The emergence of startup wave is undergoing through a fundamental shift with entrepreneurship & innovation being a key catalyst in job creation and solving everyday problems. A decade ago, there used to be only a handful of Indian startup success stories and now with time, startup ecosystem has indeed come a long way. Insights Success team interviewed with the young and dynamic business personas, Yashraj & Yuvraj Bhardwaj, the Co-founders of WorkoLab and we are glad to share their motivating words and insightful answers.
Please tell us about the journey of WorkoLab from its initial days, the growth, and its expansion.
WorkoLab is India’s first co-working space with an objective to facilitate research among the emerging entrepreneurs and researchers. Spread over an area of 12500 sq. ft., WorkoLab offers a collaborative space coupled with research guidance by India’s youngest scientific minds with an aim to infuse innovation into your startup idea.
Co-founded by Yashraj and Yuvraj Bhardwaj with an initial seed capital amount of INR 3 Crore, the twin brothers identified an existing gap in ‘lack of coworking spaces and research hubs altogether at the same place’.
The company has an aggressive roadmap ahead with a rapid growth plan and expansion to other cities like Mumbai, Pune, Kota, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, and Jaipur by March 2018. In the second phase, WorkoLab plans to take an international leap starting with Malaysia and Singapore and thereby launch 100+ centres in next 3 years across the globe.
What inspired you to come up with this idea, which changed the Startup World?
Co-working in India has been just made the business of table and chair. These days, we people are very high in talking about making global startups from India, but nobody is ready to accept the fact that innovation is something very important, if we want to bring a real change in the ecosystem. We thought of this concept to build cowering spaces with research hubs so that people are ready to take interest in innovation, research, and development.
Briefly tell us about Mr. Yashraj & Mr. Yuvraj Bhardwaj, Co-Founders- WorkoLab.
Yuvraj & Yashraj, 18 year old twins from Delhi, are the owners of the company Zenith Vipers, which they started back in 2013. Since then, they have never looked back and humbly climbed the steps of success with hard work and dedication.
They have worked on 24 projects and filed 8 patents in a team of two. They got Karamaveer Chakra last year for their work and have been nominated for Padma Shri 2018. Recently, they got the ‘The Eagle Award’ from Malaysia. They have been winners of many fellowships too such as, SF Fellowship $250,000, Austrian Innovation Grant worth $40,000, and much more.
What are the unique services/ products provided by WorkoLab?
We are the first Co-Working space across the globe to provide research hubs to start-ups working with us to promote the concept of Research and Innovation.
Kindly brief us about your strategies behind those services/products. If possible, kindly give us a one line unique quote that best describes your company.
We are excited to build a thriving start-up community through the launch of WorkoLab. We are not just another co-working but are trying to trigger the spark of innovation into startups. The space can be used for research, collaboration, networking and support, which is a space where we bring together a community of like-minded graduate students, entrepreneurs, startups, software developers along with relevant mentors into the same ecosystem.
How do you work on your long-term relationship with your clients?
We are a space, which is not into lock-ins or anything like that with the clients taking our seats/research hub memberships. We simply work with them on concept, and expect them to grow. The curated people are sitting at our spaces.
Kindly brief us about the most satisfactory experience with a client. What kind of game changing services have you provided to them?
We have currently independent researchers who are working with us. The most fascinating fact is that these researchers are aged from 9 to 83. And 90 percent of these people undertaking research are without degrees.
What challenges have WorkoLab faced on the road to success? Please share with us the issues a company in this field generally faces.
We faced a lot of issues in the interaction. People in India think research is something very difficult and impossible to do, and we really have to work very hard to be able to deliver our thoughts on research. According to us, people just need complete dedication and good set of questions to do research.
What are the values and factors that you attribute to, for your success?
Yes, the values play a very major role for anybody’s success. In simple words, clients for us are no less than god, and we can do anything to make them feel our spaces as their homes.
What is the greatest strength of WorkoLab? How is it helping to move forward with the future plans?
The greatest strength of WorkoLab is the research hub that we run with all our co-working spaces. This has really changed the revenue and the financial model for us. The revenue from co workings is just 12 percent, which are making rest 88 percent comes from the research projects, patents, etc. that we are doing at our spaces. This is really helping us to get rent free spaces, and people are really eager to invest in our company.
WorkoLab: Facilitating Research among Emerging Entrepreneurs and Researchers
