Aashish Solanki

If you notice all my earlier posts have all the spheres of my life covered: the things that I’am involved in and things that I do for joy.

‘Yulop!’ – is the place I spend most of the day, week and month. Yulop is a dream. Yulop is THE place to work. It all started with Sridhar when he shared his dream with me way back my 5th sem..

We passionately then chalked out many ideas, mocked a few prototypes and the best part used Sri’s white board extensively. This white board saw so many ideas, it witnessed so many discussions and God only knows how many coffee cups it stood by!

Atlast we zeroed on one thing to start off with : www.ybangalore.com – a platform for all the city-zens, a tribute to the city we loved, an opening for civic issues… The small release made us feel on top of the world. But soon we realised that more was needed to be done. We had fallen short of our expectation.
We decided to give it a makeover. So there we were: myself juggling engineering and Sri managing work along sitting together in the evenings, saturdays and sundays for next 4 months to get a new version out.
This time we were content and happy that our efforts produced a pretty neat v2! I was almost done with my engineering and had given those tons of mba entrances, Sri had just returned a few months back from his onsite US opportunity. We then decided why not take the plunge and do Yulop on a bigger scale. And yes the bread and butter scale..

But just then God gave us options, when we hardly needed them. I got selected at IIFT (Delhi) and IIsc (Bangalore) for my MBA. Sri on the other hand was asked if he could lead and go to the US for a good project..

This was tempting but not tempting enough! We had already boot strapped, we now looked for some investment to start operations.. Sri was the cause in the matter. Just when things seemed bleak we found our angel investor!!

Yulop started operations legally on May 14 2007.

I finished my exams by May 31!

Since then it’s been a journey well rewared. Ups and Downs, challenges and milestones.. its like smelling the your own sweat and going to sleep with all the contentment in the night and the there comes the next day with yet another opportunity.

Over the months Yulop came out with

1. www.books.yulop.com - India’s only regional platform to promote local culture, literature and of course regional book e-commerce. As of today you can buy about 2500 Kannada books online..

2. http://bengaluru.yulop.com- A single window for all the city people. From events to citytraffic, from city map to city question and answers, from citynews to cityreporters.. we have covered it all!!

3. www.cityfind.yulop.com - A local search with a horizontal reach. Imagine finding a punture shop, imagine getting info about a dry cleaner, imagine arranging a priest, imagine each and every individual of the city having a web presence with or without internet!! CityFind empowers that. With already over 70,000 listings of Bangalore listed and mapped the power of web has just multiplied!

4. www.moblr.yulop.com - Also carry the power on your mobile. Be it finding a place or planning your movie or just even planning to spend your evening.. Yulop Mobile gets you do that!! CityMovies, CityFind and CityEvents now all in your GPRS mobile phone..

So far it’s a been an exhilarating ride… full of life, joy, comrade & learning! More than anything I have learnt so much more with people around me. I’am so grateful to have these folks at Yulop around, I learn so much from them that it leaves me amazed with how much they know and how well they are part the ‘knowing!’

I’am immensely thankful to everyone at Yulop for they complete my family. I’am so proud and happy to be known to anyone associated with Yulop.

There are miles to go before we reach the destination. And at every station it’s great to have wonderful co-passengers like you. Thanks for being there.

Do check www.yulop.com if you have not.

I look forward to all your comments and feedbacks!

Cheers.

This post is tagged sri, startup, Yulop