Dipankar Sanyal is an MSc first-year student of computer science at St. Xavier’s College. His start-up — Cash N Gifts — has been selected for the Nasscom 10,000 start-ups initiative, which aims to build and sustain the 10,000 best technology start-ups in India by 2023. t2 catches up with the student-entrepreneur...

What’s Cash N Gifts?
It is a website called www.cashngifts.in, where users can earn free gift vouchers and prizes for completing simple offers or sharing their opinion in the form of surveys provided by advertisers. There is also an Android app (Cashngifts; available on Google Play Store). 

The idea...
“It came to me three years ago. I used to blog and would often wonder what if I could create a platform where advertisers could promote their products and users got acknowledged for trying out their products? The concept of winning freebies in countries like the UK and US was already growing,” says Dipankar. 

An avid programmer, he started working on the idea and in February 2014 his website was launched “exclusively for people in India”.

The initial response 
“For the first couple of months I got only 400 members as I didn’t have any money to promote the website,” Dipankar recalls. In the next year-and-a-half, it grew to around 15,000 members, which he calls “mediocre growth”. 

“But the last six months were great! With the money and sources collected in the past 18 months or so, we started approaching popular bloggers and companies to promote us. Even big companies like MobiKwik (mobile wallet and payment system) partnered with us and thus within six months we added another 30,000 members! Now we have 45,000 members.”

The trick, says Dipankar, is not to lose heart. After four months, he decided to find a partner and met Vimal Ghorecha, who has a website designing business. 

Nasscom’s initiative 
Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), with support from industry giants like Google and Microsoft, is aiming to nurture 10,000 technology start-ups in India between 2013 and 2023. The selected firms will get support with funding, infrastructure and start-up kits, including hosting credits and other technology and business tools valued at over $25,000.

“So far five phases of this initiative has been held and we had applied for the fifth phase in end-2015. Our start-up was shortlisted by them this March and we have already received the start-up kit. We will also get a mentor to groom us and invitations to attend various pitching events where we would get a chance to interact with potential investors,” says Dipankar. 

Inside the start-up kit 
Google Cloud credits, Microsoft Azure credits, Amazon AWS credits, IBM cloud credits, featured account in HackerRank (focuses on competitive programming challenges) for six months and other virtual credits from companies. 

Future plans
“Now we are looking for more investments and if we get an investor, we’ll aim to become a full-fledged company with our services expanded throughout India,” is the word from the young entrepreneur.

The business-college balance
“For that I have to sacrifice some of my sleeping hours. I do business-related work till 2am or 3am. After that I go to sleep and wake up in the morning to go to college. I love both my work and college,” says Dipankar. 

Debroop Basu