Have an idea, have the energy, but do not have the experience and the money... do not fret; help is now available. Here is how Picsquare got started.

There has been enough complaining about the lack of a conducive eco-system for early stage entrepreneurs. Things are slowly but surely changing. TiE Bangalore recently selected Picsqaure for incubation for its Entrepreneur Acceleration Programme (EAP). "This is our attempt to kick start the early stage (seed/ angel stage) investment ecosystem in India", says  Nishant Malhotra- Programme Director TiE-EAP. "We want to increase the number and the quality of early stage startups in India."

Picsquare was the first company to be selected through three rounds of evaluation by successful entrepreneurs, industry leaders and venture capitalists. Nishanth Malhotra adds, "We looked at all the usual criteria that a VC would look at - management team, growth prospects/ market opportunity, quality of the business idea, etc. The #1 criterion that we considered in this case was VC fundability. I.e., is Picquare the type of company that could attract series A VC funding in 12-18 months? Our answer was, yes. We were impressed first with the management team and the clarity of their ideas. Second, Picsquare is following a proven business model in a market that is ready for their services."

"Picsquare caters to the Photography Related needs of people from India" says Manish Agrawal (26) Founder of Picsquare. The idea came when in the US he struggled to send photos to his family in India. His parents prefered prints to seeing it on the computer. A real pain no doubt and that is what a start up needs to address.

Manish and his partner Kartik Jain (24) boot strapped since July 2005, working from their home and using their savings to get them through. They were flat mates before they started this venture and knew each other as hostel mates at IIT Bombay. They zeroed in on this idea because it had an "India Focus", and India is happening, this idea uses the Internet and Indians have growing spending power, and there was this huge unserved market; the NRI community which wanted to send picture prints back home. They are the first to admit that the idea is not new; in the US you have SnapFish, Yahoo Photo and the hugely popular Flikr. But all of them focus on the US market and not on India and that is something that Picsquare focuses on. So if you are in the US you can upload your pictures onto Picsquare, and ask for prints to be delivered to folks back home, just for Rs.4.50/-  per print plus Rs.36 for courier charges.

The work on this was completely done by the Founding duo, no sweat they say both of us are engineers and they used opensource technology to cut down on costs. Picsquare.com has a library of over 57,000 images, which the user community has posted since it launched in December last.

Both Agrawal and Jain resigned from corporate jobs to start the venture. Was it risky? "Really no risk is involved" they say. "We have foregone our salary for one year, but then the things we have learnt in this period we have not in our entire career." Taking business decisions, networking with people, understanding how to do business are some of the valuable learning the duo feel that they gained. "We are a lot more valuable to the job market today than we were earlier. So no real risk at all."  One thing admirable about this founding team is the way they conserved cash and used a lot of smarts for marketing. They used "Guerrilla Marketing". They broadcast about Picsquare to their IIT friends and their alumni networks; people who were staying in the US, slowly the word spread and soon they were featured in magazines read by NRIs. Momemtum started building. They do take experienced advice seriously and to their credit they have roped in Shripati Acharya who co-founded Snapfish into their advisory board and later as an investor.   Their other investors are Sanjay Swamy COO of mCHQ, and Vijay Iyer VP-Marketing of  Portal Software. The duo find them very supportive, "Not like typical investors who might be very money focused. They are like mentors and are focused on how to grow the business. For us it is good to have someone whom we are answerable to, it brings some amount of discipline."

Happy clicking and printing to these two budding entrepreneurs, and hats off to  TiE for doing some serious work in furthering the cause of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The author is Chief Catalyst of Businessgyan. He is an alumni of IIT-M, IIM-B.  His areas of interest include business strategy & innovation. E mail : This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Issue BG64 July06

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