Hottest Indian Startups In 2012 | Hacker News Reader

Hottest Indian Startups In 2012

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87 pointssooperman22 comments

Fusioncharts is 10 years old is it still considered a startup?

Add Komli and Visual Website Optimizer to the list.

Yep, it's hard to draw a line in the sand. We're 2.5 years old, profitable and happy. So don't know if we still qualify as a startup! :)

Question for people in the Indian startup scene -

It looks to me like the "acquire users first, figure out how to make money later" mindset does not fly in India in general. Would I be right in saying that such companies are a relative minority? How do Indian VCs respond to this mindset which is acceptable in silicon valley?

Yes. Such startups are a minority in India. Barring a few exceptions, VC money in India is available only for companies whose money making model is absolutely clear. That's why the startups that don't focus on making money early on, die out pretty soon.

Thanks. Any recent examples for the exceptions?

PS: Looking forward to this book - http://woodegg.com/in

Zomato, on that list, is a living example - http://zomato.com

Not necessarily - they've got branding deals going on, notably with CocaCola and distilleries. I'm sure restaurants also pay handsomely to be featured on the city homepages.

All those stupid Indians aren't even competing with me for making the next app for sharing niche musical tastes. What suckers!

A lot of that is also tied in with Indian culture - the youth here cannot afford to have the let's-try-and-it's-okay-if-we-fail attitude. By their early twenties men are usually expected to have steady jobs by which they can provide for a spouse and a family.

A lot of people do want to do startups, though - so they tend to gravitate towards ideas that provide a steady source of income, which will let them fulfil these obligations.

Early (and arranged) marriages, social pressure to be financially secure... there's a lot of reasons for this kind of attitude.

Not to mention that being 'educated' means having at least an undergraduate degree - so there are few dropouts. Leaving college to pursue a business idea is looked upon as an act of extreme idiocy and disgraces your parents / family too.

There are many more that normally haven't taken a deep marketing track (and that remains a challenge).

For example check out colama - http://www.colama.net - using VMs for college education; http://www.emee.co.in/ (note - this is my employer's product) - gamification of enterprise workflows, and http://www.kpoint.com/ - which allows you to record videos and embed them in the website (and often used in many conferences, for internal company presentation).

For people who can't access the website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Companies, with diversity in the culture would always win in the long term. Simply because these companies would be able to hire the best, from larger pool of candidates.

Great list of companies. IT is very heartening to see quality startups coming from India.

They are all useless startups. I just find Zomato and Ola as successful ones.

Have you even checked them out? I find Fusionchart and interviewstreet really good at what they do!

Fusionchart is not a startup. Interview Street on the other hand is really good. Forgot to mention that!

the site's consistently down, good thing there's Google cache

It's working now. Awesome list btw.

Dude you can hardly call companies like Komli and Visual Website Optimizer startups.

Can't speak for Komli, but VWO is certainly a startup. They grew from a single digit headcount very recently and didn't exist too long before.

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