Navigating the Full Spectrum of Entrepreneurship: From Conception and Operation to Valuable Closure and Insights
****I always wanted to start my own business; with my previous project on Finflow, I had a lot of learning, and now I want to start something where I can build software and scale it in a big way.
I was going to pick up the dry cleaning when I realized I had forgotten my bill, and then the thought came to me: everything is digitally identified, money everything, but still a huge chunk of the bill needs to be kept offline. Then, the idea of Di-Bi came to be. Make the whole billing system digitalized and get rich financial data.
Then, my friend Shashwat started working on the idea and started shaping the idea.
We started to take part in a lot of B-Plan competitions to learn a lot about startups and get recommendations on where we are going right and where we are going wrong.
Slowly, we started to win a lot of competitions, which gave us a lot of confidence to continue our startup. We also got selected for the ‘Foundation Program for Aspiring Entrepreneurs’ by BML University & NITI AAYOG. The program helped me to build and validate the idea and helped me build the initial Prototype by doing hands-on projects in the market regarding our startup.
After the program was completed, we started working on making the Proof of concept. We got great help from mentors like Abraham Cherian and **David Shastry** to build our Proof of Concept.
After we completed the Proof of concept, we were still not able to launch the MVP and test it on shops as there was always some error or issue coming with the prototype. Finally, as Inter IIT approached, the team decided to give our Startup DiBi a try at Inter IIT - Entrepreneurship Problem Statement. So, a lot of students got together and started working on the idea, and we worked day and night to build the first launchable MVP in the market. Also, we won Inter IIT and secured Bronze Medal. Finally, the MVP was launched in the market, and we got it running in 5 shops in my local area, where they were able to send bills digitally to the users without any hassle.
As we were running the MVP with the very basic feature, we wanted to move to the next part. We tried hard for the next 3-4 months but were unable to get to the next features. The software was getting more and more difficult to build, and managing the shops that were running our MVP with academics and other college activities was getting difficult, which created a lot of problems for us to scale our startup. So, after nearly 4-5 months of battle, we thought of closing our 2-year-long work and decided to start a new chapter.