Marketing, AI, health: Test your business creativity with Edition 219 of our weekly quiz!

Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 219th edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.

What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?

Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.

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Q1: The ‘last-mile problem’

Many ideas look smart when presented in boardrooms, but rarely translate into real business outcomes. How can this disconnect be addressed by using digital technology?

Q2: Holistic education

Education should be about building confidence, communication skills, and global exposure; not just academic scores. Where is the entrepreneurial opportunity here?

Q3: Digital marketing

Brands continue to face rising customer acquisition costs and limited visibility into cross-channel performance. Digital advertising spend is generally concentrated on a small number of platforms. Where are the new business opportunities here for startups?

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Q4: Nutrition

Many children meet daily calorie intake requirements, but tend to avoid vegetables, nuts and conventional supplements. How can this nutritional gap be bridged?

Q5: Food labelling

Labelling of ingredient lists is often a slow and error-prone manual process. Even top companies largely use Excel sheets and documents. How can technology help here?

Answers!

Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!

A1: The ‘last-mile problem’ in AI

Founded by Shub Bhowmick, Sumit Mehra and Shashank Dubey, Tredence is a data science solutions provider focused on solving the last-mile problem in AI, or the disconnect between insight and impact. It combines strong domain knowledge, robust engineering, and first-principles problem solving.

Its offerings span generative AI, agentic AI, and multi-agent domain accelerators to convert AI into a core transformation lever. Read more here about its 100 global clients served by R&D centres in India, and how it leverages value storytelling, responsible AI-governance, explainability, and compliance in its platforms.

A2: Holistic education

Founded by Devvaki Aggarwal, Instrucko offers language, communication and life skills programmes along with teacher training. Its immersive confidence-building approach is based on teaching children through stories and real-life situations while building emotional intelligence.

“We teach empathy, patience, and values through stories. These are the skills that truly matter,” Aggarwal says. Read more here about its clients in India and overseas, such as Scindia School, Mayo College Ajmer, Sanskar School, and Mobius Foundation.

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A3: Digital marketing

Founded by Umair Mohammad, Shamail Tayyab, and Pratik Anand, Nitro Commerce works with consumer brands to improve customer acquisition, attribution, and engagement across channels. Its unified layer brings together identity, intent, engagement, and attribution via analytics systems to enable faster decision-making.

For example, its Nitro Pulse product focuses on AI-driven engagement and sales automation, including recovery of abandoned transactions and real-time interaction. Read more here about the company’s customers, which include more than 2,500 brands across fashion, beauty, home, food, and lifestyle.

A4: Nutrition

Founded by Amarpreet Singh Anand and his wife, Sahiba Kaur, Good Monk develops easy-to-mix, clinically-validated nutrition powders that address common vitamin and mineral gaps in diets. Its goal is to make nutrition tasteless and odourless, yet effective, so that people consume it naturally as a food blend.

Its products include Family Nutrition Mix for ages four to fifty, Healthy 50+, and a plant-protein mix for rotis. Read more here about how it prepares formulations rich in vitamins and minerals, which are already consumed by over 450,000 customers.

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A5: Food labelling

Founded by nutrition expert Rashida Vapiwala, LabelBlind leverages cloud-based software to simplify the entire food labelling process. It helps speed up the creation of a complete, compliant label with the nutrition table, ingredients, and required declarations.

Its AI tools rapidly validate an entire label and generate a compliance report. Read more here about its clients across 12+ countries, including Indian firms such as Tata Starbucks, ITC Hotels, Tim Hortons India, and PVR.

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

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Edited by Suman Singh