How many start-ups have withdrawn after filling out the nomination forms?
So far, there are 297 companies online; nine have withdrawn. One was sold off so (it) had to withdraw; the eight include Tringme and Muziboo.
What was the issue with source attribution to Pluggd.in while nominating a start-up?
That was a very early glitch because we were so scared of not giving people credit. I’m sure we’ve looked at companies all over India, we’ve also been in touch with CII, contacted management and trade associations. Pluggd.in was not a partner. The company was indeed sourced from Pluggd.in and we accidentally sent (an) email out saying Pluggd.in had nominated them. We falsely attributed something to (Ashish Sinha, chief editor of Pluggd.in) that he did not do. The minute we realized this was a mistake, we wrote back to the entrepreneur and to Ashish. Now what we’re doing is unless people say you must attribute it to me, we’re just taking it as general nomination.
Some start-ups have criticized the process of rolling out nominations in batches on the website, which gives a heads up to the early nominations.
We expected more rolling nominations because people needed time to get the word out. It’s not as simple as two extra days or even an extra week. We have a complicated problem in making sure that all 300 and more get attention. If you’re up there for two months instead of two weeks, it’s easier. But we’re trying to find other ways to put groups of people together by slicing start-ups in different ways, such as how to get non-consumer companies out there or showcase companies from smaller cities because less people know about it. We do think there is a disadvantage to coming in late, but we’re not going to shut the nominations for those who do and we’re thinking how to improve it for next year. We’ll have a lot of pre-nomination activities, and batching people for more time on the site for next time. It will be easier if more people know about it so we can market it much earlier, get a lot of that work done in advance.
There is concern that companies might spam for votes through email and SMS. How do you ensure the top start-ups are chosen because they are promising companies and not the best spammers?
This is why we have structured (the) first round where half comes from expert reviews. We try to anticipate that it shouldn’t be all public voting in the first round. You need a 50-50 weightage of public votes and expert rating to get into the shortlist.
Any other learnings so far?
It’s much harder than we thought. For example, self-nominations are wonderfully expressive, but sometimes it is harder for lay people to understand, and working with the entrepreneur to get language done is very time-consuming. We were also concerned about the turnaround time on expert reviews. It was supposed to be one week, but we were really struggling with that. Luckily, our partners are coming in to help us, we have volunteers as well as three people internally to help with follow-ups just on the expert reviews.