A start-up for start-ups

by Pranita Jonnalagedda 17:22 0 comments Features

“When I see an  interesting app or a product, especially if it’s by a Hyderabadi, I try to make the most of it.” 

- Ravi Korukonda

With increasing number of start-ups making Hyderabad their base, a growing trend of various business ventures is becoming more and more prevalent. From technology to art to food, everything is here and the most interesting thing about all these is that they have cropped up over the past four years. However, factors like political unrest have contributed to a failure of many of them. Also, for most such start-ups, in spite of a novel business idea, a competent working team and even the right kind of marketing strategy, survival is becoming difficult due to lack of buzz and that’s where Start-Up Hyderabad comes in.

So what do they do? Led by Ravi Korukonda, COO of Purple Talk Inc., (the mother company of Start-Up Hyderabad) they focus on promoting startups that show promise by “creating buzz to help them get global visibility”. Says Ravi, “When I see an interesting app or product, especially if it’s a creation by a Hyderabadi, I try to make the most of it. I have always been vocal about the need to encourage start-ups and have been doing that informally for long and I think this is just a formal way to go about the same now.”

Team Start-Up Hyderabad

Start-Up Hyderabad features unique, hip and happening businesses round town, by means of a blog and also a Facebook page. “When a business is featured on our website, it would be a promotion for them, and open gates to more people who will be able to know about the businesses. We have interesting write-ups about every business we feature on our site and sometimes we don’t even contact them and do it on our own, through some research.”

Also, this would be a way to cross-promote each other! “When we feature them, all their fans know about us, and that is an advantage for us, at the sometime they get recognition too.”

But there must be some criteria for selecting the featured businesses? “Not really! For us a start-up is something that is able to create an impact, a 100 billion dollar acquisition of something one that will generate a lot of jobs in a couple of years or is based on a unique concept. For now we have no criteria. We take everything as it comes.”

Interestingly their Facebook page has around 1,200 likes garnered in a span of three months. “People have liked our page either due to the businesses we have featured or due to being start-ups themselves,” Ravi adds.

The best thing about Start-up Hyderabad is that it isn’t a business model and Ravi says it will probably be like that for a while and adds, “I am taking out some time helping out other people. For now we haven’t thought of generating any revenue through this. But if we have to sustain it for long, it will have to become an independent business in itself and we will probably make a business model out of it then.”Having featured nearly 25 businesses so far, do they have a plan to make it a media outlet sometime? “You never know. We haven’t thought about that yet. But it could happen.”