Entrepreneurship and startup was in my mind while I graduated. During the last few months at college, i put this discussion with friends, especially with my final year group. But most of them were not interested. The idea was to start an embedded system training firm, which gives handson training at colleges was my idea. Right after my graduation, i got in to Grey Techno Labs as an engineering trainee in embedded system. There, I got experience in pcb design, microcontroller programming etc.
Infact, Grey Technolabs was a well established training company. By vieweing the activities there, my idea for starting a training firm grown in my mind and I tried talking it with my colleagues. Most of them were not supportive but a few motivated me and interested in the Idea.
During that time I got a good rapport with another training firm and I was able to make an agreement with them. They were doing only inhouse training and academic project development. I put forward the idea of on campus training to them and assured them that, I will do the marketing and bring business and they agreed. Since I was active in IEEE student activities and just passed out, I had contacts across the colleges in Kerala. Prepared a whatsapp message with the available on campus workshops, I sent whatsapp messages to all my contacts. Lot of good responses came and was able to bring four workshops continuously.
First one was at MACE Kothamangalam, then at SCMS Karukutty, Sarabhai Tvm and LBS Tvm. I am getting a percentage of the training fee for each workshops. But seeing workshops coming, I was the gut feeling that, I can start a firm and we can do training by ourselves. I used to discuss all these things to my colleagues who were interested in business idea. After viewing back to back workshops, all got excited and one fine day we decided to startup.
We means, three were there, Myself, Shibili Rahman, Jesting Varghese. And on October 2012, we resigned from Grey technolabs to start our own firm. The owner of Grey technolabs, Mr. Shahim Baker (my good friend now) motivated us.
Initially we started working from our rented villa (We named it PeaceVilla) where we three along with other friends staying. The other friends were also startup founders. All the three of us put almost 35k each as the initial investment. Fortunately we got some academic projects from colleges and schools and this pushed us to build the basic electronics infrastructure.
Since students has to come for training, we started checking for a rented office. Then only we came to know that, inorder to get a rented space, we need to have an entity. So we met one chartered Accountant, Mr. Rajiv. He explained us the various options like Partnership firm, LLP and pvt ltd etc. Immediately the debate started – what type of enterprise we have to register. Lot of people told us to register as Pvt ltd because of its credibility. LLP was not common at that time. We chose partnership at last, due to its simplicity.
The next question was the name of the firm. We debated n number of names. As day passed, along with training, we also starting thinking of other activities, like product engineering, roof top solar Installation etc. After few weeks of discussions, we came to one name
Neo Green Labs
Infact, we were not sure, why we came to that name. People used to ask us this and we were not having a clear answer.
On Feb 25th 2013, we officially formed our partnership firm, Neo Green Labs at Kochi.