About Aniruddh Arora
My name is Aniruddh Arora founder of Lenme, currently pursuing my graduation in Electrical and Electronics from UIET Panjab University and this is my story. I wish I could tell you that in my story I was an overnight success, because that would be really cool, but my story is more of a work your way up the ladder thing. After entering the rat race going on in the nation to “crack” the JEE , despite of the fact that I got good grades I knew that it was not my cup of tea.
Me and my dear friend, Ashutosh Upadhyay (who also happens to be the co-founder of my start-up), always had a keen interest in being ‘entrepreneurs’, I intentionally quoted the word because people often misunderstand the term mostly because of its fancy pronunciation. We, in simpler words wanted to be a problem solver i.e. an entrepreneur. But let me tell you being a problem solver is not an easy task. Because even after the world having exponentially increasing problem creating ability there was no suitable solution to most of them, at least none that didn’t involve us going bankrupt or having a fairly godmother who magically makes the problems disappear with a whiff of her wand. So, we put our ambitions to a standstill and decided to concentrate on our studies (not really). XIth and XIIth passed by and I got admitted to UIET, but Ashutosh decided to drop a year because his grades weren’t up to the mark for him. Call it sheer luck, the very next year he got admission in UIECT, the Chemical Engineering Department of Panjab University.
How did you think of Lenme?
Soon enough our once heart felt desire to start a start-up resuscitated. We like all the other crazy entrepreneurs decided to have a daily 1 hour brainstorming session for idea generation. For a long time none of our ideas struck a chord with either of us but one fine evening I had, let us say, a divine intervention and I came up with the basic idea of Lenme! (Applause) and for a pleasant change Ashutosh and me agreed in unison that maybe, just maybe this idea could really work. We worked on this idea vigorously for a year, with the help of our mentors, Prof. Deepti Gupta International students Dean Panjab University and Dr. Harish Kumar UIET, Director CSDE Panjab University, pitched the idea and got incubation from Panjab University and became their first officially recognized start up.
Introduce your Team.
We assembled a team of some really talented people including Pankaj Garg (Android Developer),
Anil Meena (Operations),
Kostubh Singh (Marketing),
Prashant (Design and PR),
Akassh Upadhyay (Web Developer) and Sahil Sehgal (Backend Developer).
At present we are a team of about 30 brilliant individuals. Lenme provides a platform to find the right people or friends when you need.
About Lenme
Now you may say I can call my friend if I need something but do you even know which friend has that thing you need, and so you end up calling 10’s of friends and lets there are 50% chances you may get the thing ( but do not forget the amount of work that happened ). Now imagine an application that lets you navigate through things that surround you, which are in possession of a nearby friend or a friend’s friend. Your problem is automatically solved. A SOCIAL SHARING PLATFORM that fulfills Short Duration – High Importance – Instant Needs.
What challenges did you face while setting up Lenme?
When we started we had orders coming in really fast, people needed stuff and we had 112 orders and we could only successfully transact 48 of them. The problem was simple, we have more orders than we could handle. The key was to try not to successfully transact all of them, but try to complete most of them. There are times when you may lose hope and feel helpless but the trick to pretend you feel fearless, indestructible and dare I say invincible for your team. Trust me when I say it’s all part of the job. Don’t worry it’s not all that hard, you will have the time of your life when you work on a startup idea and you will have your worst days but remember to keep on going for those good days.
Whats your current status and future plan?
After the trail run we are off market and working on our app, yet our reach and customer traction is ever increasing. Without marketing we get a Facebook like and an order daily. We are currently working on our NGO, Sahayta and another dream project TRUB (Track Resources using Bluetooth) a coin sized Bluetooth based tracking devices which we believe can bring revolutionary changes in the lives of the masses. TRUB has been approved by the incubation and is under first phase of development.
VID is doing a wonderful job in keep people like us motivated.
Lenme : Website | Facebook | App : play.google.com