“O yes! I cracked IIT”, the happiness that is displayed on the face of the aspirant cannot be fathomed. Getting into one of the most premier and prestigious institutes of the nation, (Indian Institute of Technology) , has been the dream of lakhs of aspiring students throughout India. Students get into these institutes with a hope and vision to a prosperous and a loftier future. But more surprisingly, there are students who despite getting into these give a drop, facing all odds, just to follow the tune, that drives them towards the entrepreneurial journey, students who in the pursuit of following their passion do not care of their present status. Here are the journey of some of those, who in this pursuit landed really really successful in life.
News in Shorts
Within the boundary walls of an IIT’s campus, hardly do the students get time do something apart from their diurnal curriculum; lectures, seminars , projects and innovation is what drives the life of students there. Very exiguous numbers have the time to keep up with what’s going on around, other than the technological stuffs. And it is ought to be so. Owing to the tremendously assiduous schedule of students they hardly have the time to go through the lengthy and interminable columns in the newspapers, to get an idea about what’s going on next door. This was something that was flustering up the minds of Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Arunauv, two undergrads from IIT Delhi, pursuing their course in computer science and engineering. Imbibing knowledge from the professors in classrooms or the text books was something very monotonous, and they wanted to go somewhere way beyond it. They learnt that the lack of regular news was not only limited to them but was also contagious in the peers around. So they thought of solving the crisis and introduced a whole new concept of news reading that revolutionized the way of getting up to date with your surroundings. They dropped the college in their seventh semester and flashed the news with their “News in Shorts”. This is an iOs and android based application , that dishes out the common masses with little but significant information, without getting into exhaustive reading of two pages for a single flash. They claim to cast the nutshell within a word limit of 60 that too with little distortion in the information. Started with a Facebook page, “News in shorts”, have already received a funding of INR 25 Cr.
Housing.com
An undergraduate student at IIT Bombay, Rahul Yadav, the brain behind Housing.com, had dropped the college in his fourth year. When one day he and his friends were wandering around near the suburbs of their college, they realized the scarcity of houses for rents, and they pledged to solve this hitch. It was then, when an idea dawned upon the young minds, which gave birth to “Housing.com”, an online real estate marketing firm, then the one of its type in India. The start-up managed to raise its initial funding, an undisclosed amount, from the angel investors including ZishaanHayath, co-founder of Chaupaati Bazaar and former vice president at Future Bazaar and eventually landed collecting funds from other investors. It managed its portal in some of the major cities in India which included Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon and the response it received was gratifying. But things started changing a little by the time the company managed to collect Japanese funding. His vision was not standing at par with that of the other co-founders. He was thinking way ahead of time. Due to this mismatch of thoughts, he was forced to resign but his journey as an entrepreneur still stands undaunted.
Also read: Entrepreneurs who made it big before 20!
Frankly.me
Another brainstorming idea that has successfully planted its root across the nation; an idea that allows people to connect with different public figures has loomed out of the mind of yet another drop out from the premier institute of IIT Delhi, Abhishek Gupta. He together with Nikunj Jain co-founded “Frankly.me”. Apart from being a passionate coder, Abhishek dreams of increasing the average IQ of conversations over the Internet. The platform that frankly administers accords people to post a question and get them answered via recorded video selfies from celebrities and experts all around. This Delhi-based start-up has managed to raise an accretion of about $600k from Matrix Partners. Currently, the start-up has a crowd of about 25k registered users with a growth rate of around 1500 per day. More than 100 figures are already on the platform with Arvind Kejrival absolutely loving this platform. With the assent of several other Bollywood celebrities and cricket stars, they expect to have a rocket growth calling home many more new users per day. Prior to this, Abhishek Gupta was also the cofounder of “Zumbl” along with Saurabh Kumar, a chat based platform that connects you with people sharing common interests, to ensure meaningful and fun-filled conversations.With a clear vision of connecting people online, he wants to instill them with new and productive ideas.
Also Read: The story of Ritesh Agarwal
Retention.ai
Here’s the story of another genius,Amritanshu Anandwho in his pursuit of chasing his dream to be an entrepreneur did not look back while dropping IIT Kharagpur. Amritanshu Anandalong with his three other friends, Manan Shah, Abhimanyu Dikshit and Anshul Singhle centralized their focus on Beta Glide, a data analytics start-up, which eventually turned into “Retention.ai”. The idea of Beta Glide cropped up when the four friends were having a drink and amidst that they received a phone call, where they were asked to download an app for testing purpose and each download would pay them Rs.100. Beta Glide did not go down well, but the data base collected and the research work done for this was thorough. All they needed was a compelling for product and marketing team which brought forth “Retention.ai”. It serves as an online platform to allowing app developers and marketers to understand uninstalled users and study their behavior. With complete analysis of user behavior, the product begets its clients to be more proactive, figuring out which customers are likely to uninstall the apps and enabling the marketers to decide whether to retain the customer or not. They claim to have worked on more than 40 million devices till date and are looking forward towards a great and an aspiring future.
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