The Story of Anirudh Gupta

Founded by Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdoh, Tripoto brings together travellers from around the world to share and discover real, and actionable crowd-sourced travel stories. The startup maps every single destination in the story, along with the associated content and pictures.

In his earlier stint, Gupta was part of the founding team of Notion Ink, and also worked for Rocket Internet as an Entrepreneur in Residence (Middle East). For Lyngdoh, it’s his second startup; earlier, he founded HST Operations (now known as HST Solar), which raised its first round of funding from HBS alumni.

Major features of Tripoto

All the itineraries are and will be by real travellers. A travel itinerary tied to a traveller profile provides additional information, such as the nature and interest of the traveller. It adds to the authenticity of the content. Further, people can connect with these travellers and ask questions related to their trips. The startup maps every single destination with its associated photograph and content, as content and reviews are still very poorly tied to destinations (especially in the developing world).

While it’s easy to find 100 trips on Agra (offering the same tours), offbeat destinations in the developing world (specifically Asia which is their focus market) have not been mapped and documented properly. “We aim to map every single destination and get credible information about it from real travelers. People’s desire to travel to offbeat places has increased exponentially in India and they are no longer satisfied with the usual ‘Agra tours’ or ‘Golden Triangle’ tours. They are constantly looking for inspiring experiences,” says Gupta.

Early days of Tripoto

The duo met in a business school (ISB, Hyderabad) and discussed the idea there. “I think business schools are a great place to meet your co-founder as you can find people with different backgrounds and interests on the campus,” adds Lyngdoh. The idea was there in their minds for quite some time but they didn’t seriously start executing it until a few months back, when the duo decided to move into the venture full-time.

On building team

It is incredibly hard to build a decent technology team in India and this is something that many entrepreneurs don’t realise, says Gupta. Good talent is locked in big companies, or is very hard to find, bad talent is abundant but getting them on board is suicidal for any company. “We faced a lot of challenge in building the technology team and invested a lot of time to get good people on board,” adds Gupta.

Initially, when hiring, the advice that the duo received was to use IIT and ISB brand name to hire. It might seem like a good strategy but they realized the futility of it very soon. “Good candidates care little about such tags in the real world. In the end it’s what you are building that matters more than which brand you belong to,” says Lyngdoh.

Traction and motivation for being an entrepreneur

Currently, Tripoto has around 100 itineraries that have been shared by travellers with an average of 8-9 page views per visitor. “We hope to reach a target 1000 actionable itineraries in the next 3 months, with a strong focus on Asia,” says Lyngdoh.

“If you are passionate about the space you are working in and solving an exciting problem with a good team then it’s a no-brainer,” says Gupta. High salaries and the perks that are associated with b-school graduates don’t seem to matter at all once you get the priorities right, adds Lyngdoh.

Challenges and road ahead

The biggest challenge for Tripoto is to expand the base of content creators, to have a steady number of good quality trips flowing in every day. “Adoption of new platforms is slow and we have to expand quickly and find a good number of early adopters,” says Gupta. Besides, there is a huge chunk of interesting content and photographs, offline (especially in India and the developing world), and aggregating and digitizing of this offline content is a big task, adds Gupta.

“We will also add gamification features to encourage sharing of travel content along with independent guide segment to offer travelers a choice to directly book tours from these guides through Tripoto,” concludes Gupta.

Source : http://yourstory.in/2013/10/tripoto-travel-startup/

The Story of Anaka Narayanan

Anaka Narayanan studied Economics at a small liberal arts college called Reed College in Portland, Oregon (US), more than a decade ago. She was interested in development economics and all her internships up until then were related to education and rural development in India. But circumstances were such that she ended up working at an economic analysis firm (NERA) in New York city after college.

“I wasn’t passionate about the work I did there (class action lawsuits), but I loved the city. I was earning a salary for the first time, and I started taking more effort over the way I dressed,” remembers Ananka. This was the Summer of 2004. It was during this time that she thought about starting a fashion label. The idea began more out of personal necessity. “When I went shopping in New York I saw a lot of silhouettes that I liked, and I admired the clean lines and neat tailoring. However, I longed to see those silhouettes in hand-crafted and hand-woven fabrics that I was familiar with,” says Anaka.

Ananka also had a history with retail. Her mother co-founded a sari retail store when Anaka was born. Her mother’s taste in handwoven, block-printed and ikat sarees influenced Anaka’s taste in textiles and fashion. “When I made trips to Chennai while I was working in New York, I was disappointed that I couldn’t find affordable brands that used Indian textiles on modern silhouettes,” says Anaka. Everything she found seemed loose and shapeless- far from the fashion-forward silhouettes she saw in New York. She felt there had to be a strong need for what she was looking for and thus was born Brass Tacks which means coming back to the basics.

She moved back to Chennai in the Summer of 2006 and started her own fashion label. She intended to find a designer partner and take's care of the business side herself but on advice of a friend, she took up designing and is now in a position where she wants to focus only on the design side. But she has managed to both over the last six years and currently manages a team of 25 that run Brass Tacks.

Brass Tacks has a blossomed retail outlet in Chennai and plan to open one more in the next six months. They retail out of boutiques in Goa and Bangalore along with an online store which pushes their sales. “The business is now at a stage where we have to expand. Aside from growing the online store, I’m thinking of starting another line that has more flowing, draped silhouettes. We’re also going to experiment with men’s shirts,” says Anaka.

This season, the Brass Tacks team has gone back to its core philosophy: translating hand- crafted textiles into cosmopolitan silhouettes. The difference is that in this collection there’s a stronger emphasis on the textiles and the craft of making the textile itself. The garments in this collection are, therefore, a mere interpretation of these textile crafts for an urban audience.

Source : http://yourstory.in/2013/10/brass-tacks-anaka-narayanan/