I began my entrepreneurial journey in December 2014. The incidents of 2014, when several cases of child molestations were reported in Bangalore’s schools, had spurred me into trying to do “something” about it. The key to keeping children safe in schools is to ensure that the people who work with them have a good track record. In the past, this was ensured by word of mouth. But Indian cities today are teeming with floating populations and there is no easy way of verifying a person’s history and credentials.
The idea was to build a digital platform where schools and their employees would participate in a simple process to build employee history and credibility. This would create a white-list of people who can be trusted to take care of children. The platform would optionally use Aadhaar for identity verification. We called it Staff You Trust.
My initial attempts at trying to get this incubated somewhere came to nought, so I took stock of what I could do with what I had. These were:
- Time (oodles of it, because I had quit my job)
- A technical mind that I hoped had not rusted after years in management roles!
- Access to the wonderful world of open-source software
A friend introduced me to Django, a Python-based web application framework, and I took the plunge. I built a prototype, and got some early feedback from a few schools. There was definitely interest, but the conversations were quite theoretical. I thought that I should build the product and then come back to them. (An experienced entrepreneur would probably have got some commitment from schools first. But that’s hindsight now.)
I talked to a classmate who runs a software development firm, and he arranged for an Android engineer to build the app. I drew wireframes, learnt how to expose REST APIs from the server, how to install and run the server on a Linux VM in the cloud. It was a year of complete bliss. So much so, that I got myself into a new comfort zone that I was reluctant to leave!
For a while, I kept procrastinating, adding a link here and a button there, and telling myself that these were all-important features! The truth was that I was afraid of venturing out and facing rejection.
Around this time I heard about iKen, a bootcamp for early entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, which could help in my journey. I applied, and got accepted for the batch starting in April 2016. The program doesn’t waste time – the first very assignment teaches you to face rejection. It rips off any band-aids that you may have placed around your ego and forces you to step out of your comfort zone. I had thought that my lack of sales experience would be a handicap. But I was told not to worry about that, because the past is no indication of the future.
My other obstacle was that I knew just a handful of people who had anything to do with schools. By now, I’d done my Bird-in-Hand audit at iKen – that included creating an inventory of ‘Who I am’, ‘What I know’ and ‘Who I know’. I approached friends, and got introductions through them to school owners. At each meeting, I would try to get a few more contacts, and so on. I built a 4-week-4-month plan with goals and metrics and religiously updated that spreadsheet every week, recording the outcomes of this week and planning the appointments for the next.
Gradually, I overcame my discomfort of doing ‘sales calls’ and started thinking of them as relationship-building conversations. And there were many wonderful conversations – with people (mainly women) who are passionate about education and have started their own preschools in pursuit of this vocation. Whether or not they agreed to sign-up on my platform immediately, my network was growing.
One day, I was surfing the web, looking for information on preschools in my neighbourhood, when I came across an article by Shweta Sharan, a content developer at the Buzzing Bubs publication, a digital publication targeted at parents. She is also the Founder of the Bangalore Schools Facebook Community that has more than 11000 members. I reached out to her over LinkedIn. A couple of days later, I received an enthusiastic response, with a request for a meeting.
We met in a café in HSR Layout on a Thursday, and I showed her my app. She was super-excited and filled a page from her notebook with a list of schools where she had contacts. Sitting opposite her, I felt exhilarated – I didn’t have to do this alone!
By that evening, I had joined the Facebook forum, and emailed her a blurb about my product, asking for beta trial customers. On Friday morning, she posted it, and vigorously set about tagging parents and school owners. She called/emailed school owners to arrange meetings for me. Those emails are still coming in.
On Friday afternoon, I got a call from Sarayu Srinivasan, a journalist at The News Minute, asking for an interview. On Saturday morning, Sarayu and I met and talked for over an hour. She reviewed the app in depth, asked a lot of questions, examined different scenarios, and asked for some screenshots. The next morning, the article was live, and being shared in different fora! Sarayu has also promised to introduce me to other people who might be able to help.
This was the principle of Crazy Quilt in action! You reach out to people, and when new connections are forged, you suddenly have more means at your disposal. It was now going to be about ‘Who we are’, ‘What we know’ and ‘Who we know’.
My plan now is to run pilots in schools of different sizes and categories – stand-alone preschools, preschool chains, large schools, child activity centres – and iterate based on user feedback. We need to quickly scale the user base across Bangalore’s schools so as to build a sustainable solution for a very pressing social problem. This should then be taken to other cities and regions, so that in the future, if an employee moves from Kolkata to Bangalore or Chennai to Chandigarh, his/her reputation travels intact.
Tanuka Dutta has an extensive background in computer networking, having worked at Cisco Systems and Motorola in various engineering and management roles. In her last role at Cisco, she was Director of an 80-member engineering team. She is currently on her first entrepreneurial journey, working toward increasing safety measures in schools and pre-schools. Tanuka holds a B.Tech in Electronics & Communication and M.Tech in Telecommunication Systems from IIT Kharagpur.