I wanted to contribute to society in some significant way. I was sitting on my couch at home on a Saturday afternoon and day dreaming about helping society; not the best way of going about it, but dreaming was a start I guess. I picked up an old newspaper and came across a very interesting and yet troubling article in the Times of India. I dug it out so you guys can have a look.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/India-facing-a-blood-shortage-of-3-million-units/articleshow/36492006.cms
I can summarize the problem in one sentence: India faces a shortage of over 1 Million Litres of blood.
That is when I thought I should go after this problem. After all, if I am to contribute to society, I might as well attack one of its biggest problems. I felt a sudden glow inside me, the kind of feeling you get when you do something good, like helping an old man cross the street. The emotion was short lived. I had identified a major problem, great, but now I had to find a solution.
I thought about it for quite a while, but it wasn’t until I went out for lunch with some friends two months later that I thought I had found a solution. I was eating some delicious paneer tikka at a barbeque themed restaurant when I saw a round bandaid on a persons hand who was at a nearby table. It struck me that he might have gone to donate blood. If he did, I wondered how he had known where to go and give blood? Some friends might have told him about some blood camp, or someone he knew might have needed his blood group. But what if no one he knew wanted blood, and he had no idea where blood camps are running? I thought the situation described just now would represent the majority of the population, and the other situation a minority; I was a part of this majority population.
Here is a guy, maybe 30 years old, who wants to donate blood, but has no clue as to how to go about it. Even if he knew of a blood donation camp running in Bangalore, he might still have to travel quite a distance to donate blood. Is the investment in time, the hassle of travelling in Bangalore traffic, and the money worth it? And does the patient have that much time to wait? Wouldn’t it be more convenient for the patient to find compatible donors who are close by? In a few cases, that time gap could mean the difference between life and death.
That is when it struck me. I thought I found the solution to the problem. Make it convenient for people to both find donors and to donate blood. That was my Aha! moment; and I looked across the table where I was eating and saw my friend who works for a startup, in android development. That was my second Aha! moment. What could be better than using a map based mobile application to find people who need blood and those who want to donate blood!
That is when the whole process of developing SureBlood started, and boy was that a challenge! We learned a lot about entrepreneurship along the way, even taking some entrepreneurship courses along the way – Entrepreneurship 101 by MITx and Gamification by UPenn. Our journey to satisfy the need for blood at every hospital in India, and soon, at every hospital around the world is just starting! We are releasing SureBlood on March 30th on the android platform, and within a couple of months it would be available on the web, windows, and the iOS platforms.
I would urge you to download and start using the application, but hey, I think the problem statement would have already done that.
Abhinav Ramesh 