A Start-Up in50Hrs
“A Start-up in 50 Hrs? Are you kidding me?” was my response
to Mitesh when he first asked me to be his “Date” for the event. After a lot of
cajoling and convincing I agreed to accompany him to the event even though I
wasn’t sure if its worth giving up a weekend on something which is impossible. Towards
the end of this blog I am going to sheepishly admit that it is very much
possible to have , in the least, a skeleton of the startup ready with few vital
organs and a mini brain developed within these 50 hours.
All the way driving to the venue which was ThoughtWorks, I
cursed Mitesh for taking me to a boring seminar with professionals in suits and
briefcase giving long lectures on Globalizations, business opportunity,
emerging markets, role of youth blah blah blah… and also for bad driving.
I enter ThoughtWorks office at 5.30pm and was a bit
disoriented for first few seconds when I saw a TT Table bang in the middle of the
development center(as the jargon goes) and the techies in three-Fourths
dribbling a football while discussing a specific issue in their code that they
were dealing with. My eyes lit up thinking about yet another opportunity for
picking at Mitesh, this time for taking me to a wrong venue. To my
disappointment that was not the case. Welcome to ThoughtWorks culture.
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ThoughtWorks welcomes us |
I entered the room where the event, in50Hrs, would commence
shortly. We began with the regular introduction session which was not really
that regular. Folks here were techies, Mechanical engineers, marketing
professional and not to forget College goers. They were all full of
ideas for the next business venture. I admit that I am neither a real techie,
nor a designer nor do I have a great idea and thus was quite self conscious of
my presence in the room that smelled of brilliance.
Why do startups fail? Vijay quotes his mentor, “Birds fly,
fishes swim, start-ups fail… Success with startups is not a norm, it’s a
miracle.” He explains that the biggest problem with the aspiring entrepreneurs
is that they want to make it big in the very first attempt, not realizing that
entrepreneurship is a lifelong endeavor of building a top class product that is
“YOU”.
Vijay introduced us to our Mentors who would guide us with
our task of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by the end of those 50
Hours. These mentors have “been there, done that”, failed, failed better and
then succeeded. Their success won’t help us in our assignment as much as their
failures.
Day1 was marked by the hustle-bustle of future entrepreneurs
ready to pitch their ideas hoping to rope in techies, designers, business
analyst to form a team that could help them ,develop a working prototype which
will be demoed on day2. 8 of 12 pitching would be accepted based on the number
of votes each pitch received from the competing pitches.
Ideas came flowing right from our favorite and most
exploited area : “Carpooling” , to the
most unheard of : On the go-Cross platform Digital data transfer across
different platforms, in between covering Recruitment platform, Social Marketplace,
Entrepreneur consultancy platform, and the list goes on.


I jumped into the Carpooling band-wagon as I could relate to it to a greater extent. It aches in our guts to see a lineup of vehicles, cars, to be more specific, with just one person inside, creating a havoc of the traffic. We came up with a carpool system which surpasses the existing systems leveraging on “Flexibility” for car owner as well as the ride requester. A mobile application(android) that enables both the participants to find each other in real time, picking up rides anywhere along the route without much preplanning and obligation. Also offering a convenient and safe feature for the driver based on voice recognition, to accept requests while he is driving.
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Mitesh with Mentor Akash |
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Carpool Team (Left to Right): Aditya,Atul and Akshay |