Mechanical Engineering startup India

Peerzada Abrar & Krithika Krishnamurthy, ET Bureau

(Those launching new businesses…)

Rohan Shravan was 24 years old when he founded Notion Ink, a startup that designed India's first tablet computer Adam. The device was launched five months before Apple placed the first version of the iPad on store shelves.

At its international debut in the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January 2010, one of the first to place an order for Adam was an employee at Apple headquarters in Cupertino. However, in the ensuing months as the iPad gained iconic status, Adam dropped by the wayside, felled by the lack of risk capital to grow the business.

"When I told venture capitalists that our product will be a challenger to Samsung and Apple, they laughed at me, " said Shravan, a mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur who initially bootstrapped the firm with personal savings of around Rs 6 lakh.

Shravan's experience is hardly unique. In the midst of an unprecedented entrepreneurial boom, several of those starting up say there are more hurdles than advantages in the Indian startup sector. Apart from the red tape and the lack of policy support there is also a shortage of true risk capital that can back edgy new ideas.

Customers are unwilling to pay for untested products and many entrepreneurs choose the middle path fearing failure. "I was very aggressive, arrogant and fought like a warrior, the so-called experts advised me to tone down and be nice, which led to our downfall, " said Shravan who trained engineering students to work on Adam as a way to minimise staff costs. "Around 80 per cent of the employees were final year students; they were later snatched by Samsung and Motorola."

In recent years, several ventures including short messaging service GupShup, personalised news service Frrole and language keypad maker Luna Ergonomics have altered business models when faced with regulatory hurdles or the fear of rejection from investors and customers.

This at a time when many global technology companies including WhatsApp, Facebook, caller identification service Truecaller, home rental marketplace Airbnb, and question and answer site Quora count India as one of their fastest growing markets.