Get yourself Caricatured @ Dezains.com

Who says caricatures go hand in hand with only celebrities and political bigwigs? In keeping with the latest trend, personalized caricatures on coffee mugs, posters, T-shirts, and the like, are being bandied as gift ideas. Recognizing the potential of the idea, Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari decided to quit well-paying jobs to start Dezains Inc., a company that specializes in designing caricature-inspired products.

Dezains.com helps you get your photos, memories and celebrities in caricatured form on different articles including tee shirts, coffee mugs etc. The talented cartoonists at Dezains hand-draw caricatures based on your photos, and print them on t-shirts of your desired brand.

It’s really simple to place an order with them. You just have to browse your photo in order form, and put your details there. After that, you will get an option to choose t-shirt from some of the major brands including Killer, Wrangler, Lee, NumeroUno, etc.

The prices of all the items are published on their portal. Just fill in the details and they will send across the finished product within a span of few days. Dezains aims to offer the highest quality available, the fastest delivery times and the fairest prices.

Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari

Vatsa, a 25-year-old from Patna, and 24-year-old Kothari, who hails from Mumbai, have known each other since their engineering days at BITS Pilani. While Vatsa graduated in 2009, Kothari graduated in 2010. Both were expected to follow a career in engineering, but the duo was more interested in T-shirt designing.

However, they knew that the market was oversaturated. Says Kothari: "Customized printed tees is available dime a dozen, so it would have been hard to capitalize on these. Moreover, it's difficult to personalize each product."

The product differentiator was staring them in the face. Vatsa's elder brother, Amrit, had been designing caricatures for free on his blog, but it was Vatsa, who was working with a coaching center in Mumbai at the time, recognized its potential. “We didn't quit our jobs immediately as we wanted to save as much as possible for the start-up," says Kothari. The buffer time also served another important purpose-test-proofing the concept.

Dezains officially launched in August, 2011 and with a little buzz created pre-launch, Dezains saw 1600 visitors on the first day. They have been growing steadily ever since and process 25-30 orders each day now. Having served over 3000 customers by now, Dezains employs 3 fulltime and 6 part-time caricature artists. Dezains has a huge fan base in the online space with more than 50,000 fans on the Facebook page. They have also teamed up with seal sites like Groupon and Anapdeal to accelerate sales.

Gharpay.in : Helping e-commerce Vendors with Cash On Delivery (CoD)

What is India’s favorite payment method? Cash, of course. In fact 80% of Indian e-commerce is driven by the cash-on-delivery (COD) model. A big proportion of the country’s consuming population has the money and a wishlist to buy products through the internet but do not have the means to strike the transaction. Hyderabad-based start-up Gharpay handles CoD for retailers (mostly online but also some offline). It essentially offers a cash payment collection network from the customer’s doorstep to retailers.

Users buying, say, a mobile handset from an e-commerce site, choose the CoD option. Once the transaction is confirmed, a Gharpay executive arrives to collect the cash. He has the invoice printed out and collects the amount. The mobile arrives later, either by the delivery employees of the e-commerce site or courier executives. The typical amount collected by a Gharpay agent is Rs 1,800. Gharpay is not a logistics provider and hence does not bring you the handset before collecting cash.

“The reactions to our start-up range from astonishment to surprise to delight in the fact that finally somebody is doing what we do. Online companies are delighted we are addressing their problem with offline payments,” says Arpit Mohan, co-founder and CTO, Gharpay.

In October 2010, ex-BITS Pilani students Arpit Mohan and Abhishek Nayak (now CEO) were discussing the sudden growth of e-commerce in India when they came across the issues in payments. Considering that there are just 200 million plastic cards in India today, they wondered what happens to those customers who don’t have credit cards. Mohan and Nayak hired a payment executive and set up Gharpay in Hyderabad in January 2011. “The company literally started on a motorbike,” says Mohan.

Three months later, more batch mates from BITS-Pilani, joined the firm. Gharpay began by delivering tickets and collecting cash for Redbus.in, a fast rising online bus ticketing provider. In March, Gharpay started exploring offline retail market for CoD and soon bagged Chennai-based Nathella Jewelry as a client.

Gharpay today collects cash from customers at their doorstep in 550 postal codes across 7 cities in India and they’re practically the only organized player in the fray servicing cash payments, in a Rs.50000 crore e-commerce market that’s struggling to get people to pay online. The offline market includes attractive segments like cash payments for classifieds (QuackQuack, a matrimonial classifieds player, is a Gharpay customer), insurance, magazine subscriptions, educational material, etc.

The main issue for an e-commerce company is keeping track of the package. Until it is shipped, you have visibility but after that, there is no information coming forth. But the quality of courier companies is improving day by day as they address the challenges facing e-commerce in India. With there being no legal limit on how much cash can be collected, Gharpay’s cash collectors often find themselves ferrying large amounts of money. “We once had an NRI buying a tour package for Rs.1.8 lakhs and preferring to pay by cash. For sums larger than Rs.25000, we ensure that we collect a copy of the person’s PAN card. We handle at least one such transaction every day”, says Arpit.

Broach the topic of ambition and their self-assuredness wafts like a breath of fresh air. “We want to be the largest player in the payments market and today, cash is the biggest thing. Tomorrow, if cards become larger, we’ll probably go after that in some way. But right now, cash it is”, says Abhishek. “China has over 2.2 billion plastic cards for payment while India has about 100 million which work online. But even in China, 50-60% of them are still paying offline.”

In a market where the confidence that goods bought online will be delivered is increasing rapidly, cash transactions are seen as the bridge to the next level of trust. Under such circumstances, Gharpay is a startup to watch out for. The opportunity is large, the team is strong, the problem is interesting and the execution seems to have taken off.

redBus.in : A truly simple online bus ticket booking service

Bus tickets? Really? It sounds less niche/weird when you know that buses are Indians' preferred mode of mass transit. No matter which way you slice it, making bus travel easy for over a billion people is a huge market, and Redbus.in is grabbing it.

                                       
Gone are the days when starting a business needed religious planning, enormous capital and large infrastructure. In the present “knowledge economy”, all you need is your brain and fertile ideas, especially in the IT industry. Entry barriers are at an all-time low and starting a business has never been as simple as now. Only your core functions have to be your own. Everything else, starting from your front desk to your backend IT system, can be outsourced. You don’t need large capital investment; sustained operational expenditure will take care of your near future.

"redBus is founded by 3 of us. Sudhakar, Charan and me.
Sudhakar – 26, B.E (Hons) EEE from BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs exp. at IBM, Bangalore.
Charan – 27, B.E(Hons.) EEE, M.Sc (Hons) Physics from BITS-Pilani, 3 yrs exp. at Honeywell, Bangalore.
Phani – 27, B.E(Hons) EEE from BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs at Texas Instruments, Bangalore.

 The only guiding light was a compelling idea and enthusiasm,” says Phanindra Sama, chief executive officer of Pilani Soft Labs, the promoter of redBus.in. “ When the idea had sprung and we decided to move on. We bought books and learnt how to code,” he quips.


Started modestly in August 2006 with a few seats from one bus operator, redBus today is one of the most successful online bus ticket booking agencies. Today, it has 700 bus operators, 10,000 buses listed on it, works in 15 states and sells around 5,000 tickets every day. They started with Rs 500,000 which was the savings of the three of them. One room of the house where they stayed was their office. In the morning they would keep the other parts closed so that the room looked like an office.


redBus is India’s first organized bus ticket booking service. With services in 15 states, sales offices in 6 locations and daily departures in 2800 routes, They are India’s largest aggregator of bus tickets.
Below are their USPs :

1. Customers can choose their seat – facility which is unique: none of airliners / railways offer this facility.
2. Customers can book return tickets – facility not available at the traditional brick and mortar agents.
3. Multiple bus operators.
4. Standard fares.

The company is often cited as the most successful startups to have leveraged latest technologies and newer business models to the fullest extent. It started by developing applications on the cloud, created the prototype for its backend application, showcased them to prospective customers and eventually scaled and moved all of its applications to the cloud. Right now, almost all of redBus’ IT infrastructure including its customer-facing portal is handled by Amazon Web Services (AWS).


Bangalore-based Pilani Soft Labs, makers of redBus has raised $6 million in Series C funding from existing investors Helion Venture Partners, Inventus Capital and Seedfund. This takes the total venture capital raised by the company to $9.5 million. Seedfund, which seed funded the company in 2008, remains the largest shareholder, said executive director Anand Lunia, confirming the deal.