 Well, this week the spotlight has most definitely been on the presentation of Budded 2016. The finance minister, Arun Jaitley, reiterating a series of policy initiatives and schemes that aim at easing all the hurdles around startups. And this is definitely a very promising move considering a lot of startup watchers and investors have been pointing out this desperate need for funding within the country's fastest growing startups. And when we look at the total funds that are given to startups right now, a large chunk of course offered the money coming in is going towards marketing and advertising, whether it's digital, outdoor or television advertisements, startups in India are pushing the envelope when it comes to creating a brand identity for themselves. We're taking a look at what has been achieved so far and what the road ahead is looking like. In a list of 189 countries compiled by the World Bank, India ranks at 155 in terms of ease of starting a business. And it's not surprising as a startup ecosystem has come a long way in the country, especially in the last decade or so. Flipkart, Snapdeal, Zomato, Inmobi to name just a few. Earlier this year, the government launched a startup India program giving incentives and relaxing compliance requirements for startup companies. Three weeks into 2016, the government announced a 10,000 crore fund for innovation-driven enterprises. Clearly, there seems to be enough opportunities to accommodate multiple players in the startup scene. You know, one of the things clearly that's visible today is there are a lot more entrepreneurs and that's great. And you know, you have this positive spiral that is in the country, which can bring the country and take the country to a next level altogether, which I think is amazing. I think the quality of entrepreneurs has also really gone up. They're really, really smart, sharp entrepreneurs. I think the caution in all of this is entrepreneurship is not a fashion. It seems to possibly even get to that level where it's become a fashionable entity and people should be really, it's a very serious and a hard thing to do. So people should be aware of that. My only hope is that entrepreneurs remain crazy because that's the only way to change things in the world and you know, we've tried to remain crazy as much as possible. Many times and not most of the times, you know, people have found us not to be doing things that, you know, defile, you know, most of the people have thought that what we are doing defies logic. But you know, it's okay because entrepreneurship is about that. When it comes to creating a brand identity, startups are leveraging through smart strategies, spending a huge chunk of money on marketing. Zomato, for instance, spent 1.2 crores on its television campaign last December. The company also relies on content marketing in various forms like infographics, videos and campaigns that attract consumers. Mobile commerce platform, ATM, set aside 500 crores on branding and marketing last year for both online and offline brand development. In fact, last year, they struck a 203.28 crore title sponsorship deal with BCCI till 2019. Being in India, we have to target the youth and I believe for youth there is nothing better brand than an aspirational brand. We don't want to be cool, funky young brand. We want to be aspirational brand where youth wants to be. To do that, we sort of put our brand values on sincerity, aspiration, perseverance. And I think those all come when you talk about sports. If you see wallet works well, you can add cash to it. And right now we were primarily online. Now we are adding like a million points where you could add wallet cash to the wallet. Now when we talk about million, we talk today as less as like 50,000 of those points. So that journey will allow us to get into large number and then all those places will place those hoardings. My expectation is that if we can distribute our wallet like matchstick distribution, like wherever you can buy a matchstick, you can buy, get wallet that is money. That is what we want to grow. Digital marketing is also another way of cementing basis in this space. Oh Your Rooms launched the Or Kya Chahiye, a 360 degree campaign last year that was promoted aggressively on all the social media channels through contests and other interactive measures. Taking digital marketing to another level, Flipkart and Minthra had closed down their mobile and desktop sites last year, converting into app-only shopping mediums. However, realizing it didn't quite work out for them, both of them are back to the basics now and have relaunched their mobile sites. So it's very simple. We believe in the app-only strategy and it's actually working for us. So I'll start with that statement and I'll tell you why we actually did what we did. Even when we launched the app, a big portion of the app was really around being able to be social. And what we mean by being social in the absence of the word is to share products, share collections with your friends. Now, eventually we'd of course like everyone to have the Minthra app, but since they don't at this point, the way to share it either through WhatsApp or through mail, suppose you're shopping on the Minthra app and you like a set of products and you want to share it with a friend. What the web page allows you to do is to be able to share that with that friend without that friend having to download the app. But what this allows you to do is to actually experience Minthra and the share itself becomes a lot easier. It's a lot more consumer friendly. But eventually to shop, you do need to actually get on the app and do it. But what we're hoping will happen is you get to experience, you get to taste a bit of Minthra, you get to see the products, you get to see the collections. Then you download the app. Instead of just saying Minthra has great products, we're showing you. So whether it's about creating an aspirational brand or marketing through promotions and discounts, there are a number of strategies that startups are adapting to stay ahead of competitors. The question is, what is a sustainable model? We've stayed away from discounting as a strategy. So we've done sort of very selective discounting when we get entered cities. However, a lot of these promotions that we keep running, they're actually very good for the consumers to sort of at least try us once and sort of figure out. One of our biggest growth sports came when we started doing, you know, hair is half a kg mangoes in every order during the mango season and people actually really liked it. And these are small gestures you make to the consumers to sort of, you know, have them try the app, figure out whether this is something that they will actually use and then they figure out the use cases. They will say, oh, I can use this app or this and that. And that's how the world of mouth sort of takes off. I think there was a time a few years ago where we stepped back and said, you know, the world of advertising is going to really, really move on to mobile because every one of us spends disproportionate amount of time on mobile phones. And in that case, if that were to happen, how do we ensure that, you know, the advertising that is appearing in front of consumers is great? We thought that we should do something about making advertising being loved by people. And therefore, you know, last year we essentially went about launching this platform called Meep which was all about reimagining advertising and making advertising, you know, making consumers love advertising. And we have done that and that's an effort that took us several years to work on. And we think it can change the face of advertising globally, not just in India. As a brand, I think it's slightly introvertish. Like, you know, it's about me. It's about my memories. It's about, you know, my connection with these drinks. And then you, as a brand, I think the attempt is to take you back to your innocent memories and, you know, probably try to have, say, we are reaffirming faith in life a little bit. You know, so that's what you're trying to do. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reiterated the importance of startups in his budget speech. He proposed a number of initiatives, some of which include 100% deduction of profits for three out of five years for startups set up during April 2016 and March 2019. Well, many investors have been pointing out that the country's fast growing startups are in need of funding in order to scale up their business ideas. Considering a good chunk of the total funds given to startups goes into marketing, the policies therefore seem promising. We internally run three businesses, marketing, payments and commerce. Right. And marketing vertical is profit-generating. It generates, like, 100-plus crore profit every year. Marketing will be the wherewithal of this business. When you look at commerce, the hidden revenue will be made from marketing. And payments is where we are sort of leading the pack. Big marketplaces where we are spending the money. So next five years, our budgets are about 5,000 crores. And we were profitable last year. And before that, we've always been profitable. But this year, we will not be profitable because this deficit is where we are spending money and growth. So consumer growth, marketplace growth, and the ecosystem build up. These are the things that we are spending on. So we've raised a total of 47 million USD so far. Most of it came in after we sort of became a consumer platform. The expectation, the investors are not really sort of meddling with the business. They recognize that we are pretty much creating a category. So some version of this will be a big business. I guess that is the bet. To be very honest, like, it is actually a good place. So, I mean, when I compared to, you know, we ran this business for a year and a half without capital. And we were sort of growing at a very healthy pace. But, you know, you are dealing with a lot of, you know, you have to make sure that your money is well sort of well managed. And we didn't really have a team. It was just me and sort of and a whole bunch of delivery people. Now we actually have a team. So the sort of day-to-day becomes easier. The sort of longer term strategic, it becomes difficult. Now with the government allowing 100% FDR in marketing and processing of food products, this will encourage rural marketing in food processing industry and even for startups in this space. Clearly, one can't ignore the draw of the startup scene in India, especially with these new policies proposed by the government. The road ahead for startups seemed to be a positive one. For almost a year and a half, we were not a funded business. We were trying to bootstrap it. And we did it rather successfully. A lot of what we are today happened because at some point of time we wanted to make a small tweak and that tweak turned into, like, a business decision. Even if you look at us moving from purely a back-end player to actually doing a consumer app, it was an experiment that went really, really well. So I think sort of be persistent with what you're trying to do and be open to sort of making the changes. You know, when the first time after a series of some 30 plus investors saying no to us, the first investor basically backed us up, the confidence within ourselves as co-founders and the team really went soaring through the roof because it was the first time, you know, someone had backed us to a level where we saw potential of a success, you know, over a slightly long period of time. We also thrived in that emotion for the next couple of years of saying we are destined to do something big and so let's go for it. And a lot of times just going for it make things happen and I would credit that first big turning point to a lot of what we achieved later on in life.