Getting noticed by 500 Startups was harder before they had an application process. In 2012 without an application process, you needed to be recommended by people within the 500 network (company founders or mentors). They do have an application process now. My co-founder Ramakanth Dorai and I were 23 year old recent college grads from India who started Walletkit and didn’t know anyone from the 500 network. But this is how we hustled our way in. On Aug 24(2012), I saw a tweet by Paul Singh from Mumbai Airport. His subsequent tweets revealed that he would be in a couple of Indian cities meeting entrepreneurs and meeting him would require a referral. I cold emailed him rather than looking for a referral with an intro about our team, the product and asked if we could meet in Bangalore which is closer to our city, Chennai.I use a small trick when mailing people who get a lot of emails. I check their facebook and twitter profiles for updates and mail almost at the same time they tweet or share ( used Tweetdeck for notification of updates). He replied asking about our product, but then went radio silent. Followed up via email in the next couple of days but there was no response. Later on, his…

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