that they were certain will be loved by ladies across India
Most Memorable Conclusion: Connect with emotions of customers which will help spread the good word and considerably reduce your marketing cost - Saurabh Saxena
Scale, Sales and all that Jazz: This focused on start-ups that have just gone about raising money, including guidance on how one could scale their business venture further, presided by founder of OML - Vijay Nair, founder of OYO Rooms - Abhinav Sinha and founder of MyDentist - Vikram Vora. From hiring the right employees to building the right orientation with your customers, the entrepreneurs gave valuable insights on all the steps necessary to grown your start-up. "Mydentist is India's largest chain of dental clinics providing high quality & hi-tech dental care services at affordable prices. I had a stock of dental chairs & didn't know what to do with it so I started a dental clinic” said Vikram Vohra.
Most Memorable Conclusion: “Build the right perception, know your audience, hire fast, fire fast” – Vikram Vora.
The Real Exits: The last panel discussion was led by the founder of Freecharge - Kunal Shah and the founder of C-bay systems - V. Raman Kumar. The session focused on start-ups who ran their business, grew and nurtured it while eventually selling it to a big player. A relatively unknown name, V. Raman Kumar spoke about how he nurtured his company C- Bay systems for almost 9 years and sold it for a whopping 1.1 billion dollars whilst deeply emphasizing on market research being the key behind setting up any company. Kunal Shah believed “For start-ups, growth is the drug. If you’re not following your customer you’re redundant.”
Most Memorable Conclusion: The highlight of the discussion was Kunal Shah’s tips on building a start-up - Big Ass market, Smart ass team and kickass product. "Don't ask friends and family when you are taking feedback of your product, take offline feedback yourself,”
Speed dating investors:
A curated event where start-ups got a one on one opportunity to pitch their product to potential investors followed by a 1 minute question and answer session. Some of the investors who featured feature in this session are Nexus – Sandeep Singal, Matrix - Rajinder Balaram, Mayfield – Vishal Dixit & Sweta Tiwari, Nirvana - Rajan Mehr, CIO AngelNetwork - Sanjay Mehta & Bindia Maheshwari, LGTVP - Rajat Arora, Indian Angels & Mumbai Angels to name a few.
The accelerator sessions occurred through the course of the event allowing participants to get interviewed by the biggest minds in the world. Spinta, the first Silicon Valley Accelerator to have entered India was a part of this event interviewing participants, nurturing their ideas and providing viable solutions to grow their business. The others being, Chrysalis, ISDI and Edugild (India’s first Edtech accelarator).
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