This smalltown boy failed fast, scored an exit with his next startup, and is now pushing style

Elephant feeding ritual in Thrissur

Thrissur is an old cultural town with plenty of colourful, intricately architectured temples. This town in India’s southernmost state of Kerala is stunningly vibrant and isn’t short of entrepreneurs either.

Back in the late 1970s, King Sakthan Thampuran invited several Syrian Christian families and brahmins from neighboring areas to move to Thrissur. Consequently, several gold artisans, merchants, and ayurvedic doctors (practitioners of traditional Indian medicine) settled there and built successful businesses. Some have even gone international. Jewellery chains like Malabar, Kalyan, and JoyAlukkas have dozens of stores across India and the Middle East.

But there was little diversification in the occupation for a long, long time. That’s changing with emergence of several tech institutes in the neighborhood. Much like other engineering institutes, students who develop apps for college assignments have aspirations of taking their product beyond the campus. And then the state government intervened to set up incubators. Prominent ones today are Technopark Technology Business Incubator and Startup Village.

So the ecosystem is slowly coming together.

Meet the hero

Anup Mohan from Thrissur, a computer science engineering dropout from the University of Calicut, has been a witness to most of the startup action in Kerala. His startup, Flamingos Media, was the first Startup Village incubatee to get an exit. It got acquired by Facebook’s preferred marketing developer Kreata Global based in the UAE.

With Flamingos, Anup tried to fill the digital marketing gap that existed in Kerala-based businesses. Its first client was JoyAlukkas for which it designed several Facebook apps and campaigns. The Golden Moments campaign was the sweetest. When he exited the firm, Flamingos was a 150-client strong company.

But this wasn’t his first startup. Anup had dropped out of college to develop Cazpo, an app to connect students of all college campuses in Kerala. Though it became popular in Kerala, he couldn’t figure out the business viability of the app. Also, at that point, there was no funding ecosystem to tap.

After completing his lock-in period at Kreata Global, Anup joined Lookup as one of the early employees and went on to lead marketing. Lookup, which is a messaging app connecting shoppers with local businesses, went on to raise funding from some high profile angel investors, including Twitter founder Biz Stone.

Anup still remembers how he was not allowed to attend the placement drive conducted by Infosys in the seventh semester of his engineering course because his academic performance wasn’t up to par. He had invested disproportionate amount of effort into Cazpo, which wasn’t encouraged by his college. But now Infosys founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has invested in Lookup.

One more time

With Cazpo, Flamingos, and Lookup behind him, Anup desired to startup again. This time, the problem that caught his eye was the annoyance most Indian boys face while going for a haircut every fortnight: wait time. Anup always tried to dodge the problem by calling the barber before landing up at the salon. Despite the “booking,” he still had to wait, almost always. On pressing them for professionalism, his barber complained that the customers fix an appointment and never turn up on time. Obviously, it was time for some technology intervention.

Anup grabbed the opportunity by launching Styl, an app for people to book an appointment and barbers to manage those bookings.

Management in style