Founded in April 2016 by Anuj Agarwal, Jahnvi Sharma, Rachna Ghiya and Swapnil Soni,
enTRIPreneur organizes trips exclusively for entrepreneurs to offbeat locations where they can connect, learn & share in an informal setting.
For the founding team, the first love is traveling & connecting with entrepreneurs. The idea came to them when they saw an increasing number of startup conferences & meetups happening all over the world. But they were not content with the way people were connecting over these events. The interaction was limited to exchanging visiting cards. And that’s how enTRIPreneur was born which aims at deeply connecting entrepreneurs over a trip.
In an exclusive interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, Rachna Ghiya, Co-founder, enTRIPreneur, shares details about her startup.
What are the unique key feature/services of enTRIPreneur?We took our first trip to an offbeat place known as Viraatkhai where there was just one lodge surrounded by mountains, clouds & trees. It was not just a vacation for the selected entrepreneurs but a time to unwind & connect with passionate entrepreneurs coming from varied fields. No one exchanged a visiting card but they rather exchanged experiences, learnings & solutions to the real problems related to each others’ startups.
How is enTRIPreneur different from existing ones?It is totally different. We are just not organizing tours like any other random travel company. We are curating experiences exclusively for entrepreneurs. We invite applications from entrepreneurs and further select them on the basis of their experience, industry, kind of value they can bring to the trip, startup stage and so on. You need to be a true entrepreneur in order to part these experiences. The first experience that we curated had adventurous activities, bonfire discussions, local community interaction along with other team building games that really helped them in knowing each other. At the end of the trip, they not only knew about the businesses of other entrepreneurs but also the way they can further collaborate.
Funding status & monetization modelWe are bootstrapped so far. We want to keep experiences as affordable for entrepreneurs while making sure that this venture remains sustainable. Our monetization will mainly come from sponsorships.
Traction detailsWe organized our first trip in the month of June & got 412 applications from different states of India along with Spain & Germany. We chose 15 entrepreneurs from 412 applications after having a one-to-one chat with 40 entrepreneurs who are shortlisted based on certain parameters.
Future plans
We are planning our next trip in month of December which will have 20 entrepreneurs - 10 will be Indian & 10 will be international. The long term plan will be to organize workaway camps of longer duration (7-10 days). We plan to see our enTRIPreneur community growing by 5000 people in next 5 yrs and around 20-25 startups emerging from this community.
Marketing plansWe tried different platforms to make sure that we reach to our target audience i.e. entrepreneurs. Facebook remained the main platform.
Challenges facedEvery new concept is first questioned and so was ours. It was hard to make people understand the concept. Also figuring out a place that is remote yet helps us in providing the experience was a challenge. There were monetary challenges because we never wanted to charge totally from an entrepreneur as we wanted to keep it affordable for entrepreneurs yet there were expenses that we needed to cover. We relied on sponsors for the same and with the support from JECRC University everything worked out as we had planned and envisioned.
Market opportunity Every entrepreneur feels the need of taking a break but most of them stop themselves because of the guilt they may have after taking a vacation - the guilt of having wasted time. We want every entrepreneur to take a guilt free vacation where they just not unwind but connect with entrepreneurs who can help him/her out or may be suggest a solution to the problem they are currently facing. With the growing number of startups, we surely see enTRIPreneur growing at a fast pace.
