The secret weapons of online and social media marketing

Marketing channels have evolved a lot – from print, TV, radio, websites, emails, online to now, social media. Today, online marketing and social media have become the most preferred channels for most of the businesses. But as anyone would agree, these are still evolving and many businesses are trying to figure out what works and what does not work for them. Having said that, while it is natural to stick to the commonly used marketing activities such as SEO, email campaigns, paid ads and social media, I always suggest that businesses should be open to explore the newer and powerful avenues too.

In this post, I am going to talk about few such online marketing activities which, when used right, can deliver great results – but unfortunately these are not talked about a lot.

# Webinars

I am a big fan of webinars. Webinars offer a great opportunity to learn from experts – without worrying about geographical boundaries and right from your work station. All you need is good Internet connection and a headset. Hundreds of experts are happy (and many a times, for free) share their expertise and experiences through webinars.

Now let’s talk about it from the business perspective. How can businesses leverage webinars? Well, in many ways –

1. Customer Webinar – You know your customers love you and are raving fans. They really appreciate your work and you have made a significant difference to their business. Why not invite them to speak about their experiences, their business and theirexpertise through a webinar? Don’t you think others in the industry will value it? If you host one such webinar, you can reach out to many more prospects from the same industry and invite them to attend it. Since it is a purely educational exercise, you won’t appear salesy but at the same time, you will get an opportunity to reach out to a larger set of audience with something really credible.
2. Industry Leader Webinar – People always love to hear the views and opinions of the industry leaders/ gurus. They offer industry insights and their opinions are unbiased. You can organize a webinar with an industry leader on a latest topic from your industry (which aligns with your offering) and invite people to attend that. Being associated with an industry leader will go a long way in positioning your business. Remember, I am not talking about being a mere sponsor for such webinar. The webinar should be organized and hosted by you and it should show that you have invited the speaker to speak.
3. Product Webinar – If you are a company selling software products, then chances are that your sales teams give multiple product demos to the prospects. Why not cut it short by organizing product webinars every week? You can have multiple webinars covering different time zones and different industries. If you organize an industry-specific webinar, it gives you an opportunity to customize the webinar content for that specific industry. Such webinars can be pre-scripted and well thought out. You can build a good scalability in this model by training multiple people for the webinar. Having a fixed schedule displayed on your website will create a good impression in the minds of the prospects. You can also choose to make these webinars interactive by allowing the attendees to ask questions so that you get an opportunity to handle objections.

# Podcasts

Podcasts are small audio bytes popular amongst people who prefer audio over text/ images. There has been a trend of people using their commute time in listening to podcasts.  So what can the podcast be about? Like the webinars, podcasts can be with customers, industry leaders or even with your internal expert team. Pick a theme and record podcasts around it. While I have heard podcasts of 30-40 minutes also, I prefer the shorter podcasts– say around 12-15 minutes at most. What are the advantages from business perspective? Well, many advantages –

• You get an opportunity to connect with influencers from your industry and be in their eyeline and establish connection with them
• You get valuable content to share with your target audience. This content be then reused in many ways – through your website, blog, newsletters, email campaigns, and so on and that too on a continuous basis.
• You get to take a position in the industry as someone who is interested in the latest topics and taking efforts to assist the community through knowledge sharing

# Influencer Marketing

With social media, it has become easy to connect with anyone. But there is a difference between connection and conversation. If done rightly, you can meaningfully connect with influencers from your industry, engage with them and then take the conversation to next level. Influencer marketing is often misinterpreted as celebrities endorsing your brand. That’s a very superficial way of looking at it. Influencer marketing really means – identify a list of influencers from your industry, map their social presence and interact with them on the platform oftheir choice. Interaction does not mean asking them to RT your link  Let’s think – Who can be the influencers for you? These are the people who are decision makers in your industry or the people whom you care to connect with. For example: For an organic food store, chefs could be the influencers and for a solar power energy company, possibly the environmentalists could be influencers. You got to identify these and map their social presence – some might be active on Twitter, others might have strong LinkedIn presence. You need to first study that and then engage with them on those platforms. Once you establish a relationship with them, you can take the conversation ahead by requesting them to write a guest blog, invite them for a webinar or record their podcast.

# LinkedIn Groups

Having a profile on LinkedIn does not mean that you are active on LinkedIn. There are many more ways in which you can leverage this powerful platform. LinkedIn groups are very powerful to connect with like-minded people and establish your thought leadership in front of a targeted group of individuals. As a company, you can start your own LinkedIn group around a theme or a topic – note that starting a group in your company name is not useful. The group needs to connect people with similar interests. They should derive value from being part of your group. As an administrator of the group, it is your responsibility to keep the group activity relevant and ongoing. While it is an effort intensive and long term activity, if done well, it can be a brilliant way of creating a community of people with similar interests. In case you are interested to understand this in more detail, here is a great presentation on dynamics of starting and maintaining your own LinkedIn group.

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Do not ignore advice on making your first marketing plan

When we  start marketing without much planning we get some results; but we don’t know if we are on-track or not. We don’t have any idea if we are going in the right direction or not. This is the story of every other startup.

Before starting the marketing campaign, we should ask ourselves why we need the marketing effort in the first place.

Only when we know the core reason/s for the marketing effort do we have clarity on what to do next.  OK…….you need more customers for your business; but then every business needs customers. This does not explain why you need marketing and what type of marketing is a good fit for your startup. You must be aware of some of the more important things that should define the marketing roadmap for your startup.

Let’s discuss what marketing is and the purpose it serves.

Reaching out to more people (broadcast)

The first, and most important purpose, of marketing is to reach out to a wider group of potential customers and tell them about what you have to offer. The simplest form of marketing is, of course, ‘word-of-mouth’.

If you are a B2B company, then your marketing efforts will help you collect information about your prospects, and the sales team can  convert them into customers. If you are a B2C company, then your marketing message should have a call to action to convert to sales directly.

Remember that marketing is pre-step to sales (collecting leads) in B2B; and ‘sales’ is a part of marketing in B2C.

The traditional way of marketing

Newspapers, Television, the phone, pamphlets, and hoardings are the all time favorites of marketers. These are mediums through which you can shout out your product and services, and a lot of people can hear your voice.

Every place or event that people are watching or listening to can be your marketing channel. That is why we see ‘ads’ in cricket stadia, on players’ uniforms, and political and religious gatherings.

The modern way of marketing

Today, more people are present on the internet. Marketers are tapping into social media, search engines, emails and instant messaging. These modern gathering places come with an extra benefit – it is easy to filter audience.  You can craft a message for a specific target audience –  e.g. all males in the 25-40 age group, residing in metros, and having an interest in outdoor sports.

Analyze where your target audience is?

It’s easy to find the potential customer when you clearly define his personality. You should know your customer more than customer himself. You should know what types of friends he has, what are his spending habits, where he dines out on Saturdays, what he does on the weekends, where he hangs out in the evenings, etc.

The more you know about your customer, the better you will be able to make a marketing plan. One more thing, you cannot please everyone with your offerings. It is better to target only one person: define the niche, think of your ideal customer and create a message for him.

You don’t need to put all of your energies on all channels. Startups have limited time and resources. It will be a challenge to understand all the marketing channels all at once (unless you have a team of 4-5 people dedicated to marketing).

“Only one marketing channel is sufficient for your growth if you figure out how to take full advantage of it.”

Try out various channels and find out which one you understand well.

What marketing channels do you have?

Social Media – Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest

Search Engines – Google, Google, Google

Email/Phone – Email/Phone numbers collected from your blog and landing pages (don’t buy databases for spamming)

Now it’s time to draft your marketing plan.

Start with a six-month bird’s eye view. You never know what will happen in the future, but you may have an intuition about where you might be after six months. If you are clueless; probably, you need to fix something else (your business plan/vision) instead of working on the marketing plan at this point of time.

Your marketing plan should look something like this:

Month One – Create presence on social media. Start with SEO and content marketing.

Month Two – Experiment with all social channels and ‘seed’ audience. Do the A/B test with the website’s landing pages. Optimize your blog/landing page for email data collection.

Month Three – By this time you should have some customer emails. Experiment with email marketing.

Month Four – By this time you will have data about your social media channel’s performance. Select one or two channels and put all your energies in growing your audience. You will also start seeing the results from the SEO effort. Optimize what works in SEO.

Month Five – Buy tools to optimize and monitor marketing. Automate things that are working well.

Month Six – Repeat the success of the previous months.

Remember, this was just an overview.  Make a detailed plan for the first month.

Important points to be considered for a marketing plan

• What would be your pitch on social media (a persuasive message is must to attract your fans)?
• Powerful content strategy – This can be a game changer! You must define what types of articles you will write, frequency of the articles, length and depth of the content, utilize the power of guest posts, and collect email-ids of your visitors.

If you cannot do these things by yourself, then hire a content strategist.

• Message through visuals (images/infographics/videos)
• How will you ‘seed’ the audience (Organic + Paid)?
• Participate in discussion forums and communities like Quora & Reddit (Manual)
• Engage with your audience and understand what they like/dislike (emails and calls) 

For Digital Marketing and SEO call (+91-9836521057) 

Email; anindya@pixelsolutionz.com 

www.pixelsolutionz.com 

Digital marketing for startups

The most exhilarating experience is starting your own venture. Some of the big questions that follow are how to reach masses, how to make your business resonate, how to drive your business results, how to be successful, and how to fulfil your dreams with a shoestring budget?

Let’s begin with a very basic question, why do startups need marketing? Startups solve problems for their users, and connecting with right users is about personalised marketing at scale. They need to build their own brand identity and a slow growth in this fast-paced competitive world can be detrimental to the startup’s health.

Why digital marketing and not traditional forms of marketing? In digital marketing, there are organic ways to grow your consumer base without incurring large amounts of money, it has low entry barriers and scale. A lot can be done with less and sharp targeting leading to less wastage.

As a startup, how can digital marketing help you? It builds awareness and positions your company and brand. It builds a consistent flow of traffic, gets the first few users. This form of marketing also drive leads and online sales.

Keeping the budget constraints in mind, startups need a few techniques/tools that they can use with minimal cost. Let’s look at some of these tools and what can be done to approach these.

1. SEO – This is cost-effective with measurable, long-term benefits. It increases the visibility and organic traffic to the website. Using this, there is free branding and it builds trust and credibility. A big advantage is that it opens your business 24*7.

What needs to be done to be SEO friendly? –  Make your site mobile friendly and secure, especially if is an e-commerce website. Do ensure all pages are working, use appropriate tags/headers/descriptions. Optimise for faster page load times, create good content on the site, and focus on online PR – get users to talk about your site.

2. Content marketing – This generates more traffic, more leads, and builds brand awareness. It also builds relationship with current and prospective clients.

What to focus in content marketing? – Publish great and relevant content on a regular basis. Formulate unique selling proposition. Set up a blog, tell stories, and work with other publishers to post your content/write-ups. Also communicate user stories.

3. Social media marketing – This is cost-effective and a platform to build voice. It is way to engage with current and future customers. Pick the right platforms as per your business – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

What shall you do on the platforms? – Think about why someone would become a part of your community or follow you (what is in it for me). Seed the platform with the first few pieces of content. Let the users take over, while you monitor. Do use groups/Q&A/chat effectively.

4. Email marketing – This is simple, cost-effective, personal, customisable, and measurable with high ROI. You can communicate with an audience of any size. Email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined.

How to go about email marketing? – Identify a service provider. Do-it-yourself platforms are good, few are: Constant Contact, MailChimp, Aweber, Amazon SES. Set up a calendar and very important is that ‘do not always sell’ – majority of the email should be about free service.

5. Growth hacking – This is low-cost and innovative alternative to traditional marketing.

How to go about it? – Offer something for free, set up a referral programme, and go with exclusivity. There should be an element that helps your product go viral.

Try these techniques, start right and let success follow you.

About the Author:

Amitabh Verma is the CEO and Founder of AMP Digital, a firm into the online training and agency space. He is a business leader with extensive experience in Digital Marketing, Sales, Operations and Customer Service and has worked for global MNCs as well as startups. He is an MBA from IIM, Kozhikode and has done his masters in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics.

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  Do not ignore advice on making your first marketing plan

Inspiring success stories of 3 entrepreneurs

Besides a great idea, it takes pluck, and some luck, to get going. Three startup entrepreneurs share their success stories with Indulekha Aravind.

Image: Nithin Kamath (L) can afford to smile now. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

All my IIT cousins now want to do startups: Nithin Kamath, Founder and CEO, Zerodha

"I come from a family where if you don't go to IIT or a regional engineering college, you're considered to have done nothing with your life. So I was the guy all the cousins in the family were told not to hang out with!" Nithin Kamath, the Bengaluru-based founder and CEO of Zerodha, says with a smile.

Kamath can afford to smile now - it is fairly obvious as soon as you step into the premises of the financial services startup he launched in 2010 by offering the lowest broking charges in the country.

A black Audi A6 stands outside the office in JP Nagar, while a golden Audi Q5 is parked in the porch of the main building.

The foundation for Zerodha - which Kamath says sees a daily turnover of Rs 7,000 crore (Rs 70 billion), serves 56,000 customers and had pre-tax profit of Rs 30 crore (Rs 300 million) last year - was laid when he was 17.

That was when he was initiated into the nuances of trading by his Marwari friends, who took him to "bucket shops" in the city, essentially less than legal outfits where you could place bets on the stock market, which he continued to do till he finished his engineering in 2001.

That turned out to be a particularly propitious year because derivatives trading was introduced in India, ICICI Bank and IndiaBulls had just launched their online trading interface and Kamath bought an Internet connection, so he could now trade in indices at home instead of bucket shops.

Image: Team Zerodha. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

His parents never discouraged his trading, though they were from fairly conventional backgrounds. 

His father, Raghuram Kamath, was an executive with Canara Bank and his mother, Revathy, taught the veena.

"I always had confidence in him," says the senior Kamath. He also let him handle the trading accounts in his name and his wife's before he turned 18. The son jokes that his father knew the state of his finances by his shampoo and shaving cream: if he didn't make money, he would start using his father's.

But soon after he started trading online, the dotcom bust happened. "The Rs 4 lakh I had saved over four years was wiped out in a couple of months. That was a big amount in those days," says Kamath.

He then joined a call centre because it left his days free to trade, which he did feverishly with the sole aim of accumulating enough trading capital. "I think for those three-and-a-half years, I must have slept only on weekends."

Those were heady days for call centres but he was still not earning enough to quit and trade full time. And then the miracle happened.

Image: Zerodha office. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

"I used to work out with a US-returned guy in the gym. We met for a drink one evening, where I told him what I was doing and showed him my performance for the last three years. He was so impressed that he gave me a cheque of Rs 25 lakh to trade on his behalf. And all this over our first drink!" says Kamath.

On the phone later, Prakash, the "gym buddy" who declines to reveal his surname, plays down what sounds like a huge gamble.

"He seemed like a very intelligent guy and I thought I would help him out," is how he self-deprecatingly puts it. As soon as he got the money, Kamath quit and started working from home under the name of Kamath Associates to give some gravitas to what he was doing.

His client base grew to 40, mainly through word-of-mouth. Then, in 2008, when Reliance Money launched, Kamath Associates became its sub-broker. Soon, his turnover became bigger than all the other franchisees put together. 

Sudip Bandyopadhyay, former CEO of Reliance Money, does not confirm this but recalls Kamath as a "young, bright guy" who performed very well. "He had a lot of energy and ideas, and took Reliance Money's model of fixed fees forward with Zerodha," Bandyopadhyay says.

That was also the year he got married to his girlfriend, Seema Patil, who he had met when they were working at the call centre.

Image: I'm the rock star of the family, says Nidhin Kamath. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

Seema says she was not very worried about how his business would do, especially Zerodha. "I knew that if it did not work out, he would come up with something else."

Her parents, though, were not so easy to convince because, like most middle-income folks, they wanted a son-in-law with a steady job.

"For them, share markets and business sounded very risky and they thought that when the markets fell, Nithin would lose everything," Seema says. Her father went to the Reliance Money office and tried to figure out what they were doing.

In May 2009, Kamath made what he calls "the dumbest move in my life" when he exited all his positions just before the results of the general election because he did not want to take a risk.

Except that the market jumped 40 per cent in four days. A despondent Kamath and his team closed the office and went to a resort where, after a few drinks, he decided he did not want to trade for clients any more.

Instead, he would build a brokerage firm that would be completely online, and offer the broking services he himself had needed 10 years ago.

Thus was launched Zerodha in August 2010, which offered a flat brokerage fee of as low as Rs 20. "The cost of executing a trade does not increase according to the size because the effort is the same, so we could offer a flat rate. We also brought in transparency through a brokerage calculator, and by offering the same deals for all customers, we could also be a lot more efficient than other brokerages," he says. 

Having given up active trading once Zerodha was born, he now gets his adrenaline rush through playing poker for high stakes. And have his relatives finally come around?

"Oh yes, I'm the rock star of the family. All my IIT cousins now want to do startups, and you know who they turn to," he says, laughing.

Image: Richa Kar, Founder, Zivame. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

"I knew that if this did not work out, for whatever reason, I could go back to a corporate job: Richa Kar, Founder, Zivame

"Apne friends ko kya bolungi? Meri beti bra-panty bech rahi hai, computer par? (What will I tell my friends? That my daughter is selling bras and panties online?)"

Zivame founder Richa Kar's mother, a homemaker, exclaimed in shock when her daughter, an engineering graduate from BITS-Pilani with an MBA from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, told her she was planning to quit her corporate job and launch an online lingerie retail store.

"She wasn't as concerned about the fact that I would not have a regular salary," Kar recalls, laughing. She adds that her father, who retired from Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, did not quite understand what exactly she wanted to do, but neither of her parents discouraged her, for which she was thankful.

Three years on, Kar's mother and her friends are among the over 500,000 customers who shop from Zivame, which raised $6 million in its second series of funding in December 2013.

Entrepreneurship happened to the slim 33-year-old  by chance: there were no role models in the immediate family and the e-commerce landscape in 2011, the year she launched Zivame, was only developing the contours we see today.

Image: Zivame office walls have black and white images of women in lingerie on various walls. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

It was her stint at SAP, where one of her clients was lingerie giant Victoria's Secret, that drew her attention to a sector which she realised had so far been below the radar in India.

"I saw the numbers and other details, and then it struck me that this was a great category," she says at her office in Domlur in Bengaluru, which has black and white images of women in lingerie on various walls and a collage with images of models in bras behind the reception.

Visits to various shops in the city selling lingerie strengthened her conviction.

"Though Indian women come in all shapes and sizes, retailers were only stocking a few standard sizes because of lack of shelf space. And then there are the sales girls who laugh if you want something lacy and racy!" she says.

So after eight years in the corporate sector she decided to take the plunge and launch a portal which would sell bras in as many sizes as possible, offer advice on the right fit, discreet packaging and money back if you were not satisfied.

Kar says she was not nervous then about venturing out on her own. "I knew that if this did not work out, for whatever reason, I could go back to a corporate job. It was just a question of being able to support myself for a year."

Image: Team members of Zivame. Photograph, courtesy: Zerodha

 

Kar quit in March 2011 and launched Zivame in August ("Ziva" in Hebrew is "brilliant", "me" was tagged on by the founder) from the first floor of a house in Domlur with a commercial permit she shared with batchmates from BITS who were running a consultancy for social ventures.

Her first customer, incidentally, was a man, who was trying to place an order for Rs 7,000 from Indore.

Those days, her only hire was an office boy (the technology part was outsourced), which expanded to a girl to answer calls the next month. And when the girl quit to join Infosys, Kar answered calls in her name, Sindhu.

In November, five more employees were hired. Kar's then boyfriend and now husband, Kedar Gavane, says he lent a hand when he could, and was able to offer some advice about online companies since he was with Comscore, the Internet analytics firm.

Though Zivame was launched with Rs 35 lakh from her savings, friends and family, the company was burning cash quickly because it was gaining traction, and Kar knew she had to seek institutional funding.

The first round, or Series A, came from venture capital funds Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures.

Vani Kola, the managing director of Kalaari, was able to grasp the potential of the business quickly. "But when there are men on the other side of the table, we tell them to check with the women in their team or in their families to understand whether there is a real problem because they can never relate to the embarrassment of buying lingerie and other issues women have to face," Kar says.

Though she had just launched the company, the families of Kar and Gavane were also impatient for the couple to tie the knot, since she was 29.

And so she did, over a weekend in Bengaluru because that was all the time she could afford to take off.

"I took leave on Friday, got married on Saturday and was back at work on Monday," she says.

Zivame had raised Series A funding in February and the wedding was in April, so her focus was on scaling up the company and hiring, and not the wedding and honeymoon. "But since I've enjoyed building the business, I don't complain at all."

The next round of funds, Rs 33 crore (Rs 330 million), came from existing investors and Ronnie Screwvala's Unilazer Ventures.

"Kar has a high sense of confidence about her, is focused on her execution and what struck me was her deep knowledge of the sector she had founded," says Screwvala.

Asked what she thinks she might be doing 10 years down the line, Kar says longingly that she hopes she would be relaxing by a beach and giving gyan as chairman, while a CEO actually ran the company.

"But before that I want Zivame to become a very big brand and company."

Image: Cherian Thomas (L), Arun Prabhakar Co-founders, Cucumbertown. Chris Luscher (right) helped with the design. Photograph, courtesy: Cucumbertown

 

A passion for cooking and blogging: Arun Prabhakar and Cherian Thomas, Co-founders, Cucumbertown

When Arun Prabhakar's senior from Model Engineering College in Kerala, Cherian Thomas, sounded him out for help with his pet project, a sort of social network for sharing recipes, he agreed to do so in his spare time but was not immediately convinced about the potential.

"I thought: A recipe-sharing site, really?" says the bespectacled 27-year-old CTO and co-founder of Cucumbertown, which has attracted angel investment of $300,000 from names like Farmville co-creator Sizhao Zao Yang and Silicon Valley seed fund 500 Startups.

The site allows users to post and browse recipes, interact with cooks and follow them, and get tips and suggestions, building a community united by their love for cooking.

When Thomas contacted him, Prabhakar was at education startup TutorVista. Thomas was with gaming company Zynga, which had bought Farmville. Neither of them planned to make it a full-time business.

Meanwhile, Thomas, who was driven by his passion for cooking and blogging, had also reached out to Chris Luscher of Information Architects, a leading design firm based in Zurich.

He had never met Luscher, but by a remarkable coincidence, Luscher replied that he had been thinking of starting something along similar lines and agreed to help with the design.

Image Cucumbertown is the literal translation of a phrase in Malayalam, vellarikka pattanam, which means a place where anything is possible. Photograph, courtesy: Cucumbertown

 

When Thomas showed the proof of concept to his boss at Zynga, he fell in love with it and said he would fund it.

Thus, what was meant to be a part-time project rolled out as a full-fledged startup in October 2012 under the quirky name of Cucumbertown - the literal translation of a phrase in Malayalam, vellarikka pattanam, which means a place where anything is possible.

Thomas says his wife knew he was destined for something like this and was relieved when he quit and launched the startup, rather than watch his mounting frustration at working in a big company. What convinced him to quit, he says, was users' reaction to the website.

Aparna Balakrishnan, a former social worker, is one of them. "The high from getting appreciated by other people is quite nice," says Balakrishnan, who has some 100 followers on Cucumbertown and was introduced to it by friends.

From 100,000 users in 2013, the site now has over 500,000, of whom only 35 per cent are from India.

Thomas adds, tongue in cheek, "Besides, when we launched I was in my 20s and in world-domination mode!"

For Prabhakar, who got to know Thomas through the computer club at college, which he headed, it was the chance to be a co-founder of a startup.

Unlike most engineering graduates, he did not succumb to the pressure to join a big firm when he graduated. Instead, he joined a startup for brands, which ended up shutting shop in six months.

"My mother had been completely against it and had wanted me to join Infosys or a multinational corporation that would give me a steady income."

Undeterred, he then joined TutorVista, quitting that when it was bought by Pearson, to co-found Cucumbertown with Thomas.

Cucumbertown stands out among the ever-increasing startups from India because it managed to attract funding even without a clear revenue model.

This is also why it's not surprising that funding had to be from the US, where investors are used to seeing consumer Internet companies like Twitter or Facebook which, in the initial years, concentrated only on growing its user base. 

The company has just eight employees so far, working out of a rented house in HSR Layout, a favoured neighbourhood for startups in Bengaluru.

"There's no time to relax," Prabhakar says, with a grin, since he clearly does not have a problem with that.

Just about everything about launching Cucumbertown was a challenge, Thomas says.

The laundry list is long, from running out of cash to uncertainty about what the next day would bring to balancing work, family and friends. But the users make it worthwhile, he says. "Any work of art that gets recognised takes you to cloud nine."

And Prabhakar says his mother has come around to the idea that he would not be joining one of the big infotech firms.

A 20-year-old entrepreneur's success story

Besides being a successful entrepreneur, he is the world's second youngest writer of books on ethical hacking.

At the age of 20, when most youngsters are still pursuing their studies and are undecided about their future, Ludhiana-based Trishneet Arora is an internationally recognised ethical hacker who assists industry in IT security, the police in cracking down on cyber crime, and companies in training employees. 

Arora, a first-generation entrepreneur, set up his own company - TAC Security Solutions - in 2012.

Trishneet Arora during a training session with crime branch officials in Mumbai. Photograph: Courtesy, TAC

It offers training, consulting and IT security solutions, and his clients include MNCs as well as domestic organisations such as Reliance Industries, ICICI Bank, Ralson (India) Ltd, the police forces of Punjab and Gujarat, and the Central Bureau of Investigation. 

He is listed by Microsoft Social Forum at third position (after Ankit Fadia and Sunny Vaghela) among India's Top 10 Ethical Hackers.

A back-bencher in school, he failed in the class VIII examination and completed his class X and XII through open learning. Arora is also an author, speaker, cyber crime consultant and investigator. 

"My father is a senior accounts officer in a private firm and my mother is a housewife. With no formal education in business, setting up my own business was a very challenging task. But the passion to do something unique and the growing number of cases of IT security motivated me to set up my own business in 2012," he explained. 

Trishneet Arora talks to CBI officers. Photograph: Courtesy, TAC

Arora said, "It was difficult to get the company registered with the Registrar of Companies as I had no idea about all the legal formalities. But I finally incorporated my own company. I feel passion is the most powerful weapon in any work, and since I had the passion to do something unique, I established myself as a prominent player in the field of IT security." 

He added: "After incorporating our own company, in a week's time we managed to get a client who asked us to do his web security. We charged him fees that were lower than the actual cost, as we believe in client satisfaction. Gradually we moved on and managed to get good clients." 

Arora says that while the big companies invest money in ensuring IT security, SMEs do not, due to the lack of awareness: "They fail to understand that they are secure only as long as there is no cyber attack. Their data and network are vulnerable."

His company, he adds, provides them with IT security through customised solutions. 

Citing an example, he added, "A Punjab-based exporter came to us and said that his buyer had sent payment for an order thrice, but he didn't receive a single penny. While working on the case, we found that somebody had hacked the exporter's network, and the hacker had total control of communication between the two parties." 

Breaching security, the hacker forwarded his own account for payment, and the exporter failed to get his payment. "There are numerous examples where SMEs come to us. Recently we solved a case where an industrialist had become a victim of credit card cloning," said Arora. 

Arora is also planning to open a training centre on ethical hacking in Dubai or the UK.

Trishneet Arora during a training session with Ludhiana police officials. Photograph: Courtesy, TAC

Besides being a successful entrepreneur, he is the world's second youngest writer of books on ethical hacking. 

He has written two books - The Hacking Era and Hacking Talk. The latter was recently released.

The rags-to-riches story of a billionaire BARBER!

Ramesh Babu has a barber shop and a booming car rental business in Bengaluru, but still prefers to cut hair so that he never forgets his humble beginnings, writes A Ganesh Nadar.

Fancy getting your hair styled for only Rs 65 by someone who goes to work at his barber shop in a Rs 3-crore Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost?

Yes, this is the amazing rags-to-riches story of 41-year-old Ramesh Babu who made it big in this cut-throat world all on the dint of his honesty, hard work, humility and some foresight.

Life wasn't always hunky dory for this man. He was only 7 years old when his father, P Gopal, a barber in Bengaluru, died. All he left behind was a barber shop: little did he know that his son would become a billionaire even before he turned 40.

With her husband no more, Ramesh Babu's mother had to work as a cook to help feed her children, get them a semblance of an education and help them have a shot at life.

Since she couldn't run the barber shop, she rented it out for Rs 5 a day.

"We grew up on one meal a day," says Ramesh Babu, in between giving instructions to his staff and answering his mobile phone.

As he grew older, his sense of responsibility tugged at him and he couldn't quite decide if he should study further or start working to support his mother and the family income.

However, upon his mother's insistence, he resolved study up to the pre-university level and then obtained a diploma in electronics. All this while, his father's shop was still being rented out for meagre amounts. He then decided to run it himself and in 1989, he began working at the salon that had first been established by his grandfather.

His barber shop -- Inner Space -- did well enough for him to be able to not just look after his family's needs, but also to save some money.

By 1994, Ramesh had saved enough to buy a Maruti Omni. He bought it for personal use, but it "used to lie idle most of the time" so he decided to put it out on rent.

And that was the seed that later bore fruit and turned into his new company Ramesh Tours and Travels.

Between 1994 and 2004, he bought seven more cars and rented them out too. He ensured that his drivers were well behaved and his clientele happy. Sampath was his first driver and he still works for Ramesh.

Ramesh had a small office till then. In 2004, he decided to enter the luxury car segment. He bought a Mercedes Benz for a cost of Rs 42 lakh (Rs 4.2 million).

He took a loan from the bank for this. "It ran very well because other travel agencies with the same car used old cars. We were the only ones who used a brand new car." From then on, it was a one-way street to success for Ramesh.

He now owns 90 cars in all, most Toyota Innovas. His fleet of cars also includes 27 luxury vehicles: from Mercedes to BMWs to a white Rolls-Royce Ghost. He actually needed a paper and pencil to count the number of cars he owns.

Today, all his cars had gone out on rent. The lowest rent for a car he lets out is Rs 1,000 a day and the most expensive is Rs 50,000 a day (for the Rolls-Royce, of course. You can now roughly calculate his daily income.

His first car -- the Maruti Omni -- is still with him, but it has been 'retired'. He does not rent it out any more.

He has 60 drivers working for him, but you can also rent a car from him and drive it yourself.

At Inner Space, his salon, there are five more people working with him.

From 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. he works at his salon, cutting hair. "Today I had three customers," he says happily.

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., he works at his car rental office. At 4 p.m., he goes back to his saloon and works there till 7 p.m. Thereafter, he comes back to the rental agency and stays there till 8.30 p.m.

He is happily married and has three kids, all in school. The elder two are girls, the youngest is a son. "I will teach my kids to work in both my businesses," he says.

The man is a shining example of dignity of labour. He is not a member of any club because he "does not have the time".

On Sundays, he works the whole day at the salon as it is the 'rush hour' there. That effectively means he does not have a single weekly holiday.

He still remembers the days when his mom worked as a cook. He still cuts and styles hair so that he never forgets his humble beginnings. He says he never disappoints his customers.

He cuts men's hair for Rs 65 and ladies' hair for Rs 150.

Some of the costs that he incurs in his business include fines. Every month, they visit the traffic police and pay all the fines. The fine is taken out from the concerned driver's salary. He does not like authorities stopping his car anywhere and troubling his customers.

And all this happened just because he could not bear to see his Omni lying idle.

His formula for success is simple, "Hard work and honesty," he says, grinning.

His humility is endearing. Success sits easily on his young shoulders even as he good-naturedly cribs about his drivers giving him all sorts of problems.

He has travelled to Germany as a tourist. He has also been to Singapore to learn how to cut women's hair. He works hard and says being honest is essential for success.