Highlights of DHI Lab’s Impact Chapter Startup Challenge 2016

The two-day event with 200 startups, 50+ speakers, and attendees that included investors from over 20 countries was a “must be present” for startups. Apart from the startups, attendees, and investors the speakers caught the audience pulse right away.

Among speakers, Jon Woodroof, Samer Karam, Oscar Kneppers, and Shradha Sharma moved the audience with their words and experience.

Jon WoodRoof, founder of Twotone gave 20 tips for start-ups to manage customer leads and communications. He spoke about importance of social communication and also gave insights about the tools he used to engage the customer or prospect interactions.

He highlighted the use of tools like

• com for creating email list from LinkedIn.
• Use of canned responses from Gmail
• com to engage customers about your recent PR activities
• com for task management
• Interesting part is how he used Instagram for sales by #tagging and right contacts.

Samer Karam, Chairman of Startup Megaphone explained audience the importance of PR to startups from their inception. While emphasizing startups to target global audience he said, “the world is where we can be great”. Last but not the least Samer says all startups should have two best friends, a lawyer and an accountant. These two people are guardian angels to startups because they help with monetary issues and legal matters that arise in various countries.

Oscar Kneppers, CEO of Rockstart accelerator asked startups to first join accelerator program to test their product in the market, makes necessary changes a million times before going to a VC. Mentors are very much needed for startups to guide them in the right path for success.

Oscar along with Sameer told the audience that India is the right place for startups as this country has money, experience, volume, and traders. Oscar later gave a video statement to IndianCEO audience.

Woman entrepreneur, founder & CEO of YourStory.com, Shradha Sharma was the perfect key to end the keynote speeches. She told her story of starting YourStory.com and spoke on why it is important for YourStory to talk about failures apart from just success and big companies.

She also says that life cannot be taken very seriously and this will hurt you especially in startups. Having sense of humor is best way to ward of stress from your life. She talked about the strength of Indian startup and the opportunity that is set to rise in a big way. Even she spoke about how British delegation came to India with prince William to invest in start-ups.

While she agrees that there is a money crunch in India, but there are close to 1Billion USD investments. She believes that this is the time when best start-ups will sustain and remain forever. While funds are needed to grow, entrepreneur should learn how to bootstrap their startup to success.

Answering a question asked by audience about why we are not able to find very deep technologies like Israeli startup in India. She says the deep technologies need deeper pockets and investors are not ready for it.

Get In The Ring finals followed this session where Nukkad Shops from Hyderabad grabbed the title.