TWTW, Week-3: Solve, disentangle and unravel!!
The week started with reading certain essays written by Paul Graham, an essayist, entrepreneur, computer scientist, venture capitalist and author. tbh, 4 online essays, oh Boy!!then started the dreadful 2 hours, I just wanted to get over with the reading and make the video(a bleh assignment, againnnn). To my astonishment I ended up reading the whole thing and by the end I had to find a solution to this problem, I was ready to embrace the topic and work to solve an issue. I must say, it was a good read:-D
Now in his essays on How to get start-up ideas, he says that for your very own start-up work on a problem, an issue that you feel exists and for which you can provide a solution. Work on something that you can build and on something that you feel is worth doing, why would you wanna waste your time :-P. Reading through I went back to this particular conversation I had with a friend, a travel enthusiast, a sucker for adventures. His recent visit was to Sikkim, and all of his sentences only ended with “If only, I had a Go-Pro”. This led to a discussion on how problematic it is for people like us to go for these trips, as we don’t have proper gear at times, and just to spend for this one trip, and then the gears would be lying in the closet till another trip is planned. And we all are aware how we make our plans these days, :-D. In short, spending a bucket of money on an object only to be locked in the closet, doesn’t really seem worth it, does it??
After a couple of more drinks, he exclaimed “ If only I could rent it all, the gears needed for hiking, the Go-Pro that I dearly wished for, even gear required for scuba diving etc. in just one touch on my hand-held device, exactly like i get Uber.” A bulb lit up, right over my somewhat sober head, it is actually a great idea, if only I had resources to fuel this idea.
Then came Thursday, the first Entrepreneurship lecture of the week. SKG mentioned about the various ways in which certain start-ups took flight, mentioned how TTT came to life, and how initially the founder would write short stories in under 140 characters and post on Facebook and Twitter and slowly it took shape and moved on to its own platform. One example mentioned by him was how the YouTube Channel of Fresher’s World came in to being and some more such start-ups.
Then for the session on Friday, SKG brought a young, bubbly guest Arya Murali. She introduced us to Dialogflow, which is a Google-owned developer of human–computer interaction technologies based on natural language conversations. Too technical??..haha!!
It helps you make web robots, something I am still trying to get a hang of myself.
In these two sessions I got introduced to a platform, and ways in which people entered the start-up world and ended up with successful ones. The best way to exclaim is I never knew things like this existed or could be done easily.
And as for the ideas:
- As mentioned in the initial part of this blog, an app to rent out adventure sports, or trekking gears.
- I was thinking of a bot for the task assignment in any work place, that way everybody would be abreast with the tasks and who is responsible for what, could be used by an event management firm, for QUEST in XIME (as many students have already pitched), etc.
These 2 are the basic ideas, I hope to figure out a way to carve my path that leads to the final formation of the two.
Any suggestions, all are welcome.
Ciao!!
