Profile: Suprasanna Mishra of StageShark

Founder Profile: Suprasanna Mishra of StageShark

How did you come to be an entrepreneur?

It all started in high school when I learned how to create websites on my own. From there, I did a few sites for friends and family and that's when I really began to learn it in-depth. I reached out to small businesses and eventually grew it out to my current web design firm - Kite5. This experience gave me the entrepreneurial experience to start venturing out into new things. My latest such venture is Stageshark. It's been a crazy ride so far, and I'm thankful for all the people I've met who have helped me go from knowing nothing to knowing just a little more than nothing about what it means to be an entrepreneur. I know I have a long way to go, and I'm excited about that journey.

How did you come up with the idea?

It all started when one day I logged into Facebook to find tons of pictures of a Coldplay concert that had just happened that past night here in Cincinnati. Coldplay is one of my favorite bands and they don't tour often in the United States, much less to Cincinnati. You can imagine that I was pretty mad that I missed it. It was then that I started thinking about a solution -- what if there was an application that would let you know when your favorite bands were in town? This was the thought that Stageshark was born out of, and that is the problem it will solve.

What resources here did you take advantage of and how did they help?

There's no way I could have made my idea a reality without support from the local business community. Specifically, the Cincinnati Innovates competition gave me a way to raise an initial round of funding to take the thought of Stageshark to a functional application. After receiving funding from them, it was invaluable working with CincyTech USA to gain more feedback and advice on everything from hiring to application development. I can't tell you how much I've learned just talking with the people who work there. I would argue that advice from those who've done it before and funding itself are equally important -- it would have been difficult achieving my goals for Stageshark without both.

What inspires you?

I keep up to date on what goes on in the world related to tech startups and youth entrepreneurship. It serves as little reminders to me that there's other people going through what I'm going through, and that in itself is humbling and inspiring. Reading about those who have been though the cycle and have succeeded fuels my motivation to make Stageshark the best it can be.

What's next for you and your company?

Look for the application release at the beginning of October this year. We're releasing it to be completely free and completely ad-free. After our release date, we'll immediately be working on the next version and adding in more features - we've got a long list of ideas that we want to pilot test first and then implement if it seems useful to our users. If the idea sounds interesting to you, head to http://stageshark.com and drop us your email. We'll let you know when we launch.