Meet the Microsoft and IIM-A mentor who founded 3 startups and an incubator

Ravi (far left) and his team

Which is easier: running a startup or running a startup incubator? Ask Microsoft Accelerator and IIM-Ahmedabad mentor Ravi Trivedi – he’s done both and then some.

After years abroad working as a Wall Street analyst, at Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America, and as a principal at the North Carolina VC firm Southeast Interactive Technology Funds, the Duke MBA alumnus returned to India in 2011 and founded Srijan Capital, a technology incubator that provides seed investment.

Two years ago, he founded ecommerce coupon site CouponRani. Soon after, he founded its Malaysian counterpart CouponBelanja. To help those sites collect and engage users, he started PushEngage, which gives each site push notifications for mobile and browsers. Later, he expanded PushEngage to be available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) for other apps and sites.

“I realized I would love to build a startup, so I wanted to come up with a unique model,” he tells Tech in Asia. His love of startups was partly what brought him back to India.

Ravi’s startups are all bootstrapped, and his business model is an interesting one. His firm and his startups work together as one system. Srijan Capital fuels Coupon Rani and Coupon Belanja. In turn, revenue from those businesses provide him with enough money to fuel PushEngage, which he describes as a “high risk” business. Only a small portion of Srijan Capital’s time and resources go into investing in businesses. The real aim is finding and getting operationally involved in startups.

Ideally, he explains, when the firm decides to fund a startup, one of Srijan’s partners will join as a cofounder. Neither of his couponing sites are geared toward raising money from investors – they simply exist to help him fund PushEngage and other startups in the future.

“It’s extremely non-scalable but helps me fulfill my passion for startups,” he says. Since he can pick the startups that Srijan works with, he says it gives him a greater sense of agency in what he does.

“It’s kind of new out here [in India], but if you’re average-plus in the U.S., you can excel here,” Ravi says.

Push it real good

Ravi is proudest of PushEngage because he thinks that while push notifications on smartphones have become almost second nature, push notifications for browsers are still a new area that hasn’t been completely utilized. His inspiration came from Google Chrome, which released the Push API and Notification API as part of its browser update in spring 2015. Firefox released the feature in January 2016, and Safari had it since June 2010.

“If you ask a room of developers what mobile device features are missing from the web, push notifications are always high on the list,” says a Google Developers blog post on the subject.

Between the three browsers, Ravi says he saw potential for a 55 percent market share for PushEngage. His own research showed him that push notifications increased engagement potentially from one to three percent, up to 40 percent compared to sending emails to engage customers. People are just more likely to open push notifications than links in emails. He launched PushEngage in January 2016.

So far, 295 sites across the globe have signed up for PushEngage, and the service is available in several languages. The SaaS currently serves small and medium-sized websites, and the team is working on expanding the service to larger websites. Corporate pricing starts at a monthly subscription fee of US$150, while the service is available for smaller businesses for US$29 or US$49 per month.

Startup inception