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Startup Saturday - The Story
What is the story behind the inception of SS ?
The genesis of Startup Saturday goes way back to Feb July 2007. We were a bunch of people organizing Barcamp Bangalore where among other things, a handful of startups used to demo their products. What we witnessed was, most of them that were not funded ended up shutting shop in less than 1 year. We wanted to do something about breaking this trend. We had a serial entrepreneur, a couple of corporate honchos, an IIMB professor and a bunch of hackers & designers. In our humble opinion we thought that startups
would benefit from getting a closed door feedback on their product. So we organized a small meeting where we invited a couple of startups to demo their product and asked them strong questions on the product, its positioning, market etc. It was very well received and so we did it again the next month. By month 3, we coined a name for this meeting "Startup Saturday".
What changes have you seen in Bangalore startup ecosystem in 6 years?
Entrepreneurship / Startups weren't buzzwords back then. The media didn't cover startup companies the way it does now. People used to build products without talking to customers (well that continues to happen now, but much less so).
Over the last six years, over 200 products have been demoed at Startup Saturday, this includes the likes of Flipkart in their pre funding days. In the initial days the pitches were mostly about the product. Now a days the pitches are more broad based, covering the "Problem", "Market", "Competition", "Barrier to Entry" etc. So we can say that the net maturity of people starting companies has gone up several notches. Earlier we were focusing mostly on the product, now we are focusing on the business holistically. There is much more emphasis on idea validation, measurement of KPIs and continuous customer validation these days then earlier. Seed funding was non existent.