How was the 1st day of Maker Mela Event?

The main event we attended was Somiya Innovation & Impact festival and under this Maker Mela, Darwin, & Naya was the part of the event, our main focus was Maker Mela (the most creative event you’ll see around sustainability)

We targeted this event with application downloads & BoB E Pay UPI Lite downloads (campaign we’ve been running with Bank of Baroda till 26th February 2025)

Traction: 130+ GenZDealZ.ai downloads

150+ BoB E Pay UPI Lite downloads

150+ smiley balls distributed (had our QR)

Here’re the offers we pasted for pulling the crowd:

• Free samples of Munchilicious & skin care products: Those who were willing to give feedback on teh spot were receiving munchilicious small pack and interested students were filing the form to receive free skin care samples to be delivered
• We also made that the hyperlocal offers are active and updated with their current student offers (on 2nd day we added a new stationery vendor too)
• We hired Somiaiya’s students to assist us in bringing more crowd (campaign brief was given them in advance)
• Direct cashback and activation of 2 PROMO codes for few days to increase the consumption).

40% of the crowd we received was more than 30 age (even the juries & prof. were interested to consume the deals and spread the word)

Few General Guidelines:

• Ask the lunch/breakfast & snacks timing in advance. No one will notify you about visiting the mess (else you’ll waste your food coupons)
• Make sure you’ve enough ventilation present around you (a big crowd increases the heat a lot)
• Ask for enough water bottles when you’ve 4 to 5 members in a stall , you’ll need enough hydration in strong summers
• Visit the stall a day before to check what all can be pasted on teh booth (does glue sticks or staple is needed) and will get idea of space allocation too
• Have a quick support team: For Bank of Baroda UPI Lite app promotion we faced many errors from users and the same were revertd them
• Give your feedback straightaway (don’t wait for the feedback form to be circulated). If you’ve any issues with the stall place (too much muddy, heat & low water stations, etc.), accelerate them to the event co heads.
• If you’ve giving right away cash backs, have a good quantity of cash (if your UPI Waltet is blocked during to many transactions)

How was Day 2 – Maker Mela Fest?

It started with restocking our smiley balls that went out of the stock on Day 1.

We made sure we shoot good feedback videos for our app, Munchilicious nutritious packets & overall hyperlocal offerings

Our stall was the only one who got the most crowd with direct GenZ interaction and all the academic people who will directly & indirectly use our app.

Prof. needs much guidance about how the app works as those who’re totally new will get a clarity of how they should proceed and claim exclusive offer from our app.

On 2nd day, it was a holiday for the campus, still students were visiting in good numbers (around 50 in each hour) and 30+ juries judging us in the entire day to give us teh score on team & crowd management, product USP, business clarity, etc.

2nd day involved pitching to investors, however our Founder knows how the pitching model works and how many serious investors actually invest the money. So major focus we gave on our stall and the student traffic.

Eventually we hit our main target of achieving 200+ BoB E Pay UPI lite app downloads

Recently after many months we resumed to start email marketing , few of the biggest mistakes we made in this journey are:

• Not overcommunicating: There’re so many things we assume during meetings and later regret of why didn’t over specified them. During the start of the pojrect we clearly mentioned collection of 500 emails. However, later we were also told to get other information like LInkedin URL, company name & website (which took the project timeline a lot long)

• Giving a fixed deadline: For any project, don’t give a fixed deadline anytime. You can’t predict anything (your team member may get a family commitment, medical issues, etc.). Thus give a buffer period (of 10 to 15 days) beforehand so your reputation isn’t at the stake. In this case the brand’s team can’t pressurize you unecessairly when you had given a buffer period

• Keep a good boundary of what needs to be done or what not: Especially when you’re dealing with agencies, the work is super divided so many a times we made unnecessary changes that would have no effect on teh conversions. Plus respecting the timings are also needed as I’m a college student plus Heeral (who had handles the complete email creation & extraction of leads) had other project commitments. So giving a fixed timeline of yoru availability helps both the parities

• Don’t risk your timeline with free tools: When the client don’t want to spend on quality tools, you can’t give a concrete timeline of project completion. We used cloudflare for email hosting and due to a server error the emails couldn’t get processed. As we had the free version so no support was provided & starting plans were too costly.

• Doing everything yourself: Atleast hiring a system admin helps in solving deep errors that are uncommon for marketers. Giving a fixed fees for the system admin helps in resolving issues in real time & keep the project on track

• Scrapping Tools: Thought we used different reputed email extracting tools from free version, you wont’ get all valid emails. Minimum 30% of the emails will be inactive/doesn’t exist/mailbox not receiving new emails, etc. So you can’t expect a high open rate from each lead (as many of them won’t receive). Instead use paid email extracting tools & extract 40% more leads than the actual target to maintain high engagement on your campaigns

• Takign teh client for granted: No matter how many tasks you’ve (even in family ermgenices) prioriization is a must. If the client has been so patient by the extended project deadline and still you’re giving any small excuses, it would harm not only your busienss & reputation but also your overall retention rate of lient. One unpleasant experience is remembers over 50 plesant experineces, so ensure that the client has the highest satissfaction rate.

• Not keeping the 3rd party agency in the loop: We made the mistake of not giving the real timeupdates and that backlashed with us. So when communicating in the group we gave updates in the mrning & then directly in the evening resulting in high project extension. So even if you’re busy or solving any eror – keep the agency team  members always informed.

Few Techncial Errors We Made During Cold Emailing:

a) 𝘈𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘌𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳: Never use a free email hosting platform. Neither you’ll get a good support nor your issues will ever get fixed

b) 𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯: Free email hosting providers has downtime issues – during a critical email campaign your results will highly affect

c) 𝘡𝘰𝘩𝘰 𝘊𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘴: It is for newsletter and not for cold emailing. Snov has the smooth interface to manage multiple cold email campaigns and filter active leads accurately.

There were a lot of combinations we tried in getting the right tool for cold emailing.

In the find of a good & free tool to experiment with – we took cloudflare and then shifted to Zoho campaigns.

2 consistent mistakes we did:

• Cloudflare: No support at all to the free members so whichever server errors we were getting weren’t resolved and project was getting super delayed. So shifted to the DNS settings to Zoho campaigns
• Zoho Campaign: It is used for email marketing and not for cold emailing. A wrong decision lead to time consumption. So though we were grttingthe open rates – that wasn’t what the tools is made for. So choose GoDaddy for hosting the emails.

Finally we found the good place to host the 3 email domains and those can be sent through Snov.

By switching on the custom tracking domain – the deliverability almost doubled up.

We revamped the unsubscribe page with the new look and a good copy to retain the outgoing lead.
We created a different flow for leads who haven’t opened the emails and followup sequence who booked the meetings.

Hoping to get some results in the month end….still the sequence is working adn will update you its status soon

How Was Our Experience at Alegria?

Though I didn’t get selected for the solo singing competition, I accelerated GenZDealZ.ai’s collaboration with Pillai’s management for more opportunities around incubation, sponsorships, judges requirement & online promotion activities.

Javed sir & Mohsin sir came to judge the duet singing – we got 1 day stall at the foodcourt with a good GenZ crowd in & around the campus. Specifically we were targeting faculties & management staff (as they’ve a good network of students to cater to and spread our offerings).

Outcome of 1 day stall (from 10:50 to 17:10) at Alegria 2025:

• Gained 60+ downloads and distribution of 80+ mobile standee bookmark to principal, faculties & other college students too.
• Visibility to 200+ moving crowd around the festival

Missed Opportunity:

At night there was a comedy night and following that few performances – we could have asked to placed the standee at night for off campus audience engagement (obviously it’d require a volunteer to drive it). Atleast 2000+ crowd attends the comedy night..

Safest place for the standee:

Irrespective of whichever event you’re attending – carrying the standee all the times is a hectic.

• If you’re a student, keeping safe in your classroom backside is a good choice
• If you’re an event coordinator, ask a student whether they could safely keep the standee (until next event arrives)

Issues With Stall:

Problem 1: Falling on the front side

Solution: Keep a heavy weight on the standee’s back side to not let it fall or keep another standee’s weight on the bottom

Problem 2: QR not scannable

Solution: Always have a big QR stick on the top of the stall or on your bookmark for alternative scanning & get downloads

Problem 3: No refreshments

Solution: Here at Alegria there were no refreshments to stall owners. Ask the event team early and make them arrange atleast good qty. of water bottles. 

Problem 4: Unfixed timing

Solution: In most events, stall timings starts on time, however the wrap up time is undecided. Ask them when it would end so plan your schedule & appoint volunteers accordingly.
If they wrap up early before the said timing, tell them to provide alternative place to setup the stall as they’ve already committed the timings

Why Do You Badly Need Volunteers At Your Stall?

• Increase in network: Volunteers (in college events these are students itself) who’re popular in the campus brings major footfall. Here students visits the stall just because the volunteer is present at the stall.
  In our case, Vidit is highly dynamic and known in the campus and so I appointed him (rates are mutually decided)
• Explanation of offerings: The engagement increases when you’ve someone who’s equally skilled at sales. Here you can divide the crowd and handle it by each volunteer

TIP: Pay these volunteers very well and provide good refreshments (they’re putting equal or may be double the efforts)

Which are the things you can’t miss (while having a stall in college fests)?

• Publicising on social media: Invite your in house social media person to cover the event and publish real time reels & content 
• Taking feedback from students: Such fests are the best time to receive critical feedback on your app/product (you may provide rewards in return)
• Inviting top level management staff: When you’ve the campus director, Vice Principal visiting the stall, it gives you a good credibility for future partnerships & you start winning the college trust
• Having an exclusive offer: We had created GENWIN code for ₹100 OFF on any deal for a limited time. These offer should not just be visible but also need to be communicated with the visitors, else they won’t know

Which are the details to be taken care while setting up your stall in small events

• Be on time: Though the stall timings might be from 10 to 4 PM , there lll be the 20% crowd who gives 80% of the revenue in those 1 or 2 hour. If you miss that period you miss on majority of the core. However, you get a 2nd chance too – when you’re exposed to many faculties who has network of students who can leverage the stall details and spread the word for good.

• Test all the resources in advance : On the day of the event, never leave anything behind and don’t trust on anyone – not even your nearest team member. Everyone can make big blunder that’ll cost you at the end. In our case we made the mistake of leaving standees in the office and need to wait extra hours for opening.

• Testing & seen it lively: There many things like cables power, volunteers, table for stall keeping, etc. are the task you need to manage while setting up your stall

• Getting volunteer’s assistance helps you to sell more. Here we didn’t get much assistance as it was an intangible product so we had to duo the explanation part and sell it further.

• Warm up the crowd is needed. Just putting the standees won’t help. The initial interactions helps to attract the crowd and the same crowd further refers to their friends to visit.

• You get to know your business nature so we understood what all things were missing in our stall (QR codes, some exclusive offer banners, working laptop, etc.) – will keep in mind next time.

• Please search for a friend who can pull the crowd and you can explain further. IN my case it was Vidit who told that we were having an exciting offer and I starts explaining the platform. Vidit was highly outrovert and had good bond within teh colleges.

Inform all your participants & your classmates in advance about such events (so they could visit as their lectures ends)

Your own classmates helps to strengthen your confidences and helps for pulling good crowd

Gained 30+ downloads and the feedback:

‘Great experience but ui can still work on themself’

‘The app is really easy to use and it helped me a lot to save money, really love the app, everyone must use it.’

While ending the event, if there’re events running in your campus, you can put the standee in the college itself for attending the next expo

We though of further integration like payment gateway – however, we would be looking in the next expo to come up with a big way and get the maximum of this event.

How the overall IIT E Summit Held?

This summit has been invited to GenZDealZ>ai as being finalist last year, genzdealz.ai go the invitation with our team

We leveraged this opportunity to get the stall and event entries at less cost (we couldn’t get the stall registrations) however we did enough networking for getting few brands onboarded and gain some funding exposure

Day 1 Review:

Networking arena at Brookfield properties and it was between investors, founders & other brand partners.

As it was an open space so first mover grabbed the opportunity to talk to the potential investor and gain the feedback to work on.

This is the time to exchange opportunities and gain maximum critical feedbacks that’ll make you think on your idea & product

Just few metres away, there was a seminar of Anupam Mittal, Infosys Cofounder & other few speakers at LHC area of IIT-B , those who got selected in seed stars or million dollar table gets the pitch in the car opportunity (2 cars were present for founders)

We did take the following materials to promote on Day2:

• Shows all the daily usage brands that would easily interest to GenZ
• All the categories we covered to show how holistically we’ve expanded
• Plus the QR in the bookmark is very handy to scan & share with others

Day 2 Review:

• Get to meet with highly intellect incubators & investors who’ll refine your idea much and invite you to pitch ahead
• Visit teh SBI startup expo to get all the fintech & edtech brands targeting IIT kids
• Many outreach brand again meeting offlien and how’s deviant sir
• Open video and sur taal mein hi Akko bhejdo sao for mekign tea fest on time

We got a few descent downloads but have kept teh sticker of our log in teh promotional wall:

• Getting few scanning via my GneZDealZ.ai
• Get to spread to other incubators & potential brand buyers
• Few word of mouth to have some more exitiemtn into switch song

If purchased stall we could getting both teh access with laptop and vice versa

• A good number of footfalls would be getting
• A getting only appp with opportunity horn?
• Eat counters to assist them further with simple brand changes 

Many of the colleges have a descent ego in not partnering with new-age startups.

Followups are mostly for years & years, if you’re consistent – you’ll get the deal/

Here are the kinda email replies we got after sending 77 outreach emails:

A few mistakes we made in cold emailing to the college:

• Not taking their names correctly
• Giving the principal the wrong pitch
• Sending an unprofessional brochure
• Getting non working email IDs with non creative subject lines

Why to get the email campaigns initiated under third party?

Recently we tried graphy emails with thier special domain and found the below results

• Spam rate decreases a lot with thier suggestions and custom analytics helps in knowing the open rates
• Everything manage under one platform without paying extra
• Soon you can try this for your email – here the the verbal flow we flow
• Make sure who all the audience reads emails of yours and who ignored them can filter afterwards

Though India is a nation where festive are highly important and needs something OFF to get the purchase completed, there’re audiences where discounts doesn’t have any effect on them.

In which cases discounts won’t work at that level:

• When the audience is financially capable to pay and doesn’t care much about the price. Pitching the course anytime in the year will work
• When the audience doesn’t have any option in teh market adn you become their 1st preferred choice your business gonna increase irrespective of any festive

When would discounts work?
– When the audience doesn’t have a large capability to pay you

– When the audience includes international customers (living in India) who may need certain discounts to manage thier exchanges values well

Case 1: DigitalChefHub (www.ihmgurukul.com)

Here the chefs are mostly less paid and are they need financial assistance to get their ups killing sorted

Here’s the sales graph during the discounts period:

Case 2: Prof. Sheetal Kunder Academy (www.profsheetalkunderacademy.com)

For financial students, they don’t have a high financial capability (considering they’re not invovled in any internship), and parents of these students are ready to send them anywhere for good studies.

Finance professionals have a good pay and read to pay any amount to get promotions and salary hikes (may pursue due to company’s policy of upgrading knowledge)

Here’s the sales graph during the discounts period: