How The Rodinhoods meet-up inspired me with a startup idea

It’s been long since the Rodinhoods became a part of my life. As an entrepreneur I was looking to connect and interact with like minded people. The Rodinhoods provided me just that.  But, for longtime we remained connected only through Rodinhood’s presence on facebook and as the number grew day by day, Alok (the original Rodinhooder) was gracious enough to provide us with a formal platform called ‘therodinhoods.wpengine.com’.   But, as the number grew, interaction between all the Rodinhooders also increased, and meet-ups were inevitable.  Meet-ups provide an opportunity to mix with like minded people, share your ideas, get feedback, tips and above all know excellent, intelligent people around you, who are trying hard to make their ideas successful and in-turn making India beaming with new Start-Ups, technologies. They are creating a new India.

Coming to my story of how one of the meet-ups in Delhi inspired me for this exciting start-up called letsdodrama.com (We are working on it, I will share the details sometime later).As founder of PACT (Platform for Action in Creative Theater) life had started settling a bit, since PACT by nature of its business is manpower driven and is difficult to scale up.

And since we are into training using theater as a tool, it is also highly specialized and getting people in all the cities we were targeting was proving difficult. So, we were billing the flight tickets, boarding & lodging to our clients who were not Delhi based, which was proving to be expensive and was affecting our revenues to a great extent. I was thinking of other avenues where scaling up was little easier.  

So, during the meet-up when everyone was introducing themselves, I observed everyone was from new age business barring just a couple of us. That was the time when I started thinking, how do I leverage the power of Internet? Since it is easy to scale up the business there and reach to an optimal number.  

While driving back to home, the idea struck me to connect theater professionals together,(I still remember sending an SMS to Alok while driving, that an Idea has come in my mind) to give them a platform like ‘therodinhoods.wpengine.com’ where theater people could interact and collaborate. With my theater background I am aware about the problems theater people face, also how it is important to collaborate and validate their ideas. I came back and immediately wrote a concept note (I realize it was very immature and underdeveloped as a concept that time but then I was excited) and shot it to Alok, Kanchan, Nayana and few others for their feedbacks. I am thankful for their immediate and frank views and suggestions, which helped bring more simplicity, clarity and focus to my approach.

Today I see that idea getting developed even further into a product. Students from prestigious universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell have offered to help and appreciated the project. Please visit my blog www.letsdodrama.wordpress.com for more details on this project.

So, why did I tell this story? Because, I want everyone, every Rodinhooder present here reading this article, appreciating the idea, to attend The Rodinhoods meet-ups in your city, make it into your priority list and not just yet another meet-up. You never know what you will get, whom you will meet, what will you learn and what idea may come up during the discussion. My sincere thanks to Alok, Asha and now also to Akancha for this great platform called the Rodinhoods.

PS: Through this note, I also wanted to let everyone know that I am looking for a Co-founder, who has a technical (Software) and Internet Business background. (No, I am not looking at any salaried employee at this juncture) Interested? Get in touch with me on “neeraj@pactindia.co.in”