Dongrila is a portal that lets B-School academia download data and e-books that are difficult / expensive to otherwise procure from the web. Launched in July this year, the startup has already begun to make waves in its target region – South East Asia.
Today we get up and close with the CEO of this effervescent startup, Tushar Sen. Having spent nearly 14 years in banking and financial services he finally answered his calling; entrepreneurship. There are a lot of accomplishments in Tushar’s official bio, not least of which is founding running the much talked about company – Dongrila. One thing that isn’t in all those official bios is that Tushar– an Indian born blokewho learnt web-programming on his own–coded the entire website of his startup himself.
The most striking part about our conversation with Tushar was what he calls the “Trident of Shiva” he discovered during his journey as an entrepreneur. The Trident as the name suggests forks out into – PRODUCT | PLATFORM | PROMOTION. So, we decided to set the “Trident” as the premise of our conversation with the founder of Dongrila.
“There is nothing fancy about starting a company, especially if you have to bootstrap the venture. It is a journey that demands extremes of dedication, faith and hard-work. If you are doing it for money alone it will fizzle out sooner or later, the only thing that drives the little venture amidst dragons, dark clouds and personal Mara is passion. The root of the word passion is suffering. You gotta be willing to suffer for your vision, you gotta be willing to suffer to reach BIW (best in world), you gotta be willing to suffer the ridicules and laughter of your critics and your cynics to reach to a place called world-class.”
Now, let us get to the interesting stuff quickly – The Trident.
Tushar’s Trident starts with the 1st P – Product, product he says “is the not just an item we are trying to sell to our consumers, it is far more than that – it is value-addition, social-currency or it can even be hope.”
Dongrila’s product suite can be called disruptive because it is likely to change the B-School education system for good. The need for Dongrila’s products stems from the fact that B-School students and professors are in constant need of current and relevant data to complete their submissions, thesis, dissertations, presentations and lecture notes. Such data though available on the internet is either out-dated or is extremely expensive. The result therefore is sub-standard submissions for students and mediocre lecture notes for professors. This simple problem has higher repercussions in the career of both the students and the professors and it also affects the ranking of the concerned B-School.
Tushar says that the other two forks of the Trident are the two wheels of the cart (company) and the product he says “drives the cart ahead.”
“For a tech startup platform has to be secure, fast and easy to use. Websites with higher page-load time suffer and choke out early in the race, search engines and consumers penalize slower and unsecure sites with equal brutality. A good platform helps build trust among consumers, it has to be fast, informative and easy to use and totally secure. Website aesthetics is a double edged sword; you can’t do without it and you can’t live with it.”
The third P of his Trident – Promotion he says “will remain to be a challenge for all bootstrapped startups.” Promotion involves advertising, PR, marketing, events, road-shows, talk-shows etc. And all this comes at a cost that bootstrapped startups are hardly ever able to afford.
“Promotion may seem like an expenditure heavy activity on the face of it, but it can be fun if you know how to break or bend the rules, it has the same basic rules, just like the rules of gravity. Some of them can be bent, others can be broken. With the advent of Web 2.0 and the social media we no longer are dependent on traditional promotion strategies, it is a totally different game now. The more you unearth, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you grow.”
Shruti is a blogger & a digital marketing consultant at Rankmebest.com with lots of passion to write about technology, startups & other niches. She has contributed to a number of famous websites. She live and breathe in digital marketing. Her aim is to spread her thought-provoking ideas to all generations. Stay tuned with her at:@shruti_gupta01 or via skype : shrutigupta2811
