An IT start-up makes the most of a big business opportunity among small retailers in Cuttack and their IT needs
Cuttack is not home to IT and being a start-up IT company here does not merit much attention. Bhubaneswar, 30 km away, has larger players such as TCS and Infosys and some small IT companies, but Cuttack does not have any IT companies to talk of.
But the absence of a fertile ground for IT entrepreneurship or supportive mentors did not deter Satyabrata Bishwal from venturing into the space. He took on a professor at his local engineering college as mentor and used the limitation of being in a small city to his advantage by designing IT solutions needed by shops in small towns.
It is in the small retailers in Cuttack and their needs that Bishwal saw a big business opportunity. His only challenge is to deal with computer illiteracy among potential customers and design some simple systems they can handle.
It was during his last semester at the Ajay Binay Institute of Technology in Cuttack that he had an opportunity to study the retail business. He then realised that there was an untapped market in the small- and medium-size retail business. As the big guys were fighting for business from big retailers, his start-up, Silicon, found its niche among smaller retailers. Business took off in 2009 and like most small companies in the region, Silicon started from a one-room set-up.
Bishwal says his first breakthrough came from a jewellery store in Bhubaneswar, for which Silicon developed software for maintaining accounts, stock and CRM. ?Their requirements are very different and we are designing solutions according to the locality they are in,? says Bishwal. The next order was from a fashion apparel store and the list has been growing since.
?We now have 130 customers in Orissa and we plan to spread the business across the country,? he says. Silicon?s hope is to build sufficient volumes and then ramp up, because he says he has seen many of these businesses and they are the same everywhere with similar kinds of problems and challenges. However, money is a constraint for scaling up and there are no seed funds or angels, so he is opting to take the franchisee route to grow. Bhagalpur and Raipur are next on his market list.
But setting up a company in Cuttack has its advantages too, says Bishwal. Silicon has been able to access talent at much lower costs, which has helped business take off with little resources. There are three engineering colleges around, so getting manpower is not an issue and space is not expensive. Plus, living costs are manageable. Small, clearly, is big for him.