MICAns Pitch Entrepreneurial Ideas to Venture Capitalists

The panelists adjudged Nikhil Saraf and Ankit Purohit as the candidates with the best pitch. Their idea, the ‘Stir’ app, is a no nonsense (no conversation) activity engine which recommends activities for its users according to their mood, past social behaviour and time at hand. Ankit recollected “Initially Nikhil and I were pursuing distinct ideas; I was targeting FOMO (fear of missing out) and Nikhil, boredom amongst youth. On Siddharth sir’s suggestion, we collaborated and the output that emerged was a lot better that what we had envisioned individually”. “Our app makes life simple for users. People end up wasting time using opening multiple tabs trying to find how to utilize their idle time. Stir is a go-to app that recommends tasks post understanding your preferences, history and current mood” adds Nikhil. Among other interesting ideas were initiatives such as an app to help people find others interested in playing football & setting up matches across cities, a LinkedIn for independent filmmakers, a service that provides information about offbeat locations and ‘storygifs’, a platform where people can create and share stories/narratives in a storyboard by compiling different Gifs logically with text.

Mr. Chandresh Pala observed, “Some really good ideas were presented. The themes presented are very different from last 2 years which focussed on marketing. The students are cognisant of interesting changes and what is happening out there in the market. But more thought needs to be put to refine these ideas and make them viable.” Throwing more light on the process of this three-term project Mr. Siddharth Deshmukh commented, “We encouraged a ‘fail-fast’ methodology- the more you fail, the quicker will be your learning from the same and application of the insight to your business module.” Mr. Jiten reinstated that ‘aiming low is a crime’ and advised students to harness a new skill or read up on areas that they didn’t have expertise in prior to joining the corporate world in the feedback session. Data collection and analytics, in his opinion, is a challenging task and is a pre-requisite for any good enterprise.