Hottest start ups - III - DeskAway

Entrepreneur's Details
Name		Sahil Parikh
Age		28
Hometown		Mumbai
Family background		Business
More than 1 company?		Yes (2)
Education		Bachelors
Graduated from		University of North Carolina
Former employer		ClinicalTools Inc
Former designation		Software Dev team
Area of responsibility		Heading a Software Dev team
Favorite book/movie Business Basics Company Name DeskAway Founded in 2007 Headquartered in Mumbai Company website/URL http://www.deskaway.com | http://www.synage.com Industry IT/ Internet/ Software Stage of the company Scaling up Source of idea Systematic search for business opportunity Awards & honors. Business description Finalist, Proto.in in 2008; Finalist, Startup.in in 2008. Synage is one of the very first Software As A Service (SaaS) companies from India. DeskAway, its flagship service, is a monthly, subscription-based online team and project collaboration service that helps individuals, small businesses, and teams within larger organizations to organize, manage and track their projects from a central location with their partners, employees and clients. With the growing number of small businesses/ distributed teams, increased broadband penetration, and 24x7 mobile work culture, DeskAway is rightly poised to give teams an accurate view of how their projects are doing and help eliminate common problems that occur when multiple people are collaborating: email spam, multiple file versions, lost files, task accountability issues, lack of reporting & work transparency. How does the business make money?. a) Recurring monthly/yearly subscriptions b) Ad supported Free plan. Team information Sitanshi Talati-Parikh, Co-founder. Competition Competitors Basecamp, GoPlan, CentralDesktop, Zoho Projects How different if your product or service? It has... Substitutes that differprice or value In what way is your product or service different? "3 Things - Simplicity, Affordabilty & Feature Richness all packed into one powerful online service. " Our leading features like "Project Templates"...> Read more.. In what way is your product or service different? "3 Things - Simplicity, Affordabilty & Feature Richness all packed into one powerful online service. " Our leading features like "Project Templates" and "Automatic Email Reminders" help eliminate guesswork within your projects. This makes DesKAway extremely powerful as a project collaboration tool (compared to its competitors) By The Numbers 2006 2007 No. of employees Did not exist 6-15 No. of locations Did not exist 0-1 No. of customers Did not exist over 50 Turnover Did not exist 11-50 lacs Profits Did not exist Primary source of initial funding Primary source of additional funding Personal savings Raised institutional capital? No		E-Myth by Michael Gerber | Movie: The Hurricane Why is this startup hot? We are hot because: 1. We launched the first SaaS project collaboration service completely conceptualized, designed, developed and marketed from India when everyone was still working on outsourcing and services from abroad. Our model is scalable, does not require very specialized knowledge (think Mcdonalds!) and can be run by a small team. 2. Everyday, we impact thousands of small businesses around the world! How many startups can do that? 3. Our CEO is the chief customer service representative of the company. 4. We are green -our entire business is on the web. Less fuel & paper consumption. 5. We were one of finalist and best companies at proto.in January 2008. 6. People confirm that DeskAway is awesome because it fulfils the key areas of an online service (Great customer service, User-friendliness, Affordable, Feature-rich):