Rajdeep Chatterjee is a Co-founder and the Chief-technical officer of indiangrahak.com and is a final year student of BBA from Techno India, Salt Lake, Kolkata. He was a student of the July 2014 batch of the Diploma in Entrepreneurship Administration and Business Laws.  Rajdeep talks about his startup journey and his interaction with the course. Over to Rajdeep.

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I co-founded indiangrahak.com in August 2014, it is an e-commerce platform which empowers and give online presence to all small retail grocery stores & supermarkets to reach out to their customers in a better way. Customers can place order online in simple steps and get their order delivered at their doorsteps from their nearby shop. For the shop keeper, indiangrahak opens up the world of analytics, new era marketing techniques & customer engagement all through his computers. India’s organized retail sector has been rapidly adopting e-commerce, while small shops have been left behind due to lack of know-how, limited resources, and operational complexity. There are an estimated 1.4 crore kirana stores and small shops that could benefit from e-commerce solutions in India.

Indiangrahak is already active in dozens of stores in Jamshedpur, Kolkata & Ranchi serving thousands of consumers since starting their pilot operations in august of 2014. They are seeing 30% month-over-month order growth rate and are looking to bring on many new stores in the coming months.

I was not aware about the course, however after several research and curiosity and interest about startups and entrepreneurship I came in contact with Mr. Ramanuj Mukherjee and Pallavi Pareek, who inspired me to take the course.

I wanted to build an effective organization structure and its various aspects and to avoid it irregularities I took up this course so that I can build successful business venture.

It was a great experience while pursuing this course, various Periodic Webinars conducted by iPleaders gave me opportunities to come in contact with those experienced mentoring personalities, their skills, and way to handle difficult situations and various entrepreneurship networks throughout the countries.

Raising investment – Angel rounds, VC & PE deals & Intellectual Property Rights are the most useful modules during the course

One of the first and most important requirements for setting up venture is the seed capital; this can range from a few thousand to crores, depending on the type and size of the venture, arranging funds is the main challenge for any startup this is where venture capitalists and angel investors come in these investors lend money and take a stake. This course has given me sufficient knowledge in the following areas – Angel investments and regulation of angel funds, Understanding non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), Transfer of shares, Dealing with multiple investors, Shareholders Agreements and how to negotiate them, Exit issues in investment transactions, Term Sheets, etc.

This course has given me valuable insights such as drafting various agreements with clients, dealing with clients, and also choosing right organization structure my own venture and was able to help other entrepreneur in structuring their new venture.

Skills I learned during the course structuring a company, appoint advisors and remunerate them, drafting Co-Founder’s Agreement, taxation of software product and SAAS companies, clear understanding of Shareholders’ Meetings, legal instruments, Shareholders’ Agreement, how to raise investments effectively, drafting employment agreement, Structuring ESOP& ESPS, How to avoid disputes and drainage of resources through courtroom battles, Data protection under Indian law, Cloud computing agreements, How to obtain copyright, trademark and patent registration in India.

Definitely student entrepreneurs studying in college will get a lot of benefits from this course. Interested students will be motivated like me to pursue their entrepreneurial journey keeping balance with various entrepreneurship network system, they can easily create a successful business venture without any hindrance.

In my future course of action the skills that I have acquired will help me to make right decisions and to take bold steps in my organization related to ins and outs before launching any pursuits. As a building cannot stand without basic foundation in a similar way no one knows where and how this course will stand as backbone while taking on-going steps in startup journey