Being a Mumbaikar, I really love local food especially Vada Pav but when I moved to Bengaluru; I missed it a lot 🙂 In Bengaluru, I found love in Idli Dosa, 99 Dosas etc. The best thing about India is that each city has it’s own uniqueness especially Local food. If you are a visitor to any city, you would have definitely wished to have “Famous Dishes” from local food joint 🙂 If you have any friend in that city, (s)he can guide you but if you are on your own, you have no option left – But to explore !!!

This is the gap ‘”Exploring local Food across India” that Bengaluru based startup – TalkingStreet is trying to address. It is part of the NASSCOM 10,000 Startups & is based out of the NASSCOM warehouse. Today, we have a chat with Maheima Kapur [Founder & CEO of TalkingStreet] about her entrepreneurial journey, Marketing, NASSCOM 10K startups etc. So, let’s get going with the Q&A…

[PS :  I in the article refers to Maheima Kapur]

Can you give a small background about yourself, your start-up and it’s founders ?

Local / Street Food is an important aspect of the culture of a city. It is something that interests many people. Travelers, local residents, foodies are all excited at the idea of sampling local food across the city, provided they are pointed to it by someone they trust. However, discovering popular street-side eateries and vendors is impossible without a local guide.

Talking Street is the local foodie friend that all traveling foodies wish they had in a city. The platform curates & showcases the best of popular, local eateries, so that foodies can hyper-locally discover delicious local food around where they are. This includes very popular eateries in cities as well as street food hangouts recommended by foodie contributors.

It offers self-guided food tours and organizes food events to bring popular food, stall owners and foodies together. An example is below

Talking Street is a sole founder startup. I have around 9 years of work experience across different FMCG organizations. I am a Physics graduate from Sri Satya Sai University and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. My core area of expertise and interest is consumer insights and marketing mix development.

The core team @ Talking Street consists of Naganand Doraswamy and Siddharth Mathur, apart from me. Naganand Doraswamy is a mentor to the startup. He has around 25 years of experience and is president of TiE Bangalore. He is Co-founder and EVP of SPAN.

Siddharth is the Technical Advisor to Talking Street. He is the founder of Fastah, an app with a mission to make mobile internet more fun and enjoyable.

Talking Street is a lean startup. We work largely with consultants and interns. Here are some more details about the team that has made this startup a reality https://talkingstreet.in/meet-the-team/

How different is Talking Street different from other food-tech companies like Zomato etc. ?

At Talking Street our attempt is to help travelers experience the food culture of different cities by helping them eat at the most popular local eateries. So we take the help of foodies to map and share the most famous local eateries across cities. (It’s not just street food but popular eateries, which are often a mix of small eateries, iconic outlets as well as street food stalls).

Zomato is a listing platform, whereas as Talking Street is curated. We ensure that all the eateries on Talking Street are popular, hygienic and highly recommended by local foodies. Also, we don’t cover fine dine restaurants. To give you an example, there is a small eatery in Gandhinagar (in Bengaluru) who makes very good bhajji’s / pakoras (and is doing so for the last 20 years); you would probably not find it on Zomato but on Talking Street, eateries such as these are what we strive to list. Hence, Zomato offers a different value proposition as compared to Talking Street.

In out attempt to help users experience the food culture of a city, we like to cover eateries by including the stories of the people behind them. That adds hugely to the way people experience the food and understand the underlying cultural nuances.

Also, when we say that we are a curated platform, we do not list each & every local eatery on the platform. Only those outlets which meet our criteria are listed. The focus, is thus, on ensuring that our users have a superlative food experience whichever outlet they pick.

Is Talking Street bootstrapped, VC funded or Angel Funded ?

We are completely bootstrapped. We plan to go slow and build TalkingStreet organically 🙂 When time is right, we would definitely look out for funding but the current priority is on building the best experience for TalkingStreet users.

Talking Street is more about Local Food Exploration, so is it an aggregator of vendors who have fixed shop ?

We cover local eateries that make awesome food. We are aware that many of them do not have fixed locations but we track them. In case the vendor moves to a different location, we update his where-about on TalkingStreet.

You can refer this link to get more insights on how we choose the right vendors. Would like to share this video that gives more insights into the entire process.

Currently Talking Street is operational in how many cities in India ?

We have covered major part of Bengaluru. Though we are covering Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur etc., we are constantly adding joints to our respective city database. We are also open for suggestions of places from Foodies since they have the right taste buds and know-how about the food joint.

When someone suggests a place, we do not directly list them but our team checks on all the parameters like food, food quality etc. before listing them. We are also working on TalkingStreet mobile app that would be very useful in such scenarios.

How many vendors/joints have signed up with Talking Street & is there any sign-up fee for the vendor ?

We have more than 500+ joints present on TalkingStreet. There is no sign-up fee for the vendors. If the vendor makes awesome food that is loved by foodies, they definitely deserve a place on our platform.

Can you throw light on the revenue model of Talking Street [Free/Freemium etc] ?

Right now, we can skip this question 🙂

Any plan/tentative deadline to release the mobile app of Talking Street ?

We are working on the app and it should be there on the Store soon. Cannot comment on the deadline at this very moment 🙂

What are the major changes that you experienced when you became an entrepreneur ?

• The need to manage and stretch time. There’s just never enough time in a day to get everything that needs to be done, completed.
• The buck stops here. Everything stops at the founder. If something has to be done, I’ve got to do it. It’s especially stark with solo founders. In a bigger organization the responsibilities are divided.
• There goes my work-life balance. I believed in a sharp work-life balance and avoided carrying work on my mind when I was away from my laptop. That changed significantly with entrepreneurship. I’ve often caught myself being totally wired into work over weekends, holidays, days-off. It’s not something I like and I’m working to change that.
• Holidays have become work-actions – there’s always something to cover or research for Talking Street when I travel and while it’s fun for the most part of it, there are times when it’s like work following you even on a vacation 🙂

How much has NASSCOM 10K helped in accelerating your startup journey ?

NASSCOM 10,000 startups has been an amazing experience. Right from the very helpful startup kit that they give all the shortlisted companies, to the co-working space with all the startups who are ready to help at short notice. The NASSCOM team is super helpful at all times – they make huge efforts to connect the startups to relevant mentors, investors and experts. They also help the startups with media outreach and PR.

What are your key advice(s) to people who want to start-up ?

• Be clear about why you want to startup. A startup is hard work and while it might look glamorous from the outside, it’s actually far less shiny once you’re in. It calls for a high degree of commitment and perseverance. So be sure of why you want to do it. You see your idea solving a huge pain for users, you want to make an impact with your product, create jobs, want to build a large organization, want to be independent – know your reasons and recall them ever so often on your journey. Your reasons will guide you on whether to apply for funding or whether you should bootstrap, on what you should build and how you should build it.
• Research your idea/concept before deciding taking the plunge. Make sure that there is a need and that someone will pay for what you are planning to build, at some point. Too often we startup without doing the necessary ground work to ascertain the need/use case for what we are creating. Doing the work required on understanding the user and his problem (for which you intend to solve) will help you understand whether that problem exists, whether it is important enough to solve and if yes, what is the route to solving it.
• Enjoy the journey. Yes there’s a destination but it is going to be a tough, uphill climb getting there so there’s no point unless you are having fun along the way.

Importance & Role of mentor in any startup

Very important since a mentor is able to approach the business from a distance and thus sees things differently from the founder(s) who are right in the middle of it all. So (s)he brings an objective perspective to the business and growth. A mentor also brings deep knowledge of the ecosystem and thus is able to kick-start thought processes which aid decision making. My mentor gives me the space to chart a route that works for me while being very firm on the business deliverables. Conversations with him help me think clearly. He also holds me to the metrics that we lay down and it helps to have someone ask the tough questions, as he puts it.

Can you give some pointers on Scaling Up and Customer Acquisition ?

Businesses need to be very careful about scaling up. Technical products which scale easily without much physical infrastructure or manpower are different from businesses which require people and infrastructure to scale. Ensuring a delightful user experience has to be the key concern while taking scaling decisions. That means hiring the right people and making the required investments in process and infrastructure, both of which take time. Hence a 6 month, multi-city operation expansion can only lead to trouble, in my opinion.

There have been many examples of organizations needing to scale back or having to close down altogether in the last 6 months, because they scaled too fast in this mad rush to get more users. Getting more users cannot come at the cost of delivering a poor experience.

Some hiring tips for entrepreneurs [especially the core team] ?

Find people who have a high degree of commitment. It helps to have a team which doesn’t need supervision because they are as motivated as you are. For the core team, get people who share your values and vision, in addition to commitment. Teams break up and startups slow down or close because the core team does not see eye to eye. A deep trust and compatibility will always make journey interesting even in the tough patches.

Seed/Bootstrapped/VC funding ? Your thoughts on the same.

Bootstrap as far as you can go. Build an MVP and get to a stage of having a few paying customers. Then look for funding to scale faster. Funding at earlier stages comes at terms which need not be favourable and will bring unnecessary stress.

Any parting words from you for budding entrepreneurs ?

• Do live research with users at every step so that you spend time on the right aspects of the business/product.
• Be firm in your belief and plough on, the road will emerge. Keep your burn low so that your runway is long and you can sustain yourself even if the product takes time to blossom.
• Entrepreneurship is like an accelerated road to self-discovery. It brings out traits that we often didn’t think we possess – both positive and negative. In my case it has helped me become more aware of my insecurities and failings

We hope that you enjoyed the Q&A since it had lot of learning for aspiring entrepreneurs. If you have any questions for Maehima or the TalkingStreet team, please leave them in the comments section. Do give TalkingStreet a spin and leave your feedback here or email it at hello@talkingstreet.in