The Indian Startup

Our first interview on this blog is with Harshad Joglekar, co-founder of Uproot.in, an online classifieds portal.

What is the size of your team?

We are a gargantuan team of two! My partner in crime is Dr Ameet Patil, whom I knew from my college days. After a “long time, no see” span of 10 years, we met over Orkut one day, and found that we both had an urge to start a company from our hometown, Belgaum. We started out small, to better manage our time and resources.
We do have plans to grow the team, as we pan in more features and products. We are on the lookout for competent developers who are well versed with system level programming as well as web technologies and are willing to work from Belgaum.

Can you tell me briefly about the background of the founders as well as their roles at uproot.in?

Ameet and I are both software engineers, who have predominant experience in system software, particularly embedded system software.
At uproot.in, we are trying something new; web services. We shoulder equal responsibilities. We both design, code, make decisions (and argue) with equal flair.

What is it like to work in Belgaum.  Are there any challenges/benefits to starting up in a smaller city as apposed to the larger business centers of India?

I have tried out the classifieds service. The application is very fast and simple to use. How was the technology behind uproot.in developed?

There are many frameworks out there that help build web applications quickly. The trade-off with most generic frameworks, however, is lesser flexibility and/or lesser performance.
At uproot.in, we chose to develop our own web framework; a tailor made suit that fits our needs, and is optimised for performance.
For some technical background you can see my blog entry here:

http://hrj.wikidot.com/blog:14

Other websites may want to have a classifieds section. Any plans of licensing the product?

Frankly, we hadn’t planned it! Nevertheless, it’s a great idea and we are open to it.
Collaboration with us is also possible via other means.
For example, a quick integration is possible via Atom/RDF feeds. There are already some websites that have requested this.
A more closer integration can be done via direct API calls to our website.
We would love to hear other ideas as well.

Can you describe some of the challenges your company has faced in starting and running a web startup?

For a web startup, cheap yet reliable hosting is highly desirable. Even after a month long search we couldn’t find suitable enterprise grade hosting options within India, which fit our budget.
If someone manages to provide such a service, I think it will be a big boon to web-startups within India.

How did you get your first users/customers? How do you market your product/services?

Our very first users were our not-so-innocent friends. They gave us a lot of feedback (positive and otherwise) and literally drove our design decisions.
The site has been getting a steady stream of users by its own.
In the near future, we would like the site to grow organically at its own pace. Word of mouth and search engines will be our primary means of communication/marketing.

What are your plans/challenges to scaling up?

We take one step at a time and try not to think too much about scaling up. On the technical front we are confident that our framework will scale up well. On all other fronts we will rely on income from our services to drive the growth.

What are the immediate and long term plans for the future of uproot.in?

Our current focus is feature parity. The site is very much usable right now but it can do with helpful enhancements such as text formatting, custom notifications, or profile photos.
In the longer term we aim to monetise from premium Ads on the website. The core functionality will always remain free.

Is there any other information that you would like to share with us?

If your readers are interested in working on exciting embedded and web technologies, they can send their profile description / resume to jobs@uproot.co.in

My views

I think Harshad & Ameet have done a great job with uproot.in.  The portal has a fresh look and is easy to use and the fact that it is very stable & responsive shows that they have designed a great framework from the ground up.  TheIndianStartup wishes them luck with their venture and thanks them for letting us interview them.

Harshad is an active member of theindianstartup.com’s community. You can see his profile here.  If you have any questions for Harshad, please post them in the comments or on his profile.