Nitin is a sharp professional driven by ingenuity with more than seven years of experience working in different roles. He is an analytical, problem solving and solution oriented person. He is a good coordinator and works with complete ownership and professionalism. He has a bachelor’s degree in information technology as well a master’s degree in management and operations. He started his career as a system engineer and went on to become business analyst.
He then got the entrepreneurial bug, which led to the launch of Funstay. Conceptualized in Jan 2015, Funstay the largest listings of homestays in India. It is also the fastest growing homestay portal in terms of number of property listings. It is a portal, which helps spread awareness about homestays and local heritage of the vast and diverse land of our great country.
Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.
Funstay.in is an online platform where tourist can search unique experiential stay for their vacation. People can choose their stay based on the experience they are looking for. It also provides technological service to host to display their undiscovered property to travelers looking for such stay. Basically, it is a win win situation for both Traveler and property owner.
What inspired you to build the above product/ service?
Passion for travel and problem that travelers face to find suitable experience they are looking for their vacation stay. Before that I was always interested to start venture being from business family background. My father is inspiration for me always.
What is your life mantra?
Be honest to yourself and other. My effort must make someone’s life easier and make someone happy.
What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?
Managing highly organized segment such as Alternate Stay segment, which we are catering to. Understanding property owner, customer need, quality and safety concerns of customers are always been challenge in this journey. But we are solving it through advance technologies and making people life easier.
How did you overcome those challenges?
In my point of time, initial mindset is of financial and personal risk. We took small steps initially and built strong base first. We worked till late hours to spend less on human resources. Personal risk is all about making your family confident about yourself. Luckily, I have well supportive family.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.
Till now, we have bootstrapped and always focused to make our business sustainable. Till now we have not raised any VC money but we are looking for some amount of money from angels that can help to make our business sustainable and profitable. We believe in optimizing operation cost and understand value of each penny.
According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?
Confidence, Determination and never give up
Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?
We use many apps and tools but I would suggest you to use send grid for email marketing tools. Highly user friendly and best tool.
Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.
Be Positive and access yourself critically as well. Think Positive and live positive.
Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.
I have to be consistent with my workout. Sparing time for myself is the habit that I have to improve.
Answer in less than 50 words
Be Positive, Be confident, Assess everything and never give up. You will face situation when you do not know what to do. In that case just listen to your heart.
- One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:
Emotional Decision at Workplace. At workplace one should be logical rather than emotional.
- One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:
Positive thinking can change your life to point you cannot imagine.
What are your plans for next 3 years?
Working for Funstay and make a good memories of Funstay in the brains of traveler.
If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?
I would like to teach entrepreneurship to students.
What are your top three getaway destinations?
Manali, Coorg and Goa
Share a quote that inspires you the most.
“Have Patience, every moment will teach you something useful.”