While I get to meet with a lot of founders at events, it\u2019s hard to make meaningful connections and conversations, as there are so many of them. And after a long time, I\u2019m traveling to emerging cities, meeting founders there, having conversations with them about their business, and understanding them better.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a chronicle of my journey and the interesting founders I met in these three cities.<\/p>\n
Every city has a host for SaaSBoomi Social and the host for Bhopal is Nemesh<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Appointy<\/a>, one of the most successful bootstrapped companies in the city.<\/p>\n Nemesh founded Appointy in 2008 as a web services company and now he is helping entrepreneurs in Bhopal to learn from his mistakes by sharing his learnings. The government of Bhopal is very supportive of the startup ecosystem as well, and there are commendable initiatives being done to help the startups.<\/p>\n Appointy has also developed a low-code SaaS development platform that can be used to build, deploy, and scale complex SaaS applications. In a short while, I will be getting to see the 4-acre campus that they are setting up \u2014 he seems excited about this latest project that he has been leading for some time now. His co-founder Sarang has been a big support in his journey.<\/p>\n Thanks to Nemesh, I got to meet some really interesting founders and what they have been up to. Some of them are disrupting big startups from here. So let me start by giving a brief about each company:<\/p>\n I will be heading to Indore today in the afternoon and Nemesh will be driving there.<\/p>\n Clicked this from my morning walk in Bhopal<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> We drove down from Bhopal to Indore next. It took us almost three hours, during which I got to hear some interesting stories from Nemesh on how he has been building Appointy for the last 12+ years. Hopefully, I will get to write another GritStory about Appointy.<\/p>\n So, my host for Indore is\u00a0Mayank Pratap Singh<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Aditi Charausia<\/a>, co-founders of\u00a0EngineerBabu<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0SuperSourcing<\/a>. Mayank is an amazing community builder, and I loved the hustle and the energy that he demonstrates. He is never on time \ud83d\ude42 but makes up for it with fascinating stories and multi-tasking.<\/p>\n With some of the founders in Indore<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> The first dinner meeting was with a group of scaled founders, who shared inspiring stories on what it took to build their startup from Indore. Since most of the information shared was confidential, I won\u2019t be able to share much of it here. The founders who have built those brilliant companies are:<\/p>\n The next morning, Mayank picked me up and took me to a place called\u00a0Chappan Dukaan<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 (56 shops). It\u2019s an incredible food joint with great food from Indore, where I got to know that 90% of the folks from Indore have Poha.<\/p>\n This is the place where you get some amazing snacks in Indore. Chappan Dukkan!<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> They are planning to make Indore a 24\/7 city and it seems like the government is very proactive and is playing an active role in shaping the startup culture<\/a>. I missed going to the market which is open at night, and I learned that it was set up to ensure that the shops actually sell gold and this was one way to provide them security doing night.<\/p>\n I got to meet around 18\u201320 startups who came to meet me. The event was at Social and completely organized by Aditi and supported by Mayank. I shared a few insights about entrepreneurship<\/a> and my background. Each startup then shared what they are building, where they can help and where they are looking for help.<\/p>\n With amazing founders in Indore<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> The best part was that there were many women founders who joined the meet-up. I also got to meet\u00a0Pushpendra<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Msg91<\/a>, again a hidden bootstrapped startup from Indore. I will soon bring out their story. It seems like he has been hiding for a long time.<\/p>\n At the railway station \ud83d\ude42<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> Later, Mayank and Aditi hosted me and Gaurav from Bingage, and we also managed to get some time to drop by a beautiful cafe called Mitthi which had been set up by Pushpendra from MSG91. After some wonderful chai and a return gift, Gaurav and I left for the railway station to go to my next destination, Surat. I hope to reach around 2:30 am in the morning and looking forward to seeing some fantastic founders out there. This is been written from the train and now the Airtel network seems to be quite stable from Indore to Surat.<\/p>\n We reached Surat around 2:30 am and managed to get some sleep as the next day was going to be hectic. It also started with a delicious breakfast hosted by Kalpesh and Ankit from Suvit. They showed me around the city, and bragged about Surat being #2 in cleanliness and that it is also called the city of bridges \u2014 something that I actually got to experience. The food in Surat is probably the best in the country and one must make sure to have it in their lifetime.<\/p>\n This signage is something that you will see right across the city<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> I reached the office where\u00a0Vishal<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Dhiwise<\/a>\u00a0was eager to host me and he had lined up meetings with startups from 11 am to 5:30 pm, with just a 30-minute break in between.<\/p>\n Apart from hosting this event in Surat, Vishal has been playing the role of bringing more and more startups to the SaaSBOOMi community and making sure we start initiating a few sessions and playbooks in Surat. Vishal is also clearly the most respected leader and founder in the Surat ecosystem.<\/p>\n Ritesh Arora of\u00a0BrowserStack<\/a>\u00a0also hails from Surat and the other company which came out of Ahmedabad was\u00a0Hubilo<\/a>\u00a0which is in the event management space.\u00a0Naman<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Refrens<\/a>, also one of the most thoughtful product people, is based out of Surat and is now building his next startup from Surat.<\/p>\n Amazing breakfast place at Surat<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> Some of the founders that I met in Surat are:<\/p>\n The SaaSBOOMi Social at Surat – we had close to 100\u2013120 founders here<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> I did get to meet around 30\u201335 founder\/startups in the evening where they talked about their products. One of them that stood out was Stitchmax which has built software for embroidery and has also one competition globally.<\/p>\n RoyalPOS<\/a> is POS software with 800 customers globally. In the logistics space, I met a very interesting company and they apparently are doing some amazing work with 15 customers and their solution integrates with companies like Fareye, etc. Some amazing conversations and we had close to 80\u2013100 people who came for the SaaSBoomi social.<\/p>\n With Nischit and Shreya from Firecamp<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div> In the morning, I had Shreya & Nischit from\u00a0Firecamp<\/a> who came to drop me at the airport and they talked about their product to me. It was in the API space and something better than what Postman is building. I didn\u2019t understand much, but with their passion and energy, I knew they were onto something big.<\/p>\n That was almost the end of the trip, had amazing fun, got to learn a lot about what startups are up to, and also loved their sheer passion for building something. Just reassures us that we are on our way to building some awesome global products from India and young India is all about entrepreneurship<\/a>. Here are some learnings and insights from my trip.<\/p>\n If you are someone, who enjoyed reading the above and wants to contribute towards the emerging eco-system like Surat, Indore, or Bhopal, do ping me. If you want to be connected with one of the entrepreneurs, please ping me and I shall connect.<\/p>\n If you are a VC, you can always make a trip to one of these cities and help do a workshop on VC101\u2026..there is a lot to be shared with the audience.<\/p>\n Thank you all who help in putting the above trip together.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dev.matsio.com\/matsio\/saasboomi\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Blog.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBhopal (17\u201318th May \u201822)<\/h2>\n
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\n(Thanks to Vibhu for the notes)<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/miro.medium.com\/max\/1400\/1*Fo10wpL_cRNbtnedqDXKdg.jpeg\")
Indore (18\u201319th May \u201822)<\/h2>\n
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Surat (20\u201321st May \u201822)<\/h2>\n
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Some learnings and observations from the trip \ud83d\ude42<\/strong><\/h2>\n