Walking on Juhu beach in the morning, you will find a man standing with a banner that reads ‘Start Your Business Online'. If it gets you interesting and makes you chat with him, then Sampath Gattu has succeeded in his innovative marketing pitch.
A finance graduate from Hyderabad with a passion for coding, Gattu came to Mumbai two months ago with his start-up dream to make websites for people and also establish a branch of his virtual snack bar, Crunch Bites. He wants to build connections in the city, and chose the hours when businessmen, celebrities and the dedicatedly fit walk the beach and take in the morning air.
Talking to The Free Press Journal, Gattu said he completed his MBA in finance in March 2021 and immediately felt the pressure of unemployment. I wanted to do something different. At the time when jobs are scarce, he said he intuitively feels more like an employer than an employee. “And then people around me were pushing me to take up a job. Moreover, I wanted to come to Mumbai for a long time but my family had been denying me this pleasure,” he said.
To begin with, the foodie that he is, he started a snacks delivery system in Hyderabad and called it ‘Crunch Bites’. It is a cloud kitchen-based start-up, with Swiggy and Zomato delivering his murukulu, sakinalu, flat sev, chakri and atkula chuwda, snacks rooted in Telangana. The next station, though, was his dream city Mumbai.
Even as his snack kitchen cooks up the Telangana bites, Gattu spends four hours every day making chart-like banners for his beach forays. Every day it’s a new chart, with meticulously chosen fonts, offering to design websites for people. There is no phone number on them as he wants people to talk to him. He said he wants to take the challenging way because it shows his dedication.
“Juhu is near Santacruz, where I stay. It’s convenient to reach the beach early in the morning. I wake up at 5 am, reach by 6 am, and stay there for three hours,” said Gattu, adding that he loved going for walks in Hyderabad, too, and thought it would be a great idea to turn into a marketing venture.
He said he could have used social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but chose not to. “It would have been convenient for me to post something online, but people would not care. I wanted to do something authentic,” he said.
And even as vendors and hawkers get into trouble with the police, he never has, as he is alone with his clean banners.
