Picture Courtesy: Bidish Acharya

As every one of us know by now, some of the students from DWIT, namely Bidish Acharya, Asim Regmi, Sumit Shrestha, Sachin Aryal, and Abhishek Gupta, are successfully running a startup called MeroHostel (www.merohostel.com). After a successful few months, they recently decided to launch a mobile application for merohostel.com. That application has been accepted to the Bootstrap track of Facebook’s startup program (Fbstart) which is a program that helps up and coming startups to succeed. Their acceptance into the program means that they have been provided with $30,000 worth of free services and tools, along with the opportunities to learn and work along with the Facebook team in order to build and grow their business even further.

The news club took a short interview with one of the co-founders of the startup, Bidish Acharya after he broke the news on his Facebook Page. Here’s what he had to say: Q) Can you tell us your initial reaction when you read that e-mail from Facebook? “I was just checking my e-mail like I do every other morning and when I saw an email from Facebook, I was shocked beyond words can describe. When I saw the title of the email I quickly clicked on it and read through it; to be honest, I just can’t articulate my reaction at this moment. A mixture of pure joy and satisfaction sums it up. After I went through the email, I started browsing the services that were provided to us, and I was busy researching about FbStart program to make sure that it was indeed authentic.” Q) Did you think your application was going to be selected? “If I’m being honest, I had no idea when I had filled in the actual form for the application until just yesterday when I got the e-mail. I had to scan through my browser history to know how I got into that website. So the answer to that question is no; I had no expectation that I’d ever hear back from them.” Q) Could you tell us a little bit about your future plans for the business? What can we expect from your group?

“Our plan right now is to scale and grow MeroHostel.com. FbStart’s services will hugely impact our business at this stage. Now that we have started earning some revenues, we will use the services provided by Facebook to promote our company even more. They have provided us with $500 advertisement credit on Facebook. That alone is a massive show of support for us, and we hope that by using those credits, we can be somewhat established in Nepal. After getting Merohostel.com to be consistently profitable, we will look forward to launch other products that show the biggest potential to succeed in the Nepali market. The group that we have assembled is a very talented one with a lot of creativity involved. So yeah for sure, you can expect a lot of things in the foreseeable future.”

The DWIT news team would like to congratulate Bidish and his team for this massive achievement and wish them the very best of luck in their future endeavors.