Saurabh Gupta -It Is Absolutely Essential to Unwind Every Day in Order to Be Productive the Following Day (Co-founder and CEO of Tamasha Live From India)

                                            

With so much development and new growth, I usually work around the clock, but I make time for a 15-minute workout every day. I also enjoy reading, so I begin my days with ebooks and articles. It is absolutely essential to unwind every day in order to be productive the following day.

 

1. Tell us more about your background and journey

I come from a humble background and have spent most of my childhood in a small town in Madhya Pradesh called Datia. Getting into IIT and being fortunate to spend 4 years of my college life with some of the brightest minds, helped me in shaping up my perspective about life and career. 

While in college I got involved with the Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT-B, where I got to interact with some of the most amazing founders like Bhavish Aggarwal, Sachin Bansal and Bhavin Turakhiya. Learning about their journeys influenced me to startup while in college.

I bootstrapped my first startup in my 3rd Year which was into solar and home automation. In the morning I was attending my classes and evenings were spent in client negotiations and team building. Successfully ran that startup for a couple of years profitably but had to shut it down due to some personal reasons.

Post that I joined the media and entertainment industry and worked with multiple production houses and advertising agencies to create interactive brand content and playable TV shows. I was last heading a gaming studio under In10 media group, where I realised the potential of gaming in India and decided to take the entrepreneurial leap and started Tamasha Live with my college friend Siddharth, who was at that time working with a early stage fin-tech startup and was solving the monetization problem for tier II, and tier III creators.

 

2.  What does your typical day look like?

With so much development and new growth, I usually work around the clock, but I make time for a 15-minute workout every day. I also enjoy reading, so I begin my days with ebooks and articles.

It is absolutely essential to unwind every day in order to be productive the following day.

 

3. How did you come up with this idea and go about executing it? 

Tamasha was founded in July 2020 and first version was released in Nov 2020. The concept came from the fact that gaming communities and their owners didn't have a platform to play, engage and earn. They have to use multiple products to engage among each other. 

Money is transferred using payment platforms, engagement is done on WhatsApp or zoom and there is no way to discover new people. Tamasha is a gaming platform which is social 2.0 meaning there is a unique combination of community, engagement and transaction layer which blends naturally among each other.

 

4.  What has been your biggest challenge that you faced with Tamasha Live and how did you overcome that? 

Hiring is the most challenging and important thing for any startup and so was for Tamasha. In such a competitive market where many startups are flooded with unlimited capital, early-stage founders are very limited in what they can sell to convince a prospective employee to join his startup. Most of our early employees who have joined our journey see our vision and immense opportunities to build something huge. We are fortunate to have a high execution, ownership & purpose driven team at Tamasha

 

5.  What do you think are the most important qualities of a successful entrepreneur? 

The important quality of any successful entrepreneur is to understand what your customers want, to solve their problem and keep doing innovations in technology or in products. The key to understanding customers is to study their behavior in order to deliver what they want so that they keep consuming your product.

 

6.  How can one overcome a hurdle of lack of funds when starting up? 

It’s always a good idea to get the early signs of PMF with limited or No capital. I believe that being capital frugal also helps you to build business with strong fundamentals. Business models that have a revenue model from day 0 can sustain and scale their business to a decent level and then can go for capital raise. 

 

7. What are your tips for aspiring entrepreneurs and young minds who aim big?

 There are two tips that I would always give every aspiring entrepreneur:

 · Trying to build on what you care about

One of the most important tips that any aspiring entrepreneur need is to discover what they’re passionate about. There’s no doubt that running a business would mean that you would face lot of challenges but if you do something that you truly believe then you will be able to add value for your customers.

· Investing in your team

If you want to run a successful business then it’s important that you invest in right people. When its about long term vision, you should invest in people whose values are aligned with your company’s goals. While hiring someone, it’s important to remember that you can always train people on technical skills but not about character and values.

 

8. Which is your favorite book and why?

I really like this book called “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harrari. It uncovers the human at its core. how they built societies, communities, organizations and nations.

 

About Tamasha Live : Tamasha is a creator-led real money gaming platform, where micro and nano influencers from TIER II and TIER III cities can host real money games in their micro-community and instantly monetize their engagement. The startup was launched in July 2020 by Saurabh Gupta and Siddharth Swarnkar after realizing that there is a huge opportunity in real money gaming as there were no platforms where people can play in social groups led by influencers.

Tamasha is working with more than 7 prominent developers and is helping them to earn a sustainable monetization medium by giving them an opportunity to publish games on the platform and get access to the community base. The platform also has other revenue streams like virtual gifting, ads, etc, and looking to add a few more interesting monetization tools for the creators.

 

Interviewed By - Nimisha Dutta