NAME OF STARTUP: Syook
FOUNDED IN (Year): 2016
FOUNDER’S NAME:
Syook was founded by Arjun Nagarajan (39), Saurabh Sharma (36) and Aman Agarwal (36) who had previously studied at IIT Guwahati, ISTC Chandigarh and IIT Madras respectively. All the 3 co-founders have a combined 41+ years of experience in the energy sector and have worked around the world.
THE IDEA: What is the problem being solved by your startup / business?:
We saw a gap in the market and founded Syook with the goal of enhancing operational efficiency. We created InSite, a location platform that allows businesses to track all of their mobile assets from one place.
Users receive real-time location, dashboards, alarms, and analytics with InSite. InSite provides users with many benefits, solutions, modules and features that assist them to grow their business by enhancing their operations, profitability, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
THE FOUNDER’S STORY: When and how did you come up with the idea for the business?:
India elected a new Prime Minister and he wanted us to Make in India. So more out of FOMO than anything else, my co-founders and I decided to quit our jobs and return to India. Our thought process was, if we don’t do it now, we will never do it. Saurabh was in Saudi, Aman was in Paris, and I was in the US. so it took over a year to actually move back and start something. Initially we were very naive. We thought since we have the ideas, execution will be really easy. We will just hire developers to build tech and they will do the needful. Needless to say, we failed spectacularly.
The founding team has a common mindset, we do not know how to give up. We certainly are not the smartest people around, but we are resilient.
Finally out of complete frustration after making no progress for about 6 months, Aman and I reasoned that if we can extract oil from 5 kms under the earth, we can learn to build tech, and, We learned! I actually went to coding class at the age of 34 where most people were a decade younger than me. It took us some time to learn and build stuff. Fast forward 6 years and the product we have built is actually used by leading companies like Unilever, FIAT, ONGC among others. We faced great challenges during the 2 years of Covid, but now things are coming back and we are gaining traction, especially outside India.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER: What is the typical profile of your target customer? Where would they be located?:
We’re focused on companies in the oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, automotive,etc , sectors which have atleast 500 assets to track
LESSONS TO SHARE: What 3 key lessons from your startup journey you’d like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs?:
Here are a few lessons from our cofounder and CEO Arjun Nagarajan in his own words:
1) Customer Comes First — Maintain Transparency: Sounds cliche’ right? Almost everyone says “Customer comes first” but the oilfield taught us to take the concept of customer satisfaction to the next level. We learnt from day one to think about customer problems and constraints with the attitude that we have to get the job done in a safe and timely manner.
2) When we started Syook, we had a tough time finding a tech co-founder. After trying for a few months, we decided either we could give up, or code ourselves. It was another steep learning curve. Today we have our own tech team and are able to engineer better products because we did the initial work ourselves. We strive hard to consciously keep learning, unlearning and re learning.
3) I started setting aside a little uninterrupted time for myself. Phone diverted, no checking email and absolutely no meetings. This was the time I really got my stuff done.
In today’s hyperconnected world, its almost impossible to focus and basically think. These days, I prepare for the battles, a day in advance. I spend at least a couple of hours early morning doing my work, things that I cannot delegate and requires me to focus uninterrupted.
HQ City: Bengaluru
Website URL: https://www.syook.com/
Number of Employees: 25-50
Connect On Twitter: @syookapp
