The term Startup Saturday was coined by our fellow HeadStart (then KickStart) co founder, Pradeep BV.
At KickStart we all wanted to create more Product companies out of India. And everyone had his/her own idea on how to do it. After evaluating everything that already existed in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the country, we decided to focus on making the lives of Grassroot level (-6 months to 2 years) entrepreneurs easy. We knew that there were gaps in networking as many of us were consistently connecting fellow entreprenerus to othe people like mentors, advisors and investors. We decided to bridge this gap in priority and this led to the genesis of Startup Saturday.
The first ever Startup Saturday was held in Bangalore in Feb 2008. Attended by about 19 people, it had the founders of Muziboo.com share their experiences of starting up. Since then, Startup Saturdays have been held consistently on the 2nd Saturday of every month. The content and format of Startup Saturday Bangalore has consistently been evolving based on audience feedback and organisers' views on what would be most relevant to the attendees. Professor Suresh, Harinath Puddipedi, Puneeth Prasad, Vinayak Hegde and Kallol Borah played an instrumental role in running the event consistently through its initial days. We can't thank NSRCEL and IIMB enough for being such extraordinary hosts!
By May, Aditya Mishra and Arpit Agarwal had migrated to Mumbai and started the Startup Saturdays over there too. We also finalised on the structure of the event. 1 hour of demo, 1 hour of Gyaan and 1 hour of Networking.
In Aug 2008, we organised the first Special Startup Saturday. Being an aspiring entrepreneur, Amit Singh wanted to do an event that was relevant to people like him. He took the lead to organise one. It was a startup boot camp and covered all aspects of entrepreneurship from idea validation, company incorporation, BPlan, bootstrapping, fund raising, produt development & management to marketing and sales. It was a huge hit with the crowd which was 300 strong. The 2nd Special Startup Saturday was organised in Dec 2008 and was equally well received.
By December 2008, Startup Saturday Bangalore had become quite popular and consistently had an attendance of over 50 people.
February 2009, which was also the first anniversary of SS Bangalore also got a new team to run it. Divyajeevan Sahoo, Jyoti Ramnath and Karun Kariappa brought in an incredible amount of energy and organisation to the event. We started having regular blog posts, consistent collection of feedback and testimonials and hassle free logistics. March saw Naveen Ningaiah and Kunalkant Sen; and a great mentor in the form of Suryanarayanan A, join the gang. All of a sudden we had the bandwidth to focus and improve on quality. Startup Saturdays became theme based to make the content relevant to the audience. The theme based events were very focused and a big hit. And the teams combined effort made Startup Saturdays so popular that the average turnout dobuled to over 100 people a month.
Based on Surya's suggestion we introduced the concept of Lightening Pitches (LPs) in April. A new rockstar in the form of Vaijayanthi KM (aka VJ) emerged and she took lead of LPs with unmatched passion. She still continues to do the same while contributing in several other areas as well.
In June we experimented with having a panel discussion instead of an expert talk. It clicked and we have been continuing to do so ever since.
In September 2009 we started charging a nominal fee of Rs. 100 to attend the event. Besides increasing the seriosness in the attendees, it also started helping HeadStart sustain its expenses in a small way.
SS November saw an unprecended increase in user registration. The talk by Surya on "To be or not to be an Entrepreneur" struck a chord with all people present in the audience. It was very well received by the audience.
And we are looking forward to continue the trend of having great spekers delivering great content to entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs in the network.
Currently we are looking for volunteers who can contribute to the HeadStart blog and regularly cover Startup Saturdays. If you have a flair for writing and would like to learn a thing or two about entrepreneruship while working with a bunch of fun people, connect with Naveen or Jeevan and we would pull you in!
