My startup journey started roughly between 2014-2016. Around this time, India had witnessed a boom in the startup culture, but the smaller cities were yet to see the spurt in innovation and private investment from entrepreneurs. Tier II and III cities had ample resources but the requirements for the services differed from that of the metros. It was difficult to identify and service the needs of the people from these cities. The entrepreneurship scenario in Assam was not promising, then and hence I too faced many challenges while working on my first startup here.
Startup Assam birthed in January 2015 after seeing this gap and opportunity. I along with a few like minded entrepreneurs decided to form Startup Assam – an initiative that was envisaged to make Guwahati the next startup capital of India. To be precise I cofounded the association with Rajarshi Sarma, Sobhit Kamal Sarma, Amitabh Baruah, Farida Syeda, Pranjal Konwar and Samir Baruah.
Incidentally, Startup Assam is the first startup community in Northeast India working to promote the startup ecosystem and driving it since 2015. Over a period of two years, it has organised over 30 programmes month-on-month (also called Startup Saturday Guwahati Talks) covering key topics and 'pitching sessions' for entrepreneurs. This effort provided a platform to the upcoming entrepreneurs of the region to showcase their 'startups' to mentors, professionals, corporates, and investors.
The activities of Startup Assam have shown results in the current start up scenario of the region. Today the startup ecosystem we see is the effort of the members of Startup Assam and many others who paved the way for a vibrant startup ecosystem. We are constantly growing with students, entrepreneurs and professionals who have brilliant ideas for starting their own venture.
In 2011, few years before initiating Startup Assam, I embarked on my entrepreneurial journey with Redlemon Communications, a dedicated organisation– co-founded by Rakesh Doley and Upola Gohain– in the field of website design and development, internet marketing, software application development, business technology consulting, independent testing, product engineering, electronic data interchange and business process management.We are based in Guwahati, catering to local, national and international clients. We provide time bound, cost-effective and value added innovative technological business solutions that require specialized domain expertise. This later became Redlemon Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Soon after launching Redlemon Communications, I also started Eshopany– an ecommerce startup for merchandising of handloom products during the time 2012 -2013 – with Maharnav Gogoi and Jayanta Paw from Assam Engineering College. It was the first e-commerce platform of Northeast India, and we did good business – gave good competition to national players in the Northeast market. We faced many challenges while working on our startup, and that's when I felt the need of a Startup mentoring hub even more.
And this was not all. A little later between 2014 and 2016, I teamed up with Abhijit Thakur, Ram Kumar Basak and Rakesh Doley and conceived an idea of a location-based-services (LBS) platform for the city of Guwahati, a city which has 'locational advantage' being the gateway to the seven sister states of Northeast India. This idea later crystalized to form a startup called 'Cellfisher' – and the successful test launch of taxi services in Guwahati in March 2016.
Cellfisher essentially strived to aggregate the auto and taxi services scattered in the city and make them available to the customers. It acted as a mediator between the service providers and customers. Customers could avail these services by dialing 59211 (PaanchNau-Do-Gyarah) from their Vodafone numbers.
Cellfisher did not own any fleet of taxis and did not invest in the training and education of the drivers. It allied with autos, service providers of radio taxis, android and ios application- based providers of taxi services, local travel agents and driver-owned taxis and helped them in providing better services to their customers by connecting them.
Finally came my Muuvr Journey (2018) . Muuvr was envisaged as The First Online Transporters Market in North-East India https://www.muuvr.in/
In 2018, I joined hands with Rajdeep Basumatary, Shalin Choudhury,Deepjyoti Baruah and conceptualized Moovr (Muuvr) – an online marketplace for shipments and trucks, where logistics professionals get in touch with one another and work towards a great eco-system. In the meantime, I also started to work as startup and innovation consultant to Assam Science and Technology University for the 13 Engineering colleges across Assam.
While working on Muuvr, we got get selected for the sea-side startup summit (Feb 6-12, 2018) held at Ras Al Khaimah, UAE where startups from different countries participated. We went to present our Startup at the beautiful Marjan island of Ras Al Khaimah where the summit was held. It was a great learning experience as we met different startups from across Asia, Middle East, Europe and Africa and got to know their journey. We also networked and got connections from different places and countries who we are still in touch with till date. .
Thereafter, we continued our efforts to boost the startup eco system in the Northeast and organised Startup Assam's yearly programme Brahmaputra B-plan competition in May 2018. The event was a great success. We were supported by Numaligarh Refinery Ideation Fund for the programme and many participants joined from across the state.
In the meantime, Muuvr started working on the intercity truck logistics application for long distance logistics operation for routes like Guwahati to Jorhat to Tinsukia. By the end of August 2018, we also had a short distance aggregator application for solving short distance logistics, which helped us visualize an infographic for a complete supply chain cycle with demand and supply.
I must state at this point that while working as a start-up consultant at Assam Science and Technology University (ASTU), I became familiar with the functioning of the various engineering colleges and felt the need of 'industry academia' which was the need of the hour. To solve this, we needed to develop the start-up mindset and eco-system in colleges to encourage young minds to become successful entrepreneurs or job creators – similar to the model of Silicon Valley where start-ups evolved from the campuses and made it big worldwide. I saw this gap in our region.
So we started conducting workshops and start-up meets, and organized Startup Hackathon 2018 for the first time at the university level in Assam. The hackathon aimed to bring different startups/aspiring entrepreneurs from all the engineering colleges of Assam under one roof to participate in a competition.
The mission of organising the hackathon was to identify the best talents across educational institutions and colleges in developing problem-solving ability amongst students in different sectors of focus areas and encourage them to enter the startup ecosystem.
The Startup ecosystem in the region got a further boost with the formation of BRAIN (Brahmaputra Region Angel Investor Network) an initiative under Startup Assam. Its aim was to connect startups to angel investors and experienced entrepreneurs for mentoring.
It was around this time that the government of Assam also launched the Assam Startup run by IIM Kolkata Innovation Park. This was 2019. In the Meantime, Muuvr Continued to Grow. During this period, we worked on scaling Muuvr. We worked on various plans for integrating the logistics industry with the short distance vehicles and long-distance trucks covering the major portion of the industry. We grew our team from just tech team to data analytics, sales, and operations teams. At that point we operated by aggregating around 60 vehicles in the market. We were also selected in the Numaligarh Refinery Ltd Ideation Fund 2018 and presented our startup to the panel and they encouraged us to scale up the project and assured us of all the help from their end.
We formally launched Muuvr on February 10, 2019 at the Assam Nest in Guwahati. We were selected for incubation at Assam Startup Nest in first cohort in May 2019. On September 30 the same year, we launched Muuvr mobile App.
Thereafter under the Brahmaputra Region Angel Investor Network, we organised Startup Pitch 2.0 in Guwahati on May 25, 2019, where 30 + local entrepreneurs and investors attended and participated in pitching sessions.
In June 2019, we started a co-working space called Dream Hatcher in Guwahati. Through this initiative we strived to provide co-working facilities to startups and entrepreneurs who needed it. This was one of our attempts at developing the 'coworking culture' among the startup community in our region.
Northeast Hackathon is conceptualized by Redlemon Technologies and StartupAssam in association with Assam Science and Technology University.
The first edition of Northeast Hackathon was organized on September 3 and 4, 2019 at Maniram Trade Centre, Guwahati. Startup Assam was given the responsibility of organizing the Northeast Hackathon 2019 for all the colleges and universities across Northeast India. It was a grand success thanks to the huge team effort of 12 core members and around 34 volunteers. Around 93 teams participated from colleges across Northeast. Video of Hackathon 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBnqoWqHm2E
The concept of the Hackathon was to develop the startup environment, its upgradation and incubation of the student across different colleges across Northeast India, which will create sustainable development across various sectors – Textile and handloom, Tourism, water management, etc.
We also organised the Northeast Business Webinar 2020 on September 12, 2020 to facilitate startup founders/professionals to grow their network in the two ASEAN countries of Bangladesh and Bhutan. It provided a platform for participants to network with people of both the market, exchange ideas and contacts, and start businesses in both the markets across different sectors. The attendees comprised students, businessmen, startup founders and entrepreneurs.
After working on the startup ecosystem and the northeast Hackathon, we finally organised the Northeast Startup Festival with the vision to create Guwahati as the startup capital of Southeast Asia. This had participation from students from various campuses across Northeast and people from all walks of life.
I must conclude by saying that I started my entrepreneurial journey early, while I was still studying at Assam Engineering College (AEC). I took up the role of training and placement secretary and we revolutionised the training and placement scenario of the college – top companies started pouring in for campus recruitments and there was no looking back. Prior to that, there were no campus recruitments at AEC. We also started the cultural festival called Pyrokinesis – which is a very popular youth festival among the student community these days!
I got inspired to be an entrepreneur while studying at XLRI Jamshedpur where we also framed a song on management "Management is all in the veins". Apart from that, a quote at my Reliance Office at DAKC Mumbai inspired me to embark on this entrepreneurial journey "Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs"
Pankaj Gogoi
Founder and Director, Redlemon Technologies Pvt. Ltd
and President, Startup Assam is a serial entrepreneur and start up crusader. He shares his journey, learnings, milestones and vision with Melange
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