A Startup that is Changing the Paradigm of Travel

"Our main goal is to uplift the local community and train them to be employed. We aim to change the way people travel by giving them alternate facilities like pre-guide booking for an immersive experience, switching from hotels to locally owned homestays, exploring lesser known trails, enjoying the culture and eating locally made food with the local people rather than dining in fancy restaurants. We do not allow the participants in our experiential learning programmes to bring plastics and we also run cleanliness drives. As I said earlier we have already trained 80 plus guides and impacted 200 plus families whose regular income depends on us. Within 3 years, we plan to train and onboard 2000 plus guides and connect local and remote homestays in our app to make them available to the travelling community"- Prasurjya Talukdar

Please elaborate on Oddessemania

Oddessemania is a travel tech startup that is trying to change the way people experience travel. It is promoting guide aided travel for travellers to have an immersive local experience. Oddessemania is incidentally the first platform to facilitate pre-travel guide booking. Trained and experienced guides are onboarded to the platform (based on their specialty) for travellers to select them on the basis of the itinerary, the subject and their availability. The guides are specifically selected from the local community and trained and onboarded. The Oddessemania platform mainly allows travellers to plan their itinerary by using maps and plan the details of the trip visually. Travelers can also share itineraries, if they want, with family and friends.

Oddessemania achieves multiple objectives by facilitating guide booking. Firstly the travellers get a local expert to guide them during the travel who ensures that they get an immersive experience. Secondly the local guides also ensure safety of the travellers. This is particularly important for solo travellers or small groups. Thirdly by engaging the local guide community it contributes positively to uplift the local economy.

What was the understanding /insight or inspiration behind your entrepreneurial venture?

The seed of entrepreneurship was sown in my mind when I was in college. I used to attend the seminars and workshops where the founders of the companies used to come and take sessions. I was inspired to work on my own and solve problems from that point of time only. Also, I and my co-founder are travel freaks. Since we are from the northeast we wanted to showcase our beauty, culture and tradition to everyone. We realised people outside the region have lot of misunderstandings about this region. We started Oddessemania keeping all these objectives in mind.

We chose to make the guide booking platform because we observed that when people come to visit places they are not introduced to the local culture, tradition or the people of those places. They come through agencies that give them luxurious facilities and hardly contribute to the local economic growth. Most people residing in the offbeat places are dependent on tourists. The big 'moneyed' players take advantage of this fact and open up big franchisee of hotels or restaurants and this is not actually fair.

The northeast is yet to be explored and we have to capitalise on our local communities. Therefore, it's now our mission through this startup to uplift the local communities and contribute to the local economy.

What are the specific challenges and milestones of your journey so far? What is your vision and future roadmap?

Well orienting the society (at large) to your idea is the main challenge that you face when you start your journey as an entrepreneur.

Our idea is completely new so doing this was doubly challenging for us. Finding the correct mentor to guide us was another challenge. I and my co-founder Prantika Sarma are first generation entrepreneurs and hence we were easily prone to mistakes. We didn't have anyone to guide us and enlighten us about the correct ways. I would say that finding and forming the right team in a startup is a very big challenge because you need someone who is ready to do extra work and research while putting in creativity always. The members also have to believe in entrepreneurship and the idea that you chose to work on. Finding knowledgeable and creative people who align with the company values and goals is a real task. And obviously, funding is always a perennial challenge to start something new. Our company is boot strapped but some amount of fund is always required to scale up and finding the correct investor that believes in your idea is not at all easy.

However, with all our efforts and proper mentorship, we have served 3000 plus customers till date and trained 80 plus guides to onboard them in our app. We also started experiential learning programmes among students and corporates and received a huge response and have already served 200 plus participants.

We got incubated in Assam start-up, recognised by IIMCIP and DPIIT and received a soft loan and incubation from the Assam Downtown venture lab. Our website is one of the top travel websites in northeast India. And this happened because we worked on the basics during corona time.

Recently, we also collaborated with Assam Tourism to train the registered guides and onboard them in our platform so that they are available to the tourists for booking. We are the official company to provide guides in Assam now. Our future plan is expand the guide system in different north-eastern states as well as in other parts of the country. Our platform is the first platform which is giving recognition and mass employment to the local youths as local guides. We also aim to expand in South Asian countries because the guide demands are more overseas. We are currently in talks with Singapore for this. Moreover, we also aim to expand our experiential learning programmes in various institutions (both educational and corporate).

What are the social objectives of your entrepreneurial venture? How do you envisage making a positive impact on the ecosystem in which your enterprise is operating?

Our main goal is to uplift the local community and train them to be employed. We aim to change the way people travel by giving them alternate facilities like pre-guide booking for an immersive experience, switching from hotels to locally owned homestays, exploring lesser known trails, enjoying the culture and eating locally made food with the local people rather than dining in fancy restaurants. We do not allow the participants in our experiential learning programmes to bring plastics and we also run cleanliness drives. As I said earlier we have already trained 80 plus guides and impacted 200 plus families whose regular income depends on us. Within 3 years, we plan to train and onboard 2000 plus guides and connect local and remote homestays in our app to make them available to the travelling community.

How important is training and mentoring for an entrepreneur? Which are the organisations that are building entrepreneurs in our state ? Any other facilitating factors that are needed?

A Mentor is like KRISHNA to ARJUN for the founder. More than funding, mentors are important because they share knowledge through their experience. With all the advice and guidance, you can avoid making mistakes and gain traction on the route to your goals. A mentor also helps you to build and grow a robust network. The mentor is the person who will objectively criticise you on your face so that you can correct your mistakes and be focussed.

Organisations like Assam Start-up and Downtown venture lab are giving the best opportunities in this case. There are also other educational institutions who have established entrepreneurship cells to inspire young aspirants in this field.

How did you go about looking for an investor or seed funding? What are some of the standard criteria that they look for in an entrepreneurial venture?

Networking is one of the gold mines where you can find not only investors, but mentors, co-founders and dedicated employees as well. There are many platforms where you can do networking and one of the gold mines is LinkedIn. I must say that we observed that students in this part of the country are not taught to build resumes or portfolios. They don't even know what LinkedIn is and it's actually a shame. Other than that, there are tons of events organised all across the globe where you can pitch to get investors, incubation and mentoring. All these information is found in LinkedIn only. We at least felt this way because we were able to connect with our mentor, investor and media houses through LinkedIn.

Some things that an investor considers in terms of the venture or the founder include the following:

• The product and its innovation.

• The potential of the idea.

• The market size where you will be launching it.

• The team that is working to make it big.

• The leadership and dedication of the founders.

• Financials.

How much do you credit technology for the success of your business? Can you please share your views?

Technology has a huge impact on us in terms of scaling up our business as well as visibility. Our entire system depends on technology. Previously, we were doing business in a traditional way and providing good services. However, we were not able to maintain many things such as guide verifications and availability, safety confirmations etc. With technology all our activities have got swifter and we are able to manage everything smoothly and now growing the company to the next level. It shall not be an exaggeration to say that it is only because of technology that we are able to bring this new revolution in the travel industry. This is not to discount the help and support that we had from other crucial quarters.

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