GenXcellence!
This post is all about my interview with the Times Of India – Pune Mirror, the topic being Young Entrepreneurs of the City! Please read the full interview below…
Name: Rohan Suhas Dighe
Age: 24
Education: BE Computer Engineering, 2007
Company Name: Social Web Factory
Founded: 1st Feb 2008
Company Description/What does your company do?
Social web factory is a Pune based company focusing on delivering strategy and solutions for the emerging social application platforms. We provide our clients with a complete end-to-end solution from strategy formation to design, development, monetization and launch. Social Web Factory’s service offerings allows our clients to engage their brand/ideas with an ever increasing audience who are increasing on Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn as means to be in touch with friends, families and colleagues.
Short Description:
We build applications on social platforms like (orkut, facebook, myspace,iphone etc.)
Write the good news about your company. As in how well your company is doing, your better experiences with being a part of business, if you are hiring. If you have just begun, write about how exciting (or unexciting) it is…
We had 2 success stories in the lifetime of the company.
1)We worked for our client company on a project which won the “Best Social Application in Asia” for a competition organized by MySpace. Some of the other competitors were Korea, Japan, China.
2)Another success story is our own product called Housie on Orkut which we managed to bootstrap which has a traction of more than 11k users in less than 5months.
Also, we expanded our company from 1 person (just me working) to 8 people, moved to a bigger office and managed to get more 15 Top Indian clients in the very first year.
We have had all this bad news economically (the downturn here and recession in the west) it was said that startups would suffer the most. Tell us how has your company tackled the downturn. What are you doing differently and how. Do you feel dispirited, do you sometimes regret taking up entreprenuership so early in life. Or is it just another challenge that you have to deal with.
Well, the economic downturn was sudden and since our work depends totally on marketing budgets of client companies it was really difficult at start but the fact that indian people have a tendency to save money in case anything happens in the future and that is what saved us. We have not just managed to run the company but have implemented expansion plans during recession since the labour costs were cut down and we could hire more people.
The only thing we have observed during this phase “the economic slowdown” is sometimes the indian clients get too overprotective and too concerned about their budgets even if they are not necessarily affected by it.
Another strategy that i am using is “cut down all costs by 10% and all corrective measures will happen” – this line was said by Kishore Biyani in one of his interviews. I guess an idea in this stage to be competitive and to “sell your goods at 10% less amount”, if everyone starts to do this we will see the economy automatically correcting.
If you are just starting off as an entrepreneur, explain the thoughtprocess behind starting off during these times.
For a young entrepreneur who is starting now i would say “There is no correct time to start your business, jump in and things should fall in place, do not worry about recession since you are not the only one who is going through it”
Help from the city:
Well, i would like to mention Pune Open Coffee Club here who’s role has been quite influential in connecting startups like ours with experienced/seasoned entrepreneurs and giving us a platform to allow collaboration between companies in Pune.
