House to Tula, Founded by a Female Indian Immigrant Entrepreneur, Wins The Startup Race, The UK-Based £10,000 Prize Competition
THE STARTUP RACE
7 min read
Runner Up Company is Olemedo, Founded by a Female Mexican Immigrant Entrepreneur; UK-Based Growth Hacking Competition Focused on Revenue over Polished Pitches, Seeking a Better Way to Drive Investment
Priyansu Nath, founder and CEO of House of Tula, wins the £10,000 Startup Race cash prize. Nath stands with James Shoemark, co-founder of The Startup Race.
The Startup Race, a UK-based Startup growth-hacking Competition which prioritises sales over pitching skills, announced today that House of Tula has won the 6-month long competition, and was awarded the £10,000 cash prize. House of Tula founded by female Indian immigrant entrepreneur Priyansu Nath, has secured the £10,000 Startup Race cash prize and says she will use the purse to invest in online marketing, social media marketing campaigns, and bring in customers to its future crowdfunding campaigns. House of Tula, the winning company, is focused on personal journaling, with sustainability at its heart and as its founding principle. More than 500 companies entered The £10,000 Startup Race in 2021. The competition also awarded second place to Olmedo of London’s founder Mariely Macias Olmedo, another female immigrant entrepreneur (Mexico).
Priyansu Nath, founder and CEO of House of Tula, wins the £10,000 Startup Race cash prize. Nath stands with James Shoemark, co-founder of The Startup Race.
The Startup Race, a UK-based Startup growth-hacking Competition which prioritises sales over pitching skills, announced today that House of Tula has won the 6-month long competition, and was awarded the £10,000 cash prize. House of Tula founded by female Indian immigrant entrepreneur Priyansu Nath, has secured the £10,000 Startup Race cash prize and says she will use the purse to invest in online marketing, social media marketing campaigns, and bring in customers to its future crowdfunding campaigns. House of Tula, the winning company, is focused on personal journaling, with sustainability at its heart and as its founding principle. More than 500 companies entered The £10,000 Startup Race in 2021. The competition also awarded second place to Olmedo of London’s founder Mariely Macias Olmedo, another female immigrant entrepreneur (Mexico).
EDINBURGH, UK, Jan. 30, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Startup Race, a UK-based Startup growth-hacking Competition which prioritises sales over pitching skills, announced today that House of Tula has won the 6-month long competition, and was awarded the £10,000 cash prize. House of Tula founded by female Indian immigrant entrepreneur Priyansu Nath, has secured the £10,000 Startup Race cash prize and says she will use the purse to invest in online marketing, social media marketing campaigns, and bring in customers to its future crowdfunding campaigns.
“As an entrepreneur, you need to validate various hypotheses for your business. What The Startup Race competition did for the business was create a 6-month time frame to achieve this,” said Priyansu Nath, founder and CEO of House of Tula. “It was the perfect time to play your cards as not only we could test the hypothesis, but every penny generated in revenue would also count towards the competition. This meant concrete insights for the business in an accelerated time.”
The competition also awarded second place to Olmedo of London’s founder Mariely Macias Olmedo, another female immigrant entrepreneur (Mexico).
“For both our first and second place winners, their mission and business success proves that ‘gamifying the startup process’ with a growth-hacking competition can help Startup founders overcome perfectionism, procrastination, and thus reduce the chance of failure,” said James Shoemark, CEO and co-founder of The Startup Race Ltd. “When customers actually start purchasing a startup’s product or service, it’s not only an achievement, but also significant validation for the startup concept and value proposition.”
More than 500 companies entered The £10,000 Startup Race, and the entrepreneurs became especially competitive towards the end. The Startup Race team used an FCA-regulated Open Banking data aggregation company to diligently, analyse and validate each bank transaction that reflected a sale the Startup Racers were able to achieve each week. This resulted in changing positions on the £10,000 Startup Race League Table each week and Priyanshu Nath won by having the most sales overall.
House of Tula, the winning company, is focused on personal journaling, with sustainability at its heart and as its founding principle. House of Tula was born in 2022 following the founder Priyanshu Nath's personal well-being journey in which journaling played a key role. She discovered that writing on textured paper gave her a tactile experience that digital devices failed to offer, and journals with beautiful aesthetics made her carry the journal regularly like an accessory. With this in mind, she ventured to develop a product that would be appreciated by more people like her and found that it was popular with other customers including journallers, artists and architects, who too appreciated sustainable good quality paper, beautiful designs and the lovely feel of textured paper.
Olmedo of London is an innovative clothing company founded by Mariely Macias Olmedo, another female immigrant entrepreneur from Mexico who studied fashion in London at the masters level in Italy at Instituto Marangoni. She blends authentic Mexican embroideries and the fusion of western inspirations, focused on creating contemporary garments for women. Olmedo wants to introduce one of the main characteristics of the luxury market; handmade process and authenticity creating collaborations with artisans and creative people in the UK.
“The £10,000 Startup Race motivated me to launch my new label with a collection of handbags made of cactus leather,” said Mariely Macias Olmedo, founder of Olmedo of London. “Technical challenges, administrative tasks and design approach, can be quite challenging to put together with a very specific deadline. However, with the tools and methods that the Start Up Race supports, was approached in a successful way. We will be continue constructing our beautiful project and improving in all corresponding areas.”
The Startup Race methodology capitalizes on the iconoclastic startup method, first developed by GodFather of the Lean Startup Movement - Steve Blank. In a 2013 blog post called It’s Time to Play Moneyball: The Investment Readiness Level. Upon entry to the Accelerator, participants gained access to the world’s best Lean Startup resources in order to validate their thinking, develop their business model and personal profile in order to attract co-founders. Other free resources on Leanstack include the Foundations and Business Model Design Playbooks and Lean Canvas & Traction Roadmap tools. The Startup Race team helps entrepreneurs incorporate their UK company and open a UK business bank account to enable them to start generating sales as soon as the competition starts. Through The Startup Race process, a number of high net-worth individuals observe how the teams perform over the course of The Race and be introduced to companies that they may consider supporting at the end of the program.
ABOUT THE STARTUP RACE The Startup Race is an accelerator program focused on proving that entrepreneurs succeed best through sales and revenue, over perfect pitching. The program was conceived in 2014 when a young entrepreneur asked Mr. Shoemark, who was hosting a League of Entrepreneurs Meetup at the time, if and how the startup process could be gamified. Mr. Shoemark decided that a business competition using the Pirate Metrics (AARRR as popularised by Dave McLure) could be the answer. He soon teamed up with Michael Clouser, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist (Dot Edu Ventures) who directed the Edinburgh-Stanford Link at the University of Edinburgh. Michael is also an entrepreneurship professor and earned his BS/MBA from Cornell University, and researched on the MSc/PhD at the University of Edinburgh. The team also partnered with Edinburgh-based entrepreneurs,investors and students as partners in order to help fuel fast-growth startups in the UK and around the world. For more information on The Startup Race, please visit: WWW.TheStartupRace.com.
