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They were all there once again, a few new faces and few old ones; a select group of entrepreneurs who had gathered to share their experiences and learnings with the community. Indus Khaitan was as usual with a killing smile, energy and his dexterous ways, opening the event with a few minutes of discussion over Michael Jackson!

The speakers for the day were Jaya Jha along with Abhaya Agarwal from Pothi.com, Sitashwa Srivastava, Co-Founder, Creadivity and Nitin, Co-Founder, Chakpak.com. All the speakers were very open and the interactions further on proved to be very fruitful for all those present. The whole session was very interactive with nearly every member of the audience having asked or spoken something during the event.

Jaya who has a terrific academic record and has worked in a few top companies of the world including Google, says that she was never designed for a corporate job. Unable to derive work satisfaction over the past few years, her passion for books took the better of her and Pothi.com was born. She was joined by Abhay who left his PhD in between and landed in India from the US, reinforcing one of the startup madness acts of leaving your present pursuits to begin a startup. A good point to learn from them was to maintain a good communication standard with your customers and not be very informal all the time. It also came to light that for unique businesses, one need not have a huge online ad budget.

Sitashwa co-founded Creadivity after keeping it in mind for many years. He left Cognizant earlier this year to work full time on his venture, which provides a crowd sourcing platform for ad creatives. Creative designers need more and more exposure and freelance orders to showcase their talent. On the other hand there is no dearth of people and businesses looking out for some such really talented people to design things for them right from the logo to billboards. Creadivity makes both meet and does it at a price acceptable to either party. His talk brought to light that startups could outsource parts of their offerings or marketing efforts to agencies and also spread out to upcountry markets.

Nithin co-founded Chakpak.com along with Gaurav, who had confirmed as the third speaker for the event. Interactions with Nithin however went very well. They left Amazon in a very planned, phased manner and at a time when they were sure of getting some seed fund. Chakpak.com is a global community of Indian Cinema lovers. You can find nearly everything on Bollywood there. The primary source of revenue for Chakpak is advertisements. Nithin says that building a community and using new media is vital for a startup. Another unique point was that one need not be seriously very interested or knowledgeable about the subject of his business as long as he knows how to sell it and make the business work.

The discussion went on to acquiring customers and how one felt if they would have to exit etc. It had to be cut short as the closing time was nearing. Thanking all those who were present Indus assured everybody of an early announcement for the next event.