The success story of Built For Free’s Winter 2016 edition

There is no doubt in the fact that the talk of the town (read country? ) is – “startups”. Apart from just the Government and investors, off late there have been a lot of  initiatives by individuals and organisations alike supporting the ecosystem to make it bigger and better. One such initiative is the  Built For Free campaign by The Egghead creative to help deserving ideas see the light. BuiltForFree is an open community platform for aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their ideas.

Participants submit their ideas  (that can be technology enabled) and the ideas are judged by the jury. The selected  idea is Built For Free by the team at The Egghead Creative. No strings attached!

After the success of their first edition, the team had hit back to make it a bigger and better second edition of the event this year. The second edition proved to be a bigger success with a total of 406 registrations and 720 new users including participants from cities all over the country. Students from  top notch schools like IIMs, FMS and IITs had also contributed quite a few ideas. While H2O cabs was declared the winner last year, this year the startup named Parking Made Simple was announced the winners with Trip In Sync by Rahul Agarwal standing as the runner-up.

Submission of ideas were allowed until 16th February  2016, after which the most powerful ideas went to the jury panel for selections. Out of 262 ideas that were submitted for this event, the top 10 ideas and Top 30 Volunteers were shortlisted and the top 10 ideators were given a chance to present their ideas live in front of the panel on 1st March 2016.

The jury panel consisted of eminent investors and business people including Vinutha Rallapalli, Rajiv Menon, Sridhar Rampalli and Vineel Nalla who closely looked at the presentations and chose out the best to be the winner. Mentors including Ravi Korukonda, Rahul Musunuri, Vijay Gummadi, Ranga Reddy Burri, Dinesh Koka had been gracious enough to weigh on the presentations as well.

The top 10 ideas that were selected for a final pitch were –

• Vox up by Riti Sinha
• V care by Harsh Ramani
• Trip in sync by Rahul Agrawal
• Here app connecting you to the people of same interest around you by Balamurali Pandranki
• Trans rev by Shaik Abdul Kaleem
• Parking made simple by Chanayka basa
• Paint ads by Manish Hada
• Blue Drop by Saksham Srivastav
• Rent Pitara by Saurabh Jambore
• Airy Beds by Mouna Challa

Apart from these 10 pitches, there was also an honorary mention of Dcash by Ram Sai Charan.

“It is a great testament to what can be done when a group of like-minded individuals come together. We are very bullish about Chanakya & Lokesh. BuiltForFree is very proud to be the enabler of such a talent and co-create a world class startup.” says Srinivas Aki, Founder of The EggHead Creative and Built For Free Campaign.

Parking made simple is the idea of  Chanakya Basa and Bokaro Lokeshwar Reddy, two law students who aim to simplify the parking problems of Hyderabad. This startup will be an app that will help the consumer find a reliable parking-space within the proximity of his location. Essentially reducing the mental stress, saving time and reducing environmental pollution.

On the other hand, Rahul Agarwal with his startup TripInSync aims to simplify the pain of remembering travel details. This will be your ideal travel companion where in you can sync the details of your trips and will also help you to organize them between your friends.

The Prototype built for the winner of this event has already started post the announcement of the results in first week of March. The prototype built is set to end on April 30th. Once the prototype is ready, the product launch shall soon happen in the first week of May.

Congratulations to the winners, and Kudos to the entire team of Builtforfree to conduct such great events year after year.

PS: H2O cabs got recently acquired by another city based startup Commut.

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