Engineering Entrepreneurship

Building a successful start-up is an arduous task. It demands a lot out of anyone, both physically and mentally. Additionally, a good entrepreneur probably misses a high-paying job despite their great skills, while working in a small room. Therefore, they invest a lot in their venture if one accounts for the high opportunity cost. Although one might think that student start-ups have it easier, they have to be motivated enough to manage their time by running their start-up and studying whenever they can.

They might do this for any reason, ranging from pure passion to a possible future of great success. The harsh reality, though, is that most entrepreneurs don't see progress instantly. Their journey is full of twists and turns. The real world, after all, is brutal and never seems to favor us. So, with every the lustrous name like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, which seem to indicate that the ups are higher than anywhere else, there is a back story where the lows are also worse.

Facing these difficulties, learning from mistakes, working towards our goals is the only way forward and is an integral part of a successful start-up. Even after doing this and more, it might seem inadequate. In all this, we must not forget that persisting is the first step to success.

With that said, to help you understand these insanely motivated people, we bring you the story of a successfully progressing start-up, "NETSIPS."

Netsips is a start-up founded by our fellow BITSians Sayan Sahay and Kanishk Katara of the 2017 batch. It has stood in the top 50 out of 3000 start-ups that competed from all over India in Conquest, BITS-Pilani.

Netsips organizes our web bookmarks and ensures easy access to them. Their services are now available in the form of a web extension and a mobile application. The extension reminds you to revisit them by sending you an email that contains a pdf and text compilation of everything you have saved for later.

Sayan Sahay

Hi guys! I'm Sayan Sahay from the Chemical Engineering department of the 2017 batch.

Right from my first year, I always had this urge to become financially independent, which led me to dabble with a bunch of skills such as marketing, content writing, blogging, - you name it.

Luckily, I met a couple of seniors who were building their start-up and took me under their wing as an intern. I learned a lot from that experience, and that was my first exposure to what you call a 'start-up culture.' The process of brainstorming ideas and generating value for people was enthralling, and before I knew it, I wanted to start-up on my own.

Somewhere in my 2-1, I made my first serious attempt at starting up. I tried making a hyperlocal e-commerce platform that failed miserably, and that led to a lot of self-introspection. The learning was immense, but I quit anyway. In my third year, Kanishk and I started researching some basic problem statements that didn't require much capital to implement, unlike my start-up. After a lot of deliberation, we settled on our current idea of Netsips. It was a small yet annoying problem that we faced regularly, and we could see ourselves using the tool we had in mind. We ran some market surveys online and analyzed our findings. To our surprise, our seemingly trivial problem of managing web bookmarks was bothering many people apart from us. This reassurance that our problem was one that needed to be solved was the motivation to develop the first version of our product – or as they say- our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and soon we had it ready.

In March, we started developing our online presence while taking regular feedbacks from our pilot users. The product soon evolved from a primitive browser plugin to a full-fledged dashboard with multiple UI components. We entered a B-plan competition in June, where we cleared the first round with relative ease and qualified for the mentorship session. Though we didn't go all the way to the final round, we received invaluable feedback and earned a full-time mentor who believes in our product and is still engaged with us.

Right now, we are focusing on developing our product further and also gaining some traction in terms of users. Obviously, revenue forms a significant part of our product roadmap, but the focus is on earning a loyal userbase before anything else. As for the expenses, we're entirely bootstrapped and try to hack our ways into using free services as much as possible.

We have set a series of small milestones and try to fulfill them one step at a time. Some of them were – MVP launch, gaining the pilot users to test the application, participating in B-Plan competition and getting our product validated by experts, and redesigning the theme. Currently, we're looking forward to launching our mobile app.

Entrepreneurship culture in our college is good, but it isn't on par when compared to most tier-1 colleges. You can see people tinkering around with great ideas, but they don't take the first step towards implementing it. However, I genuinely feel that our current E-Cell is working hard to turn this around and will make this campus a place to be for young entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is an enriching experience in countless ways. It teaches you humility, brainstorming, problem-solving, managing finances, and lots of other things they won't teach you in lectures. Give it a shot, and I promise that you won't be disappointed. Take a problem statement that's bothering you. Throw away some ideas. Carve solutions out of those ideas and check their feasibility and implement it. There's no need to go big and try to reinvent the wheel.

Your product/service could be simple, but it should add some value to your user's life in any way possible. Also, do not chase after investment, be frugal at the beginning, and be as lean as possible. Even if you fail, it doesn't matter, the learning will still be with you, and you'll have an awesome story to tell. It's just about the first move. Make that move.

Kanishk Katara

Hi! I'm Kanishk Katara from the Electronics and communication engineering of the 2017 batch.

I always wanted to have a start-up even before I got into college. In my first year, I joined E-Cell and TBI student bodies. It helped me get to know the start-up culture and opportunities on our campus. I met many seniors who had been working on their start-up ventures, which added to my motivation and confidence. Since my first year, I discussed start-up ideas with my friends and seniors but never worked seriously on anything.

The idea of Netsips struck in November last year when I talked to Sayan Sahay about browser features and bookmarking while waiting for our order in ANC. The basic idea was to remind the users of their saved text content by emailing them a personalized magazine every week. We started working on the product in late January and built our MVP by mid-Feb. Since then, we have been continuously improving the product based on the feedback we get from the users. Our browser extension has drastically improved since then. Now Netsips has developed into a complete browser extension that lets you save and access your bookmarks from multiple devices and reminds you of your text content through an email newsletter and pdf magazine.

The lockdown and the pandemic have positively impacted us. Now we have a lot of time to work as the academic distractions have minimized. We expanded our team, added a whole lot of features, built our android app, started our Facebook, and Linked-in pages during this lockdown. Currently, we are a team of four. Apart from Sayan and I, Karan Kaul (2018 batch) is developing the android application, and Sonakshi Mishra (2019 batch) manages the social media pages and blogs. I would also like to mention Aryan Arora (2019 batch), who built the first version of our android application. These people supported us a lot, and I would like to thank them for their contributions.

Conquest 2020 (The B-Plan competition of Pilani campus) was the first time when we came out with our product. We got to interact with a lot of mentors, they gave us a lot of suggestions about the product and getting it out into the market, which helped us prioritize our short-term goals. Through Conquest, we connected to Mr. Arijit Banerjee (currently a growth product manager at Wynk Limited), who agreed to mentor us. Since then, he has been helping us in every aspect, be it design, marketing, features, or anything else. He has also been a strong moral support to us.

About the entrepreneurship culture in the campus, I would say it is better than ever. I know a lot of people who are working on their start-ups. We have a strong E-cell team this year, and they have put in a lot of effort to improve the start-up culture on campus.

For people who have any start-up idea, I have one suggestion: don't keep waiting and start working actively. Start with some market research, if it is a product, list down the features and start building. Take your idea to E-Cell and TBI, make the best use of linked-in by talking to people in that domain. That is all I have to say.

To have a great experience with Netsips, click on the below link.

www.tiny.cc/netsips

• Written by Rohit Kumar Gattu

• Editing Credits: Chetan Reddy Madadi