With big ideas and bigger goals, Vasanth Sampathkumar and Surendar Shanthi are reaching out into the internet world from a town in India that only has 10% internet penetration. Their project, Honeytask, aims to help project managers, well, manage their products. With features that allow managers to keep all of their projects in one place, use chat as a team communication tool, organize commitments with an interactive calendar, and delegate tasks (just to name a few), these guys might just hit their goal of covering 50% of the project management market.
Vasanth and Surendar managed to pull themselves away from the newly launched beta version of their product to answer some questions for us here at KillerStartups.
How’d you come up with the name for your company?
When we think about productivity and agility the first thing that strikes our mind will be honeybee. It carry out its tasks in a more structured and faster way. So all in a sudden we thought “Honeytask” will be a more apt name for our productivity tool.
What’s the very first thing you do at work everyday?
We always love to work late night even past 3 or 4, so once we wake up we search for the foodies stored right in our office refrigerator. On a professional note, we start our day by checking all the latest news that has happened through an app Feedly.
How many people did you start the company with and how many people work for you now?
We both started-up a year ago and recently three like minded people joined us and now we are a five member team.
Remember the early days starting up? Maybe you can share one anecdote that describe the struggle you went through?
We would rather say that we are still in our early days. We are based out of a lesser known city to the world and still many of our neighbourhood thought that we are running an Internet cafe and enjoying our days. Explaining about our startup and the stuffs we do and mak[ing] them understand is a nightmare for us, yet we love to explain them.
How do you handle frustration? When/how was the last time you dealt with frustration?
When things are out of our control, we take a short ride on our bikes to get fresh air and naturally it relaxes our minds and thoughts.
What’s your office environment like? Is it the kind of place where everyone is bumpin’ away to house music or is it more traditional?
Right from day one we are pretty sure that our office shouldn’t be in traditional corporate style and we closely follow it. We got our mini foosball board, guitar and planning to have graffiti art and Playstation in coming weeks. We do play Cricket every weekend with our team.
How do you picture your company in 5 years?
We just launched our product and have to scale. In five years we aim to cover 50% of software market that deals with productivity and collaboration apps. As a company in five years we should have our own office space with above 150 employee count.
Who or what inspires YOU? Role models? Quotes? Running? Video games? Snack food? Give us the deets, dude!
As like most of the startups we too highly inspired by Steve Jobs. His thoughts and vision towards products and technology are phenomenal. Whenever we feel down his “Stanford Commencement” speech will lift up our spirits higher. And we admire this quote of his:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
Inspired by his sayings we always follow our hearts and it helps a lot in our startup journey.
How’d you fund this venture? VC? Self-funding? Crowd-funded? Where’d you get the money, man?
We love friends and they love our ideas. As of now our friends are helping us out with their big money.
Got any great bootstrapping tips for the lean startups out there?
As a startup, we find perseverance and patience is the key to success. Making lot of mistakes in early stage is not an issue but we have to learn lessons from it and not to repeat those mistakes again. Do believe in yourself and your idea. It will take you to places.
What would you be doing if you had one year off and $500,000 to spend (and you couldn’t spend it on your current startup / projects)
Ahem! We are travel addicts so would like to cover entire India on a road trip in a brand new Harley Davidson. If still time and amount left we would plan to complete the dream wishlist. Check out the wish list here.
Do you consider yourself a successful entrepreneur right now? If not, what’s it gonna take to make you feel successful?
We might say that we are happy and proud of what we are now as entrepreneurs but to be a successful entrepreneur we have to get our dreams fulfilled and we [have] a lot of dreams and [we’ve] already started chasing [them].
Website you couldn’t live without and why?
Google: you get whatever you need.
Mobile App you’re in love with and why?
Angry Birds: we don’t know [why] but [we] love to sling.
Dogs or cats?
Love to have dogs.
iOS or Android?
Ah, mind says Android but heart says iOS.
What’s the greatest thing about your company?
PASSION! Working from a city where Internet penetration is still lesser than 10% and developing the products for global users is really a challenging stuff. Only thing that drives us is a passion to create products that would help to make people’s life much more easier.
Where can our readers get ahold of you? Facebook? Twitter? Google+?
You can contact us anytime and do ping us for a friendly chat or even for a drink.
Facebook and Twitter for Vasanth, Facebook and Twitter for Surendar, and our personal blog.
