Amar Gautam

I recently came across an awesome website. I was curious and went to find that this was a brain child of a Bhopal based company. More into it led me to the CEO of the company. The most interesting part was that he happened to be my senior during engineering days at the university. I share a different bond with him and I thought to share a talk with my readers that I had during an online chat session. Here we go -

Me: What is the idea behind FeedMingle.com?
Gautam Kishore: It came to my mind after experiencing a regular need to merge some feeds and put the combined data to some website or directly feed it through RSS. Like a site that wants to show the regular sports updates aggregated through all sports news sites.

Me: There is a lot of buzz going around on the internet about FeedMingle.com. What are the attractions of it?
Gautam Kishore: Its simplicity and the sweet user experience is the key attraction. It’s just a small tool to mix/merge more than one RSS feeds into one to produce it in all needed formats i.e. RSS, JSON, Atom and a simple HTML widget to simply copy and paste in your blogs and sites. We launched another small feature of it today, you can also mix your twitter accounts with other feeds by just putting the twitter username with a leading “@” in the URL field like @gautamkishore

Me: FeedMingle.com is a brain child of EuLogik. Tell me something about the company.
Gautam Kishore: Eulogik started with a vision to build usable web 2.0 apps and using latest web technologies and trends. Not just that, innovations have to be a part of its creations. We are bound to focus on quality and doing small things in the simplest and the bestest way.

Me: So is EuLogik only into web products and solution? Are you planning to move into other arenas?
Gautam Kishore: Yep, we also build mobile apps and some iPhone web apps are in the pipeline. Desktop software don’t apeal us much but we are open to any great products or projects.

Me: EuLogik is an interesting name for a software products company. What is the story behind the name?
Gautam Kishore: “Eu” means good or beautiful in latin and “Logik” is just a trendy formation of word logic. so, EuLogik stands for “Beautiful Logic”!

Me: Please brief us about your role at EuLogik.
Gautam Kishore: I’m the founder and the current CEO of it. It’s a small venture now so, I need to take care of almost everything. Technology, finance, workforce, almost everything.

Me: Why do you think a majority of Indian IT start-ups are into services and not in products?
Gautam Kishore: The scenario is changing now in India too. The most important thing to be a product company is not just the idea but the capital to execute the ideas. The VC funding in IT sector in India are still in an infant stage. Its very difficult to get a good funding opportunity in India right from start. So our great entrepreneurs start by providing service and surviving first. Later it is sometimes difficult to switch to their ideas coz the money starts flowing and it never seems bad.

Me: Any memorable moment from the starting phase of EuLogik that you would like to share?
Gautam Kishore: Every moment is, some in positive sense and some negative. We got great opportunities and lost them. The best part, we learned and never repeated our mistakes. We got a great project which could have changed the whole finance scenario but we dropped it. Reason being it was next to impossible to build the quality and the quantity of the workforce needed in the given time for a start up like us. But that brought us to develop even better product i.e. FeedMingle.com that got us this much of fame and popularity.

Me: Sir, from a kid in a underdeveloped state like Bihar to a budding entrepreneur – how do you view this journey?
Gautam Kishore: It was indeed a long journey and I find myself to be too slow yet. I got to be faster because I’ve got only one life and there is lot to be done.
The journey has just begun and I’m going to run faster.

Me: There are lots of engineers who want to quit their regular jobs and start their own company. What are your views on this?
Gautam Kishore: I’ll advice them to go for it. But, not in hurry. One must be assured of their vision and the determination, there’s no looking back afterwards.

Me: Thank you so much for your time sir. It was indeed nice talking to you.
Gautam Kishore: Same here