Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a scope.
I cannot believe how fast this first week went by. Everything here in India is new to me — the sounds, the scents, the food, the kites, the colors, the ubers, the way of life. While my team mates went to the first weekend trip today, I am stuck home with a Delhi belly. Then why not catch up on this eventful week?
On Monday we first met our client. They are called StartupOasis and it is their goal to foster innovation driven entrepreneurship in the state of Rajasthan. They train students, incubate startups and raise funding for incubated startups. We met Chintan, Pallavi and Abhishek at the Park Prime Hotel to get a better understanding of who they are and what they do. We aligned on a rough agenda for the first week, our main concern being to talk to as many stakeholders as possible.
The next morning we took an uber to the Sitapura Industrial Area and headed to the StartupOasis headquarters.
It was a long day of listening to the various people, among them the Ops lead, the Finance lead and the founders of a startup which uses the co-working space offered by StartupOasis. Our aim was to find out as much as possible about the processes and the support offered. We continued this mission the next day and went to see two more startups: one had developed an app for newspaper vendors to facilitate the billing process (Mera Paper), the other had created science project kits for schools (Projects for School). All of them talked very highly of StartupOasis and their support. The last meeting of the day was with the Vice President of the Rajasthan Venture Capital Fund. It was meant to round off the day with another perspective.
About a year ago, StartupOasis launched a new project calles TEDSTART. Its goal is to foster entrepreneurship especially among students. This is why they established seven centers at colleges throughout the state of Rajasthan. It had been our goal to visit one of these centers, and a trip was arranged for Thursday. We would go to Jodhpur, which is a mere 5–6 hours train ride from Jaipur.
Leaving the Girisadan at 5:30 am, we safely boarded the train at 6:00 am. It took as a couple of minutes to understand that our fellow travelers (exclusively Indians) wanted the seats to be changed into beds and we all lay down to sleep through the trip.
Gaurav, the city lead for the Jodhpur TEDSTART center, came to pick us up at the station. He gave us a very insightful description of his tasks and time flew by. We managed to see a part of the old city of Jodhpur, a market, a famous stair well — and then it was time to leave again, after 4 hours in the Blue City.
On Friday it was dawning on us: We had followed the guidelines given by our hosting organization Pyxera Global, we had listened for a whole week, we had seen and heard so much about StartupOasis — but we did not yet have an idea on how to support them with our particular skill set (Pre-Sales, Procurement, User Assistance). We did a short brainstorming session, collected everything we had heard so far and figured out that the only issue our client was facing was an increasing number of customer data to be maintained and analysed. And then, finally, we decided on a scope: we would evaluate open-source CRM systems for them, look at the training material, do some test runs and train their employees. What a successful end of this first week!
So now I am sitting on my balcony, relaxing my belly, listening to the call for prayer at the nearby mosque. If it weren’t for my belly, I would indulge on the scents of ghee and garlic floating through the neighborhood. It is getting dark, I am waiting for the team to come back home, with lots of fresh memories, sore muscles from the Camel ride maybe. I keep my fingers crossed for tomorrow when I planned a trip to Jaipur and surroundings for all of us. And I am hoping that this Delhi belly will soon be a Mannheim belly again.
