Software, an IT company working on offshore products and outsourced software development, has invested $1 million in CollegeDekho. The online platform connects colleges and their course listings with interested students, and is in the business of clearing bottlenecks in the college admissions process. CollegeDekho will be using the funds for developing its platform, building its team and marketing.
Ruchir Arora, CEO and Founder, CollegeDekho
“Higher education in India is a market segment that requires a fresh approach to overcome incumbent inertia. We liked the idea of a disruptive development that could assist students in making more informed choices,” says Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder, Girnar Software.
He adds that incepted as a medium to connect students to colleges, CollegeDekho will leverage its proprietary and unique technology platform to match student preferences to prospective colleges. Girnar Software’s investment would serve as the seed funding for the venture, with more funds expected to be raised in due course of time.
On funding, Ruchir Arora, CEO and founder, CollegeDekho says, “In India at any point of time there are 30 million students enrolled in 36,000 colleges. Despite being the third-largest higher education market in the world, it is hugely underpenetrated and offers significant growth potential. We have been established to provide a transparent, open platform that facilitates interaction between students and colleges. Through this venture, we aim to provide students with authentic, comprehensive and unbiased information. This will help them evaluate and select a career option best suited to their interests and proficiency.”
Girnar Software is the parent company of many portals such as CarBay.com, CarDekho.com, Gaadi.com, Zigwheels.com, BikeDekho.com, PriceDekho.com and now CollegeDekho.com. The company has also introduced specialised portals like TyreDekho.com and TrucksDekho.com.
In January this year, the group company picked up $50 million from Hillhouse, Tybourne and Sequoia Capital. It also attracted investment from Ratan Tata and a strategic investment from HDFC Bank.
From being popular fodder in science fiction to a staple at the world technology fairs, home automation has surely come full circle.
Soon to be a reality in the homes of our future, it is the complexity, differing formats and the ability to do more which is steering innovation in this space.
But rather than figuring out the domotics as well as linking the differing hardware, network and communication interfaces, what if the only thing needed was Wi-Fi and the switch of the future?
The team working on CloverBoard with the founders
Making this a reality is a bunch of NIT-Jaipur graduates through what they call ‘the senseful anyway switch’.
The Switch of the future
Introducing CloverBoard, the ‘senseful’, which communicates (with other CloverBoards) to sense motion, figuring out occupancy and taking actions accordingly. It perceives the intelligence of the day and the user’s routine to give wise control to the lighting. According to the founders, the switch can help users save 10-15 percent on heating and cooling costs as well as 30 -40 percent on lighting costs.
In another avatar, CloverBoard is also the ‘anyway switch’, where its buttons aren’t hard coded and can be assigned with varying functionalities. So, you no longer have to travel all the way to your kitchen to switch off the lights; you can do it from your bedroom while snuggled in the comfort of your bed.
One can also assign an ‘away’ theme to a button to switch off all appliances with a touch before the user leaves his home.
It allows users to create themes allowing you to set the lights and the cooling for a particular time of the day; scheduled functioning of appliances like switching on geysers for 10 minutes every day at eight a.m., and also taking care of security, protecting homes from robbers by sounding an alarm and sending a notification in case motion is detected in the person’s absence.
But, doesn’t this what other home automation ventures essentially offer? The founders disagree. They say that the traditional home automation products and services available aren’t really automating. They believe giving users remote access on a smartphone isn’t automation; it is rather realised when one does not need to pull out his phone and when appliances are behaving automatically according to occupancy and usage behaviour.
Moreover, many legacy home automation companies, according to them, follow the approach of changing the wiring and basic infrastructure of the house in order to provide a customised solution, causing not just inconvenience but also adding to the cost.
The CloverBoard
The journey
For co-founders Nishant Kumar, Nirmala Kunwar and Ritika Dhyawala, the sheer passion for robotics and automation brought them together. Having met at a robotics college group, these graduates tried to solve real problems through technology right from their first year of college.
Such was their appetite to solve real issues that even after starting their job, they were constantly in touch to discuss new technologies and problems to be solved. Seeing this, Nishant’s older brother Vivek Raj joined the crew, helping with networking and connecting the team with some renowned research organisations, MNCs, investors and businessmen.
The team has come a long way. Entrepreneurs understand that realising a scalable product is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in a hardware startup.
The co-founders tell us that an actual scalable product is far different from the basic prototype. To give a rough division, only 10 percent of the effort goes to make a prototype while 90 percent of the effort goes into converting that into a product that can be scaled and mass-produced.
Ritika tells us that it was tempting to build a service company. For running a home/office automation company, third-party products can be bought from China but in that case, the company would become an integrator and will never be able to innovate in the future.
“We wanted to create something that can be adopted by the masses and do constant innovation,” she says.
Ritika believes the journey has taught the team a lot. She says:
“The journey has not just taught us technical aspects of a scalable product but also the different aspects of people. The dream and realisation of building a hardware company is difficult and scary but the joy of seeing an actual product come to life can’t be described in words.”
For these first-time entrepreneurs, their journey so far has helped them realise the importance of money in tough situations. An equally important lesson would be the necessity to rein in emotions in difficult and hopeless situations and persevering despite all odds.
Currently at a pre-revenue stage, the venture plans to have a limited release of their product next quarter, followed by a full release by the second quarter of 2016. Ritika says,
“There is a common notion that Indians cannot build well-designed hardware products. You will see this melting. Also, we will expand quickly in the coming months to reach different parts of the country.”
Bootstrapped for a long time, the firm has received a grant of Rs 10 lakhs from IIM Ahmedabad through ADB. In talks with potential investors and strategic partners, the business is looking to raise $1.5 million to take CloverBoard to the top eight cities of India.
Having received orders for more than 1,000 CloverBoards, the firm believes in creating self-sustainable, connected homes by combining energy management, solar energy and superior battery technology.
Concluding, the founders narrate the bigger vision of being able to give homes a personality while enabling one to have a conversation with their home, and integrating voice recognition technology.
Conversations, coffee, and drinks are possibly where most startup ideas are born. PiQube was no different. Jayadev Mahalingam was having a conversation over drinks with another startup founder, who mentioned that working with recruitment consultants instead of against them produced better results in his experience.
At the time, Jayadev was struggling with his startup idea and business model. The startup was in its first year and the core team had been stuck for seven months without getting paid. “With this new insight, we immediately came up with an ‘Uber for Recruitment Consultants’ backed by our complex machine-learning algorithms and network of human screeners to ensure the quality of profiles landing in the company’s inbox,” says Jayadev.
PiQube Team
Profiling the candidate
PiQube today, is a people intelligence platform where data science and human judgment overlap to give you intelligence on the talent you have, and the talent you need. It is a hiring tool that not only performs socio-metric profiling and analytical reporting, but also helps create a job, view applicant profiles for that job, shortlist the profiles, reject those that do not qualify, schedule interviews, verify the candidates, and even make an offer to the right candidate.
PiQube has a network of over 300 recruitment consultants and a claimed efficiency level of 1:8, which is atleast twice that of any hiring tool currently available.
Hiring is one of the biggest challenges for modern-day organisations with companies not knowing how to find the right mix of skill, domain expertise, and winning personality in their talent search process.
PiQube aims to remove doubt from the entire process of hiring, through seamless communication, technological intervention, and by never ruling out the efficiency of human judgement.
Jayadev believes that this is an exciting time for the HR Tech space, in India and globally. He says they are solving various pieces of the hiring problem through predictive analytics, Big Data and Cloud; however, the process still remains pretty rudimentary in our country.
According to him, what really sets PiQube apart is the genius overlapping of predictive analytics and human judgement, which has been translated onto a platform. He says it takes you through the entire hiring process, minus all the resume crunching, spreadsheets, paperwork and wasted time.
“We just reached the 25 customer landmark. We’ve managed to close about 55 positions in the last 30 days across 17 companies.We’ve onboarded more than 300 recruitment consultants onto the system,” adds Jayadev.
The internal workings
Once the company posts a job on PiQube, it intelligently decides who works on the requirement through a complex scoring system. The system accounts for speed and redundancy, assigning to more when there aren’t enough responses.
Consultants then start working and uploading profiles onto the system; the internal algorithms screen the profiles and score them based on Skill, Domain and Personality. Human screeners like SMEs or work from home HR personnel then eyeball the profiles. If two out of three screeners say approve the profile, it is forwarded to the company.
Interview scheduling is done at the click of a button, and the calendar invites go to both the hiring manager and candidate. The final acceptance is posted on the platform. The invoicing too is automated on the platform.
The team
As a sole founder, Jayadev, who has a background in aircraft wing design and recruitment, says he faced a lot of challenges. But contrary to popular wisdom, not having a co-founder only helped him invest a lot more in his core team.
Rajeshwar Rajaretnam is the Head of Tech at PiQube. He is ex-PayPal and comes with experience in putting together scalable systems and high-end architecture. Jagadis Natarjan, the Product Head is ex-Amazon. Prabha Rajagopalan ensures that Operations run smoothly and has prior experience in seeing a company grow from 10 to 250 people.
Agnelo Mascarenhas and Immanuvel Vasanth are the Analytics backbone of PiQube. They come with very diverse experiences in corporates and startups, and are completely responsible for the Intellectual Capital in the system.
Lakshmi Balasubramanian manages customer relations and was working at eShakti earlier. Ranjani Shankar ensures that the PR machinery is well oiled.
The HR Tech space
The team has raised $500,000 from the “HR Fund” -a group of 50 – 60 HR Heads, who have come together to foster Tech in the HR Community. Currently a Web-only platform, PiQube will be launching Android and iPhone apps soon.
“We already have Singapore-based clients with whom we will be expanding our scope of operations in the coming months. Users can directly apply for jobs through the system from March 2016,” says Jayadev.
According to an HR Service Delivery and Technology Survey, close to 85 per cent of Indian organisations are looking at Cloud for HR. Close to 44 per cent of Indian organisations are looking at mobile for their HR modules. Globally, similar players in the space include iMomentous and Virgin Pulse.
Up until December 2010, Rohan Khara had not listened to a single podcast and admits that he was ignorant of the entire podcasting industry. Now he heads one of India’s handful of startups that are dedicated to creating and producing quality content via this medium of audio storytelling.
Jabbercast founders Left to Right: Gustavo, Rohan and Vijay
On what got him started, Rohan recalls, “One day in December 2010 my friend Gustavo Bitdinger sent me a detailed email outlining the different problems plaguing the podcast industry. I whipped out my iPhone, fired up the native podcast apps and spent about six weeks binging on different podcasts. This is how I realised how everything which Gus mentioned in his email was true; especially the very first pain point: ‘Make it really easy to discover and subscribe to new shows.’”
He adds, “There is an intense increase in podcast consumption; there’s an annual $18 billion advertising market in audio programming which is transitioning from terrestrial radio to on-demand, mobile-based consumption. This is a huge opportunity for Jabbercast to capitalise on by redefining the podcast experience for content creators and their consumers.”
Jabbercast
What emerged was a podcast player which differentiates itself from the rest by focussing on shareability. Rohan says, “While at a high level Jabbercast offers all the fundamental experiences that a podcast player should provide, our goal is to help anyone discover and share great podcast moments. Our secret sauce is a unique experience that delivers a daily mix of podcast highlights tailored to your interests while empowering you to share your favourite podcast episodes and ‘snippets’ with friends.”
He offers the numbers to back up his claims, “Currently, 46 million Americans listen to podcasts every month and this is growing by 15-25% annually. The daily average podcast listener listens to more than two hours of podcasts a day: more than any other form of audio. In 2014 itself, 7.5 billion hours of podcasts were consumed by listeners and this is going to touch an estimated 10 billion hours by 2016.”
Podcasting is getting to where the Internet was a decade back. With a deluge of quality, even glorious, content users are skyrocketing. Yet, current apps offer little room for sharing and dissemination. Though the platform makes it increasingly easier for creators from any background to upload episodes, there is little-to-no room for users to share and discuss them on a common ground. Facebook or Flipboard are go-to sites for content sharing because of the ease of distribution. Rohan envisions Jabbercast to be a Flipboard for podcasts.
According to Rohan, shareability precedes discovery, something that should be easy and intuitive for podcasts in the first place.
What’s different?
Rohan explains, “Jabbercast’s current main differentiators are the rich visual slideshow on the player screen which provide a one-click access to web links to topics discussed in the episode and the integrated Twitter module which allows listeners to join the conversation around their favourite shows without having to leave the app. These two have been very well received by our early users. As a testimony, Nick Loper – host of the podcast Side Hustle Show – said, “Jabbercast destroys the Stitcher app.”
The long-winded route to entrepreneurship
A Kolkata boy, Rohan ended up in Stanford University by way of Bangalore’s RVCE. After long stints at Microsoft in Seattle and Quikr in Mumbai he was itching to start something of his own. The startup scene in India excited him immeasurably, though there are less than a handful of people who are into podcasting full-time. Most of India’s popular podcasts are successful side projects. Rohan says, “Its early days for podcasting in India. We need a lot more shows like the well-produced India Startup Chat and we also need more podcast networks like Audiomatic.”
Rohan clicking a selfie with one of his podcast heroes, Roman Mars of 99% Invisible
But the chance to be part of this ecosystem was thrilling enough to warrant a move back to Bengaluru, which he did in 2014. He explains, “The startup landscape in India back in 2010 was not even remotely as hot as it is right now. A lot of freshers, and also those with a couple of years of work experience, are now choosing entrepreneurship over a standard 9-to-5 job. Those who cannot escape the 9am-to-5pm due to their circumstances are thinking of how to effectively utilise their 7pm-to-2am. This is an incredibly positive sign because it helps build a stomach for risks, experience failure early on and get a real taste of what it takes to put together the building blocks of a sustainable business. Naturally, this has created more competition for hiring great engineering talent and more importantly, acquiring the customer’s attention and this in turn forces the entrepreneurs to become more innovative in their outreach to future employees and their customers. Overall, things are moving in a positive direction.”
Building up
Rohan’s partners-in-crime are Gustavo Bitdinger and Vijay Ragavan. The three co-founders met through university and work and share a strong common vision of how to elevate the user experience in this competitive industry. The Jabbercast team has intentionally refrained from active marketing and focussed instead on carefully curating a beta community of users. This is a bootstrapped venture. But Rohan says they are in talks with angel investors from the San Francisco Bay Area and the outcome appears positive.
Once the honeymoon is over…
For Rohan, the hardest part about becoming an entrepreneur was reconciling with the post-honeymoon stage. He says, “Once the honeymoon period is over, and the nebulous fantasy of an IPO or a billion-dollar acquisition makes way for day-to-day work, the constant companion of any first-time entrepreneur is the negative inner monologue which evokes self-doubt in everything they do. I suggest to not fight it. Make peace with it and keep moving forward. It’s going to be difficult and will take time but you will emerge a stronger person.”
But when compared with the best part, things don’t look quite so bad. He says, “The two things which are the most rewarding about a startup are working with smart folks and forging deep relationships with them; getting to work on a product which truly solves a problem and is loved by the users. It is a big dopamine release to hear a user say something positive about what I have built.”
Future
Rohan says, “We truly believe in the transformational power of great audio storytelling. Audio has a certain intimacy that you just can’t get with video or any other medium. That’s why we’re so excited to be bringing podcasts to the mainstream.” This would explain his grand enthusiasm for Jabbercast’s future.
He expounds, “Our goal is to make the experience of finding and listening to great podcasts as easy as turning on your favourite radio station. Imagine getting in your car and pressing a single button or getting on a train/bus to work and just clicking play on your phone to start streaming stories from the world’s best minds that are insightful, thought-provoking, or just plain funny. We want millions more people to experience that via Jabbercast.”
Advice
For like-minded ‘rodeos’, the newbie entrepreneur offers straight shooting words: “Gone are the days when having just a ‘cool’ idea or building a product with a slick UI was enough to tag yourself an entrepreneur or raise funds. This is 2015: wake up and smell the coffee! You need to think about user acquisition from day 1. If you do not have a distribution strategy or at least some mental blueprint of how you plan to get real users, then you should find an answer. A lot of entrepreneurs are intoxicated with a ‘cool’ idea which does not solve a problem and the result, as is the case with any intoxication, is a bad hangover. In the early days of your startup, your users should ‘love’ your product/service. ‘Liking’ it is not enough. These users should not be your family members or close relatives. They are biased and may not give the brutally honest feedback which you need to hear to improve your chances of succeeding.”
Between 2011 and 2015, the number of millionaires in India, according to a Kotak Wealth Management report, grew from 62, 000 to 137, 100. The number of millionaire Indian households worth $3.8 million grew by 17 per cent from 2014 to 2015. That figure is expected to more than triple to 348,000 households over the next five years with a combined net worth of Rs 415 trillion.
The rise in the number of millionaires has created a new market in country – luxury products. According to a study by Euromonitor, between 2009 and 2014, the Indian luxury market grew from around $30 billion to a whopping $130 billion. In 2014 alone, the sale of luxury goods in India grew by 25 per cent.
In June 2014, when luxury-goods sales witnessed whopping growth, Nakul Bajaj launched Darveys, an exclusive member’s only luxury-goods portal.
“Darveys is a gateway to the elite Indian populace, desirous of a cosmopolitan fashion range. The platform was launched with a thought to fix two basic concerns that Indians confronted –limited availability of collections and prices that were way higher than at international stores. We have been able to fix this situation by introducing an extensive variety of products through tie ups with international boutiques in Europe and the US. Now, these boutiques offer competitive prices with a guarantee of pricing better than any other online and offline store in India,” says Nakul Bajaj, CEO, Darveys.
Profitability code
When the e-commerce biggies are still grappling to crack the profitability code, Darveys claims to have found a way to do it. Darveys incorporates 300-plus boutiques across the globe, who get a chance to sell directly to customers in India.
Nakul Bajaj, CEO, Darveys
In the case of luxury fashion shopping, an inventory-led model is a step towards profitability as the company procures in bulk. It also has membership subscription procedures, where customers first register with Darveys for a lifetime membership fee of Rs 1,000 and only registered members get a chance to explore and shop from its entire range of 10,000 products. “We aim to give our customers a beyond satisfactory experience,” says Nakul.
Currently, the platform claims to have 15000 members and shows 25 per cent month-on-month growth.
Building faith
Nakul says that authenticity is the biggest challenge in this segment and he says he has been able to overcome this successfully. He says that in case of any lapse in judgment as far as authenticity is concerned, the platform guarantees returning twice the amount of money to the consumer.
“We only work with boutiques bearing an A+ Rating with the Better Business Bureau and have been in the same business for at least five years. Besides, on every product sold, Darveys takes all purchase receipts from the boutiques, which is proof that the item has been procured from the brand directly. This documentation is then matched with the actual product and only then is the product given clearance to be shipped from the boutique,” says Nakul.
Eyeing opportunity
According to Euromonitor, over the next five years, spending in the Indian luxury market is expected to reach Rs 236 billion from Rs 132 billion. Besides, there has been a huge shift from offline to online.
In 2014, almost 40 per cent of retail sales shifted to online sales, which are expected to be 70 per cent by 2020. During this frenzy, Darveys aims to cross the Rs 100 crore annual turnover mark in the next three years. It is also eyeing the online luxury space in the unexplored market, which is Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
“In future, we plan to increase the number of designers and boutiques so as to provide an umpteen range of products to our customers. Our future plans focus on increasing our range of boutiques and introducing more designers and reaching untapped areas at prices unavailable before,” says Nakul.
However, Darveys is not alone in this segment and faces stiff competition from many national and international players. Net-a-Porter, Gilt, and shopbob etc. are the global players in the segment who also ship their products to India. Closer home, portals such as RockNshop, Obstore, Stylista, Elitify, Pernia’s Pop Up Shop, FashionAndYou and Exclusively among others also stock international luxury products.
Bengaluru-based RoomsTonite, a mobile-only last-minute hotel booking app, secured angel funding of $1.5 million from a group of investors. The company will use these funds to further expand their services in India and other countries and to strengthen its team to complement their capabilities.
The funding was led by Lashit Sanghvi, Co-founder, Alchemy Capital; Nikhil Vora, Founder, Sixth Sense Ventures; Venkat Vardhan, Promoter, DNA Networks; Mohammed Bin Abdul Rehman Al Khalifa, Chairman, Caravan Group; and Ralph Berezan of Berezan Group of Canada invested in this round. Vissal Mathew and Balamurali Krishna of IDS Software also contributed to this round.
“While technology is at the forefront of what we do at RoomsTonite, our constant focus is to ensure that customers get the experience of real time booking at a great price,” says Suresh John, CEO and Co-founder, RoomsTonite.
He adds that on the hotels front, the platform helps sell their unsold inventory. So, hotels can earn additional revenue through RoomsTonite, and, therefore, increase their RevPAR (revenue per available room).
Founded in June 2014, the company claims to witness a massive growth from its business and user base standpoint. The company boasts over 2 lakh app downloads in a span of less than a year and a significantly high percentage of repeat users. The company has so far directly partnered with over 4000 hotels across 325 destinations in India.
YourStory take
According to a report released by Google, the Indian online hotel booking is going to touch the mark of $ 1.8 billion by 2016, with an estimated 8.4 million countrymen booking hotels online.
From last-minute booking to budget hotel aggregation, various platforms are using different models to grab the customer via the Internet.
Hotel chains often struggle with unoccupied inventory while customers look for last minute accommodation options at discounted rate for overnight stays. Solutions like RoomsTonite appear to be a win-win proposition for both hoteliers and guests. Based on the success of HotelTonight (US) and HotelQuickly (Hong Kong), early stage investors are anticipating a similar trend in India.
Tripadvisor, Expedia, Travelguru, and Yatra, among others, are some of the platforms which work in the last-minute hotel booking segment, with certain conditions. However, besides RoomTonite, SavvyMob is the only platform which offers only last-minute hotel booking service.
“The summit was visible. The curve of the climb leading to the summit was right before us. We were only 700 feet away, and yet we were faced with one of the most difficult decisions any mountaineering team has had to face after being so close to the summit – Should we go ahead or do we turn back? Our teammate, who was suffering from Pulmonary Edema, had no choice but to turn back, but the decision rested on us. ”
Punit Soni is talking about his experience in trying to scale the summit of Cotopaxi. At more than 19,000 feet, in Ecuador, it is believed to be one of the world’s tallest active volcanoes.
From 49 feet to 19,347 feet above sea level
To the average Joe, Punit Soni is the CPO of Flipkart, a $15 billion firm and one of India’s largest startups. It has been a long journey for the son of a scientist at the Baba Atomic Centre, Mumbai. For Punit, it wasn’t about Cotopaxi or the climb or even the summit. It was about pushing his limits. It was about learning about himself in the stark and real situations possible.
Today, as the CPO of Flipkart, Punit believes that trying to conquer the world of e-commerce is no different from summiting a mountain. There are different challenges and complexities one needs to deal with on a daily basis. Maybe the Big Billion Days was one such occasion. In his blog, Punit speaks about his experience in heading out for deliveries. He says:
I remember sleeping a total of 15 hours in those five days and being slightly disoriented from all the midnight countdowns and afternoon naps on bean bags. So to some extent being out in the mellow Bengaluru sun felt good (in about 15 mins of being outside, I felt like toast). In a whirlwind six hours, I met chartered accountants, engineers, construction workers, delivery folks, home makers, kids, security guards. Went to warehouses, construction sites, a school, a high end furniture startup, and some apartment complexes.
For Punit, it has always been about learning new things and testing his limits. The journey began when he decided to step out of his comfort zone and do his Masters at the University of Wyoming, in the US. From a bustling city at sea level to high plateau land surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, Wyoming changed Punit’s perspective on life.
“I remember walking into university to get my ID and a passerby smiled at me. It was a new experience. I guess if a fourth of a population lives in one region, everyone knows everybody else,” says Punit. While he followed the well-trodden path of finding a job in the Bay Area after graduating, Punit knew he had to do something else and something more.
Punit Soni during a mountain climb
The reality of being another person of Indian origin with great GRE and GMAT scores with a background in engineering and working in the Bay Area just didn’t appeal to him. He kept asking himself what it was he could do and wanted to do.
“I knew I didn’t have the academic pedigree, but I wanted to join one of the best management schools and work with some of the best academic minds. So I decided to join Wharton Business School. For that, I knew I had to become a well-rounded person,” adds Punit.
It was this drive to challenge and test his limits that led Punit into the world of mountaineering. And to that day on the slopes of Cotopaxia. While he joined mountaineering as a part of the leadership programme at Wharton, it turned out to be something bigger than just a test of mettle and leadership. In such situations, people are stripped of all kinds of pretenses and cloaks. There is nothing but stark reality in front of you.
Punit Soni – CPO Flipkart
Finding success in failure
Standing so close to the icy summit, there were a few possible scenarios –one was to send his teammate with Pulmonary Edema with a group that was descending. The next option was to leave him at high camp while the others summitted and came back. The third was to give up the climb and get back, and the last option, chosen only in extreme mountaineering situations, was to leave the person behind.
They knew one thing if even one of them couldn’t summit, none of them would. They decided to turn back. For their descent with their unwell team member, they decided to create something called an express engine. One individual would hold the shortend of the rope and another would hold the long end. The one with the long rope would pull and the other would keep the guy standing as they all descended.
“I failed a lot on the mountain and failure on mountains is very concentrated, condensed and very stark. It taught me several things; one was that there is no such thing as failure. The other was it taught me to be a very connected human being. If you’re in a leadership role, you are actually riding on the efforts of a larger team. And one of the most important lessons of mountaineering is decision-making,” says Punit.
But it wasn’t just mountaineering that taught him to learn from failures. There have been highs and lows even in his corporate journey.
Punit Soni on a climb
The teachings of a seven-year-old
But mountaineering and Cotopaxi was just one curve in a long line of different attempts to push himself. When Punit decided to test his limits, he decided to learn and try different things, and physical pursuits like marathon runs and mountaineering were just one aspect. The other aspect was learning Child Psychology. From engineering to psychology? Punit says it was a subject that fascinated him and in order to learn more about himself, he enrolled in a course.
It was during this time he met Dominic, a seven-year-old boy from a disadvantaged background. It was an odd situation where a child of Hispanic origin was placed with an Indian-born engineer. “I possibly learnt more from Dominic than he could learn from me,” adds Punit.
Even today Punit is in touch with Dominic and he believes this to be something great and magical. Dominic is the first kid in his neighbourhood to have graduated high school. He currently is pursuing his undergrad in the UCLA. “I don’t think I have accomplished anything bigger than this. There is a special connection with this kid,” says Punit.
It was this attempt at several different subjects and pursuits that have made Punit.
He says, “I am not the kind of person who sits on the fence, I believe in taking a call. Over 80 percent will be right and 20 percent will be wrong, and I am ok with it. It’s better to be wrong and then correct yourself, than just sit on the fence and do nothing. I have faced some very intense situations, where you need to make decisions. And I’ve become very comfortable with them.”
Punit says that the single biggest source of frustration he faces is when people tell him that they can’t do something. “I don’t understand how that is even possible. If you really want to do something, you will find a way,” he adds.
Things happen because you can. Punit says he was rejected by B-schools and nobody would give him any thought or time. But in the third attempt he got through. He says this is because you really can. There is a balance between failure and success if you believe in yourself.
“What I do is not great product work but its great people work. Sometimes I walk into office and see people working together and wonder what makes these people tick and work together. While the end is the same, why is everyone together and working on one goal? It’s then you realise that the magic that is created when like-minded people come together to solve a mission is something that is breathtaking. It’s this magic that creates the product output,” says Punit.
It’s not a test it’s a sales event
In most cases, people think they’re going to give a test. Punit believes, that’s a wrong attitude. He says you’re going there to market yourself.
“You need to walk into anything in life believing you’re in control. Whether it is getting on stage and talking to thousands in front of you or an interview or a team meeting. You always know more about yourself. You need to internalise rejection to realise that they are just events that show the best of yourself,” says Punit.
The summit of Cotopaxi might be far today, but it possibly has taught him more than any classroom could.
Picture this. You’ve ordered a watch online and it’s been more than a week since you’ve received any details. There are no tracking details to fall back on, emails, phone calls, or even a message. The end result is frustration and annoyance. In today’s crowded ecosystem, it is customer experience, and not just product, price or USP that makes or breaks a brand.
However, with increasing expectations and ever-evolving consumer needs, one of the biggest challenges most organisations face is keeping up with these changing needs and meeting every expectation.
It is to fill this lacuna that Cloudcherry was born. It provides brands with a real-time, omni-channel SaaS-based customer experience management platform that helps brands track, measure, and improve customer delight.
Team @ Cloudcherry
A fast-growing world
We live in an age where customers use social media, and rating and review sites to voice their opinions and experiences. Most brands are still focussed on rather archaic and redundant methods of collecting feedback.
Vinod Muthukrishnan, Founder, Cloudcherry, realised that brands deserved to hear from their customers directly. On the other hand, customers who wanted to be heard should be able to talk directly to the brand. This, he felt, needed to happen in an efficient way.
The eureka moment really came when he began thinking, ‘What if we created a platform that brings customer experience closer to brand owners and managers in real-time, and makes the process ultra-efficient and authentic?’
Vinod’s early career was spent at sea, as a Certified First Officer with the Maersk Line. During one of his breaks, he met the team at Market Simplified and ended up joining them as part of the core team, handling global sales and partnerships. But, it was the need to start up again that drove Vinod to build Cloudcherry.
Bringing in the key differentiator
Today, Cloudcherry is used by several customer-facing brands to measure several key metrics with the Net Promoter Score and the Cloudcherry Customer Delight Score. They leverage these tools to discover actionable insights for customer experience improvement and to address issues as they happen at any touch point of interaction with the customer.
What sets them apart, according to Vinod, is the fact that they give a brand round-the-clock real-time data, metrics and analytics about their customers via a simple and easily usable platform.
“We are a click-configure-deploy product. In less than 30 minutes, a brand can go live across their entire global network of touch points,” says Vinod.
Vinod adds that customer interactions happen with the brand on a daily basis via Cloudcherry. He says these interactions happen across multiple channels, at multiple points of time.
“As a brand, it’s extremely important to understand the customer’s experience during these interactions and to capture key data insights for improvement. This is what Cloudcherry helps to do,” adds Vinod.
The workings
A brand can deploy the product in less than 30 minutes across various channels like tablets in stores, smart phones, email, SMS, QR codes, IVRS and websites to capture experiential data. This data then flows into a single, centralised dashboard with insights and analytics.
Everything happens in real-time, be it data collection, issue re-dressal notifications or data analytics and helps a brand to stay on top of customer needs non-stop and round-the-clock.
Being a SaaS-based product, Cloudcherry work on a simple monthly subscription model with no setup implementations or upfront fees.
Post the launch of the alpha version, during which time the team established a clear product-market fit, the product went live early this year. Since then, they claim that 40 brands have signed up with Cloudcherry, with over 700 points of presence that aim to process over a million interactions by the end of this year.
The internal team workings
They have also seen a 20 per cent increase month-on-month in feedback collected and points of presence over the last six months.
“Bringing together a varied team towards a common mission is a challenge in itself, but we were lucky to get a great founding team who are passionate and truly believe in the value our product offers,” adds Vinod
The core team comprises Nagendra, who was Vinod’s co-founder in his previous startup; Vijay, who was key to the conceptualisation of the product; and Prem, who handles marketing and is a close friend of Vinod. Analytics and Market Research is handled by Vidya, who connected with the team through the early investors.
The team believes in running a very lean startup model. The initial funds came from angel investors, as well as support from family and friends.
With their early success and traction, the team was able to raise a seed round of $1 million from IDG Ventures India and The Chennai Angels. They also have a strategic investment from Capillary Technologies, whose product is the one that they are integrating with.
The team aims to cement themselves as a market leader in India, especially in the retail and BFSI sectors. They plan to expand their global presence with a focus on South East Asia Enterprises, and SMEs in the US in a DIY model. “We aim to make customer experience synonymous with Cloudcherry and establish ourselves as the experts,” says Vinod.
In his cushy corporate job as India CEO of Monier, a German brand, it is safe to say that Prasanna Raghavendra was at the pinnacle of his 19-year-long career. But in his own words, not every story is ‘cute’, and his was a rather practical one. Speaking from his conscience as to why he left the comfort of his job to start up, he says
“We missed the dot com boom because we weren’t equipped, but we didn’t want to miss the e-commerce wave, especially when it is touching so many lives.”
(L to R): Co-founders Prasanna Raghavendra with Hemachandra Bhovi standing in front of their first car delivery.
Prior to Monier, Prasanna, 46, was with Panasonic, where he met his partner-in-crime Hemachandra Bhovi, 40, who was serving as the India CTO for the company.
The two had met in 2009, and were still in touch. Conversations often veered to the big problems that needed solutions. From construction equipment and diagnostics, to real estate, the duo had their eye on every sector, but Prasanna’s passion for automobiles won the day. His vision was of a curated e-commerce platform for brand new cars and bikes, from where people could buy vehicles or book test drives from the comfort of their homes.
Prasanna adds, “This was the last untouched brick-and-mortar model that didn’t change much. Moreover, since people researched new cars and bikes online, why not give them the convenience to buy them online?”
The co-founders also noticed the recent rising numbers of car and two-wheeler buyers, who were unhappy with the exercise of running to showrooms only to return unsure of whether they were getting the best deal. This was particularly true in the hatchback, entry-level sedan and two-wheeler segments.
Zip Zapping through
Thus was born zipzapwheels.com, an e-commerce platform curating brand-new as well as used cars that allows customers to buy and book test drives online. With an initial investment of 50 lakhs, the firm is in partnership with 60 dealers in Bangalore and plans to take the platform to NCR, Pune, Mumbai and Chennai as a part of the next phase of growth.
The platform has successfully sold 125 units since May 2015. However, according to the co-founders, these are prosperous times and 60 per cent of their sales was witnessed in the past one month. Further, they are planning to double the number of units sold by the end of next month.
When asked how much time on average it took to sell a certain unit, Prasanna says it entirely depends on the consumer. The fastest sale made on the platform was 50 minutes for a bike, while the longest sale conversion took a month. He says that there are two kinds of consumers.Those who are sure of what they want to buy close transactions within 24 hours, with an additional day taken to process the loan, if availed.
The unsure ones tend to take as long as three days to narrow down on a decision. While the venture refuses to reveal its revenues, the platform is free for its customers. They charge the dealership a certain percentage of the cost of every unit sold. Prasanna says that although they haven’t narrowed down on a fixed percentage, it can vary depending on multiple factors such as demand for the vehicle, the stage of launch, and the inventory.
The platform also has a ‘Hot Deals’ section, which helps customers know the best offers available on a certain model across dealerships in a particular city.
The team at zipzapwheels.com
Wheeling into the future
By the next quarter, the venture plans to integrate more features onto the platform. They plan to build, integrate, and develop a proprietary auto loan product, which will help customers apply for loans swiftly and effortlessly. The business is already in talks with six big banks while running an engagement with ICICI Bank offline.
The founders are also planning to improve the consumer experience by integrating curated deals that give live information on the availability of a unit, and by when will it be ready for delivery. It will also provide extensive information of the model and the month of manufacture.
The firm plans to increase the units sold to 500 per month, while aiming at engaging a monthly traffic of 300,000 daily visitors. At present, the firm sees a daily traffic of 1,500- 2,000 visitors.
When asked about any exciting moments in his entrepreneurial journey, Prasanna recollects the first lead the platform received. He narrates how the team was jumping when they got their first lead, curious to know from where the gentleman had reached them from.
Speaking of the overall vision, Prasanna tells us that they aim to service the entire life cycle of the product. Within the next year, they are likely to introduce newer verticals related to servicing, accessories, and driving destinations onto the platform.
In short, as the founders describe it, they want to bring motoring to your pocket.
YourStory take
The auto classified market is not new to India. Although the founders refute this, they are pitted against stronger competitors like CarDekho and CarTrade, who have been in the market since 2008 and 2009, respectively.
Here are the numbers:
CarDekho.com is amongst the top 200 most popular websites in India according to Alexa ranking and received Series B funding of $50 million from Hillhouse Capital, Tybourne Capital and Ratan Tata earlier this year. According to CarDekho, the site lists around 1,400 dealers of new cars and more than 3,000 dealers of used cars receiving around 10 million hits a month.
On the other hand, CarTrade was just acquired by CarWale and had raised $30 million from Warburg Pincus, Tiger Global, and Canaan Partners in 2014. In early February this year, the firm claimed that they had four million unique visitors every month, and listings of more than 100,000 used cars in India.
Clearly, the online automobile sector is consolidating with the acquisition of CarWale by CarTrade and ZigWheels by CarDekho. In a media statement, Girnar Software, which operates CarDekho, claimed that it was planning to make up to five acquisitions for overseas expansion.
Moreover, Quikr turned up the heat in August this year by launching Quikr cars. While two-wheeler sales, test drives and auto loan facilities might be a few of the differentiation that zipzapwheels.com is bringing to the market, the verdict is clear:
To pace faster than established competitors in the market, one must explore newer verticals and be disruptive in their stance compared to the competition, have staggering metrics, and the backing of fuller pockets.
In one of his essays, Paul Graham talks about schlep blindness in startups. Schlep is a Yiddish word that means a tedious or an unpleasant task. He talks about how great startup opportunities are lying unexploited right under our noses because the amount of unpleasant work they require is enormous. After having spent eight plus years pioneering online real estate in India, I’ve recently moved to building an online to offline business in the used car space, and in coming years, perhaps would be able to share which industry had more schleps to deal with!
As I put things in perspective, I can appreciate how the online real estate evolved as a market and as the sector goes through a sluggish phase, how tectonic changes will happen in the near future – creating opportunities galore for existing and new players alike.
Real Estate is the classic example of schlep blindness. The estimated size of the real estate market is approx. $100 billion, which is almost 5 per cent of India’s GDP. This does not include the size of transactions in the secondary and rentals market. Cumulatively, brokerage in this industry comes to more than $5.5 billion. It’s schlep for sure, but very lucrative.
Real estate is inherently cyclical in nature. After a great bull run – post the sub-prime crisis in the US – a despondent bearish cycle started two years back. The nature of the market, and especially the buyer, has changed so much that existing players will have to evolve quickly, else they’ll perish. It’s the classic case of “what got them here will not take them there” because the underlying rules of the game have changed.
The biggest change that has happened is the end of speculation. For more than a decade, a tax-efficient mode of investment was real estate. In the primary market, experts estimate the investor to customer ratio to be historically 70:30 in real estate. But that is fast changing to 30:70. Because of this, there is massive buildup of unsold inventory in the market. As reported by Knight Frank, there are six lac+ unsold units, which at the current absorption rate will take more than two years to clear, even if no projects are launched.
Think about this and look around you – we all want to live in our own homes. Culturally, we as Indians have always wanted to buy a home, yet there is such a massive buildup of unsold inventory. This is indeed ironical. The problem as I see is that builders have been shortsighted and were happy to sell to investors who created a lockdown situation as supply became abundant and was commoditised.
This situation is scary because a lot of investors are/will start defaulting on their installments and this will create massive pressure on builders to sell remaining stock. This will result in changing the underlying power equations in the industry. Some of these changes I think will be permanent beyond this slump cycle.
Home-buying decisions were always difficult for the end customer. “Prices revising next week” was the most effective sales tactic, but even that is no longer effective. Going forward, as the market changes from being seller-dominated to buyer- dominated, the sales process will become harder and consultative.
China’s real estate market has gone through a similar phase and entirely new models have come to prominence in the last two years. AiJuWiJu raised $150 million last week, while FangDD, which has an asset-lite model and sells through a network of real estate brokers raised $225 million last month. In China, with the slowing overall economy and slowing real estate sector, there is a lot of vertical integration where the classified players are doing transactions.
In India, a lot of VC money has been invested in Real Estate and the market has begun to see consolidation, which I see increasing in the next 6-12 months. The incumbent players like 99acres and Magicbricks will see competition from stronger merged players. This is the right time for the incumbents to drive acquisitions to strengthen their product offerings for the customers and the builders.
There is a new wave of startups which have cropped up in the recent past focused on distinct offerings in rentals, zero brokerage platforms, managed rental marketplaces, broker networks, communities, etc. This is interesting as these are all trying to solve unique problems, which the incumbents are not focused on. I see these players as interesting wild-cards who can possibly build an asset-lite model in the real estate space, which scales much faster than the vertical-integrated approach efforts of classified players. Models like BroEx, IRX, RexProp etc look promising but need to figure out their revenue strategy as they build engagement platforms to hook the real estate community. Community building platforms like ApartmentAdda and Commonfloor have built significant presence within residential apartments and it would be interesting to see if they can participate in the ongoing euphoria of hyper local marketplaces.
I think there will eventually be clear $3-4 billion + companies in this space each with possibly different DNAs – maybe a classified, online integrated brokerage and an asset-lite marketplace.
The online real estate game, as I see it, is very interestingly poised with the rules of the game reset midway and housing.com having showed that all leaders are vulnerable.
The game has just begun.
About the Author:
Prashan Agarwal is one of the pioneers of online real estate in India, who realised as early as 2007 the impact that internet will have on the industry. He was the founder of PropTiger.com, India’s largest online transaction marketplace -+for real estate.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
There are many companies now that help one to find that new house. Property discovery platforms like 99acre, Magicbricks, Housing, and Commonfloor have made our lives so easy.
Real estate is a multi-billion dollar market with $1billion spent on marketing alone by developers and brokers. That is the reason why companies like Commonfloor and Housing were able to raise more than $100 million in funding. There are more startups in real estate like Grabhouse, RealtyCompass and GharFinder that are trying to solve different issues of house buyers.
The Homesfy team
But problems with the real estate market, it seems, are never ending.
Problems of buyer – There are problems aplenty for the buyer. He needs to contact innumerable middlemen for finding his dream house, go through legal hassles for documentation, figure out furnishing and furbishing options, haggle with movers and packers, and so on. Net result: emotional, physical and financial fatigue. You muscle through all these issues because you cannot up and leave as it is a huge investment.
Problems of brokers and developers – They pay a lot of money to list properties without any guarantee on conversion. They waste time and money attending hundreds of call, meeting potential buyers and hiring talent to cater to them. Still they are unable to provide a complete solution to customers.
As an end buyer, we do not indulge in property transactions too often, ideally not more than once in a lifetime. So all we want is a house that becomes a home in little time and which actually fits our profile and budget.
There is a huge gap between listing of properties and moving into our dream house.
Homesfy aims to be the solution in such instances in the form of a property services platform: a marketplace for property search and all related services that gives real-time, profiled solutions to every property-related issue. Homesfy is tech and service layer between real estate buyers and service providers.
Homesfy helps buyers find the right home and vendors for moving in, packing and shifting, home improvement, legal and documentation work, handymen, locality trips and other home buying services.
The company claims to help brokers by providing them qualified leads so that they can close deals and provide a complete solution to drive customer stickiness. They remove all duplicate property listing for brokers and developers and put out no commercials until a transaction is successful.
“As many, including myself, were grappling with house hunting in Mumbai, the experience of our own customers and prospects gave us a vision. Our team conducted one-on-one interactions, persona study, broker survey and thorough research resulting in a bulk of unabridged list of problems,” says Ashish Kukreja, Founder, Homesfy.
Ashish’s vision is to make property search easy and cheap. His own experience while searching property incited him to offer profile-based property search. He spearheads new business initiatives, business development and product strategy. He has an experience of scaling up new business vertical with names like Kotak and Unicon where he was responsible for 10X + business growth in equity broking and private wealth management. Ashish is an MBA from IBS, Hyderabad.
Mukesh Mishra is the Co-founder who drives sales and partner relationship with help of his domain knowledge. He is working towards becoming a dominant player in organised property search market across all major urban locations in India and completely drives the P/L. As part of the founding team he delivered some pathbreaking solutions to grow business with low client acquisition cost. Mukesh is a certified real estate advisor. He loves travelling which also helps him study property across various locations.
Both found that the market is never void of needs, so they decided to start from where the other listing portals stop.
They realised that it is right time to graduate from a property search platform to a problem-solving and absolute budget-friendly platform where they can improve buyer’s moving-in experience.
Mukesh says, “The first six monthshad us driving around our customers across their preferred localities offering free services for property hunting. I was introduced as driver in some of the trips. From Month seven to 13, we saw exceptional sales;we cracked a whopping 110 deals! Our customer-centric approach and a policy of not saying no to their needs have taken us to Dubai to close a transaction for an elderly couple.”
The company started with a humble Rs 15-lakh dealand has now gallopedits way to closing deals worth Rs15 crore in present day.
The company has generated over $75million in GMV since inception and has got funding of Rs onecrore in two tranches through angel investors- Merisis Advisors, a boutique investment banking firm and Allure,a company in diamond trading business.
They currently provide services across Mumbai and Bengaluru regions only and are looking to expand across Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai in the next couple of years. With expansion,the company will cross 100 million GMV with transactions of more than 1,000 apartments involving 500 active partners.
Ashish says, “The front is simpler, but the backend keeps us up all night. Our technology stratagem brings everything under one tech layer. We had to build one platform that would declutter the chaos. Giving all stakeholders a plug and play solution was necessary.”
Homesfy is aiming to minimise property search time by delivering 100check points, to zero in on the most ideal property and move-in services for frictionless home buying experience.
The air we breathe is slowly choking us. A fact amply made clear by the startling and rather grim revelation that Delhi’s air quality at PM 2.5 particles has been named the worst among 1,600 cities by the WHO. It is no wonder then that the quality of air across the globe is one of the most debated topics at the ongoing Climate Change Summit in Paris.
Stockholm-based Airinum was founded with a belief that people all over the world have a fundamental right to breathe clean air.
Four friends Alexander Hjertström, Fredrik Kempe, Johannes Herrmann and Mehdi Rejraji, who met at Stockholm Business School, developed a modernised breathing mask that protects against air pollution, bacteria and virus and other pollutants. Unlike other masks available in the market, Airinum claims to combine high-quality protection with comfort and design.
Alexander
Returning symptoms
It all started at the end of 2014 when Alexander travelled from Sweden to India. He was moving to Ahmedabad for six months to study at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). Within the first month, he noticed that his long-gone asthma symptoms had resurfaced because of the pollution in the air.
Alexander struggled to find a protective mask that actually helped and was practical to wear every day.
“I saw people walking around the street with simple scarves, trying to protect themselves. Sadly, I knew they did nothing to stop the pollutants in the air, which get stuck inside our lungs and blood stream, leading to severe health complications. That was it, I decided then and there to do something about it, and when I came back to Sweden, we started working on building Airinum,” says Alexander.
Back to the drawing board
Alexander reached out to key people he felt would complement his skills and called upon his friends. They instantly loved the idea and joined in. Alexander says this venture has a strong purpose and can make a difference to the world.
Airinum’s mission is to provide the best breathing protection for everyday life, while helping raise awareness about air pollution so that people can breathe without endangering their health. Alexander also focused on the look of the mask considering the style-conscious urban citizen his firm was targeting.
“In this way, we give urban dwellers something they actually want to wear, instead of feeling embarrassed. In the long term however, we hope that this product doesn’t even have to exist,” says Alexander.
With the mask
Chokes along the way
The biggest challenge he says has been to develop a product that really works to protect different people, since each face is different, by making the mask fit better and prevent air leakage. They used stretchable material that easily contours to the wearer’s face. This allows the mask to offer higher protection, because a good filter isn’t enough by itself.
“There was a lot of iteration in the early phase. Another important challenge we overcame was to make the mask more comfortable. Today, we use a type of material that makes the mask more breathable, this is important as many users claimed they felt suffocated while using masks for a long time,” says Alexander.
The mask is made up of a polyester type fabric that is light and highly breathable. The filter is an advanced multi-layer technology that protects the wearer from smells, dust, bacteria, virus, pollen, PM2.5 – in essence 99.9 per cent of everything you inhale.
Kickstarting with a bang
They have now teamed up with the right partners to grow at a stable pace. The main strategy is to sell online, so as to scale into several markets fairly fast. The team comes from a mixed background (Sweden, Germany and France) and comprises business and engineering graduates.
They launched on Kickstarter on the 23 November 2015. They have had great traction and became overfunded within less than 24 hours. Their backers are from more than 30 countries, spanning Europe, the US and Asia. The campaign is up and running till 27 December 2015.
An innovative part of their idea, according to Alexander, is also implemented in the business model, where they will offer subscriptions for filters, but the skin of the mask will be reusable (washable). All filters on the market today have a limited life-span, and it becomes difficult to breathe in because particles clog them up.
Therefore, to keep up the high performance and stay hygienic, they recommend customers change the filters frequently.
Solving the bigger problem
The team is looking into several options for the future, especially into different verticals for the mask. One aspect they are working on is increasing awareness about deteriorating air quality.
They intend to figure out the best way to contribute to a less polluted environment. In the long run, they hope to develop products that directly reduce pollution. “But for now, the most crucial step is to provide people with better means to protect themselves against the acute health problem of air pollution,” adds Alexander.
The e-commerce bug is alive and thriving not just in India, but also in neighbouring Pakistan. Dawaai, an online pharmacy set up by investment banker Furquan Kidwai, is just one among the many online retail stores that are attempting to bring a bit of the e-commerce magic to strife-torn Pakistan.
With a growing middle class, like in most Asian countries, the healthcare system in Pakistan is divided between expensive private-sector medical institutions and low-cost government healthcare centres.
A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the country’s healthcare infrastructure is underfunded with only 0.8 per cent of the GDP allocated for public health in 2010. By comparison, India spent 1.2 per cent.
Back to the roots
In order to combat the various healthcare problems in Pakistan, several young entrepreneurs are setting up online pharmacies and healthtech organisations. And amongst these is Karachi-based Dawaai.
Its Founder and CEO Furquan was an investment banker in London and New York for seven years, before deciding to come back and starting Dawaai. He says a place like Pakistan has a huge demographic advantage when it comes to creating a great consumer business.
Where else would you find a burgeoning middle class that has or will have money to spend? These 200 million need to spend to live a decent lifestyle. With this thought in mind, Furquan wanted to get into something that was an essential item, where the customer did not take much convincing.
Furquan Kidwai
The industry and its aims
The pharmaceutical industry was untouched and ripe for disruption. The first idea was to bring something like BOOTS or CVS to Pakistan; however, he had to give up the idea due to low margins, pricing limitations, and a highly regulated market.
The aim was to provide integrated pharmacy services with convenience and quality. The team at Dawaai is reinventing the concept of retail pharmacy by taking authentic medicines to the patients’ doorsteps as quickly as possible. The idea is to structuralise the pharma industry in Pakistan, while simultaneously adhering to all the existing pharma laws.
“Only qualified pharmacists handle all our pharmaceutical products, including procurement, storage, and dispensing. These associates are available 9:30am – 9:00pm (Monday to Saturday), and we are just a phone call away from all our valued customers,” says Furquan.
Being an online store, the biggest challenge that Dawaai.pk faced was maintaining two separate portals for its prescription, and consumer health and OTC products (Well.pk). This was primarily driven by limitations on online marketing for e-tail stores selling prescription items.
Furquan adds that an online store cannot compete unless its technology front is efficient. Therefore, the team believes in continually updating the system. He adds that they try to ensure that every customer who comes on to the portal experiences a smooth transaction and better service every time.
The market and the team
“Unfortunately, most e-tailers in Pakistan have this mentality of having a website as a shop front with just a facility to take orders. Some of the new technologies we are working on will be a breakthrough in the global e-commerce space, and will tremendously improve the way consumers interact with us and experience shopping,” says Furquan.
Dawaai’s monthly revenue growth has been close to 23 per cent over the past year. Based on market intelligence, the team is claiming that based on revenue, they are the largest online health store in Pakistan and one of the largest e-commerce startups in the country.
The team comprises graduates who have first-hand experience of how their work impacts the business. Furquan adds that with an open-floor culture and no hierarchies, it is a fairly stimulating environment for anyone keen to make a difference and with an ability to think outside the box.
Instead of hiring people who have years of experience in the industry, Furquan has tried to get team members who are self-motivated and can lead from the front.
The company follows a hierarchy-free horizontal structure with every department working on a set goal and following the same standards.
No limitations in terms of inputs from the category managers to the pharmacists mean that the company is always evolving and dealing with everyday issues, thereby making operations more smooth, and serving the customers properly.
Speaking about the startup scene in Pakistan, Furquan says it is in its infancy. This makes it difficult to hire quality graduates, as they still aspire for typical FMCG jobs. It involves a lot of personal selling about the potential for business. So far, they have been able to hire a star team by inspiring all their members to work on creating the next ‘Health Amazon’ in Pakistan.
“We have been funded by foreign investors, which include a VC from the US, a Super Angel from South Africa, and a McKinsey consultant from the UK. We are now in advanced discussions to close our current funding round,” says Furquan.
Sahr Said, Founder of Lahore-based online salon discovery and appointments platform BeautyHooked, told YourStory the e-commerce market in Pakistan is estimated to reach $600 million by 2017 from its current size of $30 million spent on online purchases annually.
The Karachi Stock Market index has been growing north of 40 per cent for the past few years (30 per cent+ in $ terms) and broke the highest ever 32,000 KSE 100 index points barrier.
Like they have done in India, startups could revolutionise the way business is done in Pakistan. More power to them!
Several hygiene-related factors made Amandeep Bhatia realise that a local laundry delivery service was the need of the hour. “We realised how disorganised this space is when we used to attempt getting our laundry done by the neighbourhood washerman. Local vendors operate according to their convenience, and not according to the needs of the customer. Given the kind of clothes clubbed together to wash, and the way these clothes are washed, it is safe to say that hygiene is not properly maintained either. Many times we saw local dhobis make small children going door to door delivering the clothes. Laundry is such an essential service of the urban daily life. We recognised a huge potential in starting up a customer-friendly hyper- local laundry delivery service and Presso was born,” he says.
Amandeep was working as a product manager with multinational companies like Honeywell, Renishaw and Cognizant, but is now wholly dedicated to his startup. Born earlier this year, Presso works as an aggregator platform for local vendors. Amandeep says, “Customers place order using our app. Our algorithms assign the nearest delivery boy and vendor partner to every order and they get picked and delivered as per the selected time schedule by customers. Customers can update and track their orders from our app only.”
Challenges
In just four months of starting up, the Delhi based Presso is feeling the pinch of a disorganised workforce and a lack of awareness of local trends. He says, “There is a huge and essential market between regular services and premium services both in terms of quality and convenience.” Amandeep’s plans to tackle this challenge is by scaling his business across India: “Our focus remains to provide a platform to both vendors and customers to achieve our promise of quality, cost and convenience. We intend to scale by partnering with small and big vendors for different type of services. Our vendor management team liaisons with vendors. Our customer app, operations and delivery infrastructure is set up for replicating the model at scale from area to area,” he explains.
Amandeep says that two factors have cropped up to characterise urban Indian population today: increase in disposable income and decrease in time. “There is also an increased demand for quality services. The scope and potential of organising this market is almost limitless,” he adds. Presso had 5,000 orders within the first three months of starting up and is growing rapidly week by week, Amandeep says.
The firm was initially bootstrapped. “Then we got angel funding from Sunstone Capital which helped us put our systems in place and scale fast,” he explains. Presso is run by Amandeep and Co-founder Subhashish Pattnayak. Amandeep says, “We have complementary strengths which helps us target different aspects of our startup.”
According to him, the best part about starting up has been the ability to take decisions fast and execute them. “This was one thing we always missed in bigger companies where decision making was very slow and lot of time just went into talking over things. I came from a lean product mindset and here in our startup we finally got a chance to implement it fully,” Amandeep says. The best advice he has got was to build a company for customers and not investors. “We get almost 40-50% of our customers from referrals which is a big push for us,” he adds.
Stay lean
Amandeep says that with the opening up of the Indian economy, the future of startups like his looks bright. “With deep understanding of hyperlocal areas, there is always scope for introducing new services and growing big,” he adds. His advice to fellow aspiring entrepreneurs: “Look for a co-founder who shares your vision and complements your skills. Focus on understanding real pain points of customers and what they want. Stay lean.”
Google provides free access to Google Analytics (GA) traffic reports to help you optimise your AdWords spend and manage your SEO. It’s a trap. For 99% of the professional population at least. So, when you start using GA,consider this:
Why is Google being so generous and givingyou this freemium access?
Why does GA not offer a good UI/UX?
Why does it feel like you need to demystify it before using it?
Why does one get lost despite the whole thing appearing so simple?
Come on! Google is not hiring the world’s top 0.1% talent to make your life simple. And is it really a freemium service? Or is it a premium (you end up spending more due to inefficiencies) service after all?
The world’s top 0.1% professionals, sitting at Google, are cracking Big Data to generate Big Reports. Let me explain this in lay terms. For that, we have to go back and understand what Big Data is. Simply put, it’s tons of simple data packed together. Similarly, tons of simple reports in one place is Google Analytics. GA lovers will attack me, for sure.
Google Analytics – Big Data to Big Report
Indeed, these are simple reports, but why do users find it complex? Google is not able to fix this, or does it simply not want to? Some people believe that it has evolved organically so it’s not UI/UX friendly. But I strongly believe that it is strategically designed like this – ghoda ghaas se dosti karega to khaega kya (if a horse befriends the grass, what will it eat).
If Google simplifies GA, then every professional would be able to optimise his or her digital marketing spend and will pay less to Google. Why would Google invest in reducing its revenue?
It is good business strategy. Make it simple, but large enough to handle everyone’s needs.
Since GA is used by all types of businesses across the globe,it is very generic and takes care of everyone. Doesn’t that sound democratic and philanthropic?
I am for all types
Is there any solution? Yes – you can customise your GA reports and solve this maze. But then, you should have the required skill-set to understand what you want and how you want to present it. Alternatively, you can hire consultants and buy other analytics subscriptions, which means dependency on the top 0.1% professionals, again.
So, here’s my message to all my entrepreneur friends.We need to understand all this right from the beginning. Identify the acquisition, behaviouraland outcome metrics according to your business model and try and achieve all of it within your digital marketing budget. Stay away from vanity metrics, just focus on business-oriented metrics.
You will be tempted to spend more to acquire more customers; but beware! Google wants that, but your business really doesn’t need it.
Carry out smaller experiments for shorter durations and learn to survive within a budget. The more we delay this in the growth race, the worse it gets.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
A bus journey from Mumbai to Bangalore takes about 18 long hours and the bus operators play at least five to six movies on the big screen. Not everyone likes what’s playing but they don’t really have a choice. What if buses had the same kind of entertainment systems that international flights do? Well, here is a company that is looking to fill that gap. Founded by Kartik Poddar and Kartik Bansal, who have known each other for over ten years, say that their similarity goes much beyond just their names. They went to the same engineering college and also worked at Microsoft for a while together. They finally plunged into starting their own venture and rolled out Fropcorn in September this year. Founder-CEO Kartik Poddar has worked in product management and marketing functions in companies like Komli Media and Microsoft, while Founder-CTO Kartik Bansal is a self-confessed geek who was previously with Shindigg and Microsoft.
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Banyanpod Technologies is a media technology company in the on-demand entertainment space. Fropcorn, the company’s hyper-local content distribution product, delivers high quality content to consumers over WiFi.
DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICE
Fropcorn operates by setting up WiFi-enabled entertainment zones at high-footfall locations. Once a location is Fropcorn-enabled, users can stream or download movies, videos, music, ebooks and other forms of content on their own devices over WiFi.
REVENUE MODEL
a) User monetised model either for title downloads or subscriptions
b) Enterprise partners who wish to provide on-demand entertainment to their customers
c) Later monetisation can come through paid app distribution, sponsored content and rich ad-formats
TRACTION
Fropcorn has tied up with leading studios like Viacom, Yash Raj, Reliance, Sun TV, and others. It is now getting enterprises on board to deploy the WiFi systems. The app, currently in beta, has around 500 downloads. WiFi has become a basic requirement across urban India. Fropcorn has a very solid proposition for people in large public spaces like airports, malls, hotels, etc. The founding team has relevant experience and already has some big names onboard from the media world. The offering can also be a good outlet for game/app developers. Currently Fropcorn is present in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.
“Customer focus, humility and having fun are key principles we follow in everything we do at Fropcorn,” says Kartik Poddar-Founder and CEO.
THE TEAM
A 20-member team split across Business development, Operations and Engineering.
“At heart we are a prod-tech company and most of the team members are in the engineering function,” adds Kartik Poddar.
GOING FORWARD
He says: “We are launching our service at multiple locations and are also expanding into multiple verticals. We saw tremendous response from our initial deployments in buses and we think a service like Fropcorn has applicability at any location where there is significant travel or dwell time. In order to make our service highly exciting for the users, we are even striking to new content partnerships to offer users a richer and wider selection of content.”
ON BEING TECH 30
“The Tech 30 badge has given us tremendous credibility and has opened new avenues for us. We have been seeing lot of interest from potential partners ever since the Tech 30 announcement came out. Winning the Tech 30 award is a huge confidence booster for our team as it is a strong validation of our people and the product we are building,”says Kartik Poddar.
YOURSTORY TAKE
WiFi has become a basic requirement across urban India. Fropcorn has a very solid proposition for people in large public spaces like airports, malls, hotels, etc. The founding team has relevant experience and already has some big names onboard from the media world. The offering can also be a good outlet for game and app developers.
There’s always that one pair of shoes, top, shirt, trouser, or accessory that we rarely use. It has either been preserved for an occasion or somehow it never sees the light of the day. It is with this basic premise — which most of us do not use or wear 50 per cent of what is in our closets — that led to Spoyl’s birth.
It was earlier this year that Bhargav Errangi, 29 years, saw one of his friends trying to sell her branded pair of shoes on Facebook. This caught his attention because a platform like Facebook has limited filter and curation capabilities. Soon, he realised that many people were trying to buy or sell on the platform like his friend.
That was his ‘aha’ moment, says Bhargav, who at the time was in Silicon Valley working at Intuit. “I was thinking along the lines of why not build a socially engaged marketplace platform where you build the trust first with the power of social/engaging content and the commerce just unfolds itself for the pre-owned segment,” says Bhargav, a PhD in Bio-Medical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, who has always been fascinated by the concept of the sharing economy.
The team @ Spoyl
Entering a new world
After spending close to 14 years in US, Bhargav decided to move back to India “While Silicon Valley has great startups, I felt the Indian market was more open for a product that was technologically-driven and consumer-facing,” he says.
However, the early days back in India were not easy. With no contacts in India, Bhargav had to begin from scratch. It was a challenge to network and to find like-minded people to join him and take Spoyl’s vision forward.
Being a part of strong and high-performing teams at Intuit earlier, Bhargav knew that the right team could turn any idea into a product and a business. “I had one primary objective four months ago and that was to build the best team for the job. I hustled, moved to Hyderabad, networked, and was able to motivate and inspire a few people whom I consider to be the backbone of Spoyl now,” adds Bhargav.
One of them was Sumit Agarwal, his colleague from Intuit, who joined in as the co-founder. Another important team member was Bhaskar Ganji, who is Spoyl’s first employee. Prior to this, Bhaskar was working for a small consultancy firm in Andhra Pradesh.
Bhargav says Bhaskar developed the whole backend single-handedly. Bhargav had in the past reached out to Bhaskar to work on some of his app-developing ideas.
“We already had a connection. He is one of smartest engineers I’ve worked with. Not from an IIT, nor BITS, but can compete with any of the top engineers in the country at the moment,” says Bhargav.
Irum Ruqiya, a growth hacker who previously worked at Myntra and Wooplr, is another core team member. Bhargav says he stalked her on LinkedIn before getting her to say yes.
Close to a month ago, the team launched the first version of the app after a few beta runs. Spoyl is available on iOS and Android. The team relies on a highly scalable architecture using Python-Django hosted on AWS. They claim to provide high performance in the app experience using the Elasticsearch technology, which allows search of all kinds of documents and is scalable across platforms, and the latest image compression techniques.
Sellers need to click pictures of their product and add the price along with a detailed description of the product. Once the product is selected, the team at Spoyl reviews the same and verifies the seller details before publishing it.
After an order is placed and verified, Spoyl’s logistics partners will get in touch with the seller and the process of delivery begins. Spoyl follows a standard marketplace revenue model, where they take a certain percentage of the transaction value as their cut to feed logistics and operational expenses plus the margins.
Spoyl also provides a white-glove concierge service, facilities that include picking up the apparel and helping the sellers present the same in a more cleaner and appealing fashion online. “This is specifically for those who don’t have the time to do so themselves,” adds Bhargav. Spoyl gets a bigger cut for this service.
Spoyl has had about 1100 app downloads, 800 active users, and claims to have close to eight orders a day. The team says they haven’t spent a dime on marketing yet and everything is through organic referral installs.
The team is going to aggressively start building content and work on acquiring users in the next few weeks. Their goal is to reach the 5,000 active user mark with 25 orders per day by mid-December. The team is currently trying to crack the logistics piece of the business before they expand to other cities.
“Since there aren’t any major competitors in this space yet, we believe that our product and execution coupled with our strong team with diverse yet relevant backgrounds will set us apart from the other early-stage companies that are in this space,” says Bhargav.
Spoyl currently is a part of TLabs accelerator program and have raised close to $100,000 from TLabs and a couple of angels. Ganesh Subramanian, ex-COO of Myntra, joined the board last month as the official advisor.
YourStory take
Pre-owned fashion has caught the attention of quite a few entrepreneurs in India. Elanic, Revamp My Closet, Once Again, Zapyle, and Etashee are some of the ventures that have started up in this category in recent months and years.
According to a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report, the collaborative economy has the potential to increase global revenues to $335 billion by 2025. While there is no reliable data on the market size for pre-owned fashion, a Google report estimated that India’s online fashion market would reach $35 billion in size by 2020.
With more Indians buying expensive branded products and lifestyles and habits changing rapidly, pre-owned fashion definitely has a market in the country. But how big will that market be and how much of that Spoyl can capture, only time will tell.
The iconic not-for-profit organisation Khan Academy has partnered with the equally iconic Tata Trusts to create specialised, freely available online content tailor-made for India. The multi-million dollar partnership will not only hire Indian teachers but also create online content in Indian languages, primarily based on NCERT textbooks.
Ratan Tata, Tata Trusts (Left) – Salman Khan, Khan Academy (Right)
YourStory sees this as a potential revolution in the field of education, for students who struggle to access quality education, for teachers, for schools, for content developers and for edutech startups across India. And also eventually becoming a medium to bring transparency and accessibility in the multi billion dollar education sector in India. Khan Academy founder Salman Khan said he was open to working with ed-tech startups in India to be able to realise the organisation’s vision to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
What’s interesting is that the content will be made available both offline and online through low-cost devices. Khan Academy already has pilot programmes underway in various schools, which also aim to help teachers improve their own skills. It also hopes to rope in professionals who want to teach and therefore impact millions of lives. The problem of access to education in India, let alone quality education, is a complex one. Khan Academy’s tutorials don’t intend to replace teachers, only to free them up to focus on giving students additional help.
Tata described Khan and his approach as “refreshingly different” in the way it aims at not only changing the world from illiterate to literate but also provides knowledge to anybody, anywhere and at any time – a model that will exponentially increase the reach of the $109 billion Tata Trusts.
For me as an Indian and as a citizen of the planet, it is a great privilege to start this partnership. I see it as a great way to make a difference for the generations to come, Tata added.
For those who haven’t heard of Khan, he’s a former hedge-fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, who set up the Academy after videos he created to tutor a cousin, led to many more cousins asking for help and the creation of many more such videos, all of which he uploaded on the Internet. As word got around, he began getting letters from not just people in the US but from everywhere in the world, explaining how a tutorial had helped them pass an algebra class, or go back to college or help their children. “It soon became clear that there was a broader need for such content out there in the world,” Khan said, adding, “It showed us how much hunger there is around the world among people to tap into their potential.”
At last count, Khan Academy had nearly 2,700 freely viewable videos of around 10 minutes each on subjects like maths, science, and computer science, as well as humanities and test prep. Given its origins, Khan Academy primarily focused on lessons delivered in English. “But when you look at areas for potential for deep impact (like a) huge population with a huge need, India tops the list.Obviously, my family has roots here, and it’s close to our heart,” Khan said while talking about Khan Academy’s Hindi language portal which was launched just a few days back. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the next 4-5 years and in the coming decades,we want to be an Indian organisation,” he added.
In the first phase, the partnership will focus on creating educational resources that will benefit children from middle- and low-income families in urban areas, while the second phase envisages content in several Indian languages. The partnership with Tata Trusts seeks to create content for Indian students, first with subtitles, and eventually original content in various Indian languages, and perhaps, find other ‘Salman’s in India.
Khan dreams of every learner in India being capable of tapping into their potential by learning subjects that are of real significance to them and to be able to learn in the language that is most relevant to their context. He wants them to be able to access it, via computers and low-cost phones, which the Academy is looking into.
When I wrote the mission statement about being able to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, it seemed a bit delusional. But we have had success with 30 million users, and now it feels less delusional and more probable. We couldn’t have found a better partner than Tata Trusts, Khan added.
Khan and Tata met through mutual friends, began discussing the issue of making a free education accessible to the masses, and eventually conceptualised the partnership launched today.
YS TAKE
Given the type of impact that Khan Academy has had worldwide, not to mention how well known it’s become, it’s clear now that for non-proven models, not-for-profit is a viable option if you’re looking to create an impact that’s both wide and deep through leveraging a technology-based millennial model.
It’s not the bottom-line numbers, but the magnitude of impact that matters. Once the impact is established, donors back you again and again. While the venture capital model intrinsically looks for revenue and profits (and there’s nothing wrong with that), the mission invariably gets influenced by different expectations, which in turn risks diluting the goals.
(Disclaimer: Ratan Tata is one of the investors in YourStory)
Many stories of pain, suffering, neglect and haphazard care are hidden inside countless homes where a family member is a patient of a chronic disease.
With nuclear families and working couples fast becoming the norm, especially in urban areas, taking good care of a sick family member at home has become a challenge. The choices have been fairly limited – either a family member has to take on the entire responsibility, or look for hired help or a resident nurse. And getting qualified and reliable help has never been easy.
It’s exactly what K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh experienced when a close family member was diagnosed with cancer. For the two serial entrepreneurs and investors, it drove home the fact that there were many challenges in getting quality home-based care in India. At the time, the husband-wife duo had just successfully exited their previous venture, TutorVista, and were exploring other opportunities.
“We found that the lack of affordable and quality home healthcare in India was a big pain-point and provided a large ‘whitespace’ opportunity that we felt we could address,” says Meena, who along with her husband, co-founded Portea in 2013.
Nurse @ Portea
Growth beyond numbers
The journey began in June 2013 from a small office in Bengaluru, a skeletal team and less than 50 customers across Bengaluru and Delhi NCR. Today, Portea has a team of over 3,500, operations across India and Malaysia, and clocks over 60,000 visits to patients’ homes each month.
In the past year, Portea claims to have seen revenue grow by about 200 per cent, the number of home visits increase by 151 per cent, the number of active patients rise by 91 per cent, its patient database expand by 307 per cent, and its clinicians base grow by 255 per cent to 2,300. The company declined to share current and targeted revenue.
“Our belief is that our impact goes beyond figures; we have created an industry where none existed, bringing visibility and credibility to the home healthcare sector in India and to the concept of ‘consumer healthcare,” adds Meena.
Before Portea’s services became available, a family needed to go to several doctors, quite possibly in different locations, to address age-specific healthcare needs, not to mention things like basic primary care, post-operative care, routine check-ups as well as allied needs like diagnostics, medical equipment or specialty medicines. And it’s not always elders who need such services. Think of someone recovering from an accident or a sports injury who needs not just physiotherapy but help in getting around the house.
What we have now created is a framework in which Portea is a co-participant and fully invested in the entire family’s healthcare needs,” says Meena. The company offers a full suite of services from at-home care and medical equipment on rent to lab tests and consultations with doctors.
Bringing tech to healthcare
“We have also created entirely new solutions using technology, including remote diagnostics,” adds Meena. Portea also uses tech to manage a remote workforce, standardise processes and seamlessly integrate the offering for patients by providing them with a consolidated view of everything.
Portea has started using point-of-care devices and remote monitoring equipment at patients’ homes. When Portea clinicians visit a patient, they use diagnostic tools that capture patient data, which is uploaded through smartphones to an EMR platform. This platform then uses predictive analytics to analyse health trends and take steps like getting a doctor to monitor the patient regularly if the trend indicates that the patient’s health is deteriorating.
The backend algorithm provides alerts if a patient’s vitals cross internally set thresholds and also checks for adverse drug reactions to any new drugs prescribed (against the patient’s existing drug prescription).
Portea’s patients receive medical oversight in coordination with their specialists. This is divided into three layers. The work of the clinicians is overseen by subject matter experts who are, in turn, supervised by Portea’s Medical Director. The team at Portea also works closely with consulting specialists and doctors of the patients.
Physiotherapist @ Portea
Challenges
The key challenge when Portea started was to create awareness about home healthcare.
“Building a consumer brand is tough in any field; more so in a sector like healthcare, which is a very personal and emotive issue; doing all of this at-scale, while maintaining quality and affordable prices, is a considerable challenge,” adds Meena.
The team not only used traditional means of spreading the word like print, radio and outdoor campaigns, but also organized camps at apartment complexes and corporate offices. Building a strong team for the diverse roles that are a part of Portea’s structure was also important.
Meena Ganesh
“There is huge diversity in the profile of people that make up this industry; while some of our employees come from premier B-schools and engineering campuses, we also utilise the talents of rural and semi-urban men and women who are recruited, trained and offered jobs as Nursing Attendants at Portea,” says Meena.
The nursing attendants are selected and sent to Portea by the National Skill Development Organisation. After a basic interview, the candidates are trained on etiquette, hygiene, behaviour and customer care.
Considering the sector Portea operates in, it is important to keep the patient’s needs at the centre of everything.
“We understand that Portea’s patients and their families come to us in their time of need. The onus is on “owning” patient outcomes and not just on “treating” patients,”explains Meena.
For many of Portea’s customers, their services are a necessity. Pandurang Pai and his wife are a case in point. “Both my sons are in the US. They were obviously worried about us since we are alone, but from the time we contacted Portea, things are much better. The nurse from Portea not only gives us the right advice and checks whether we are taking our medicine, but also spends some time and we love to speak to her,” says Panduranga, 80, a resident of Malleshwaram in Bengaluru.
Opportunity
We need to only look around us and within our families to realise the opportunity in home healthcare. India’s healthcare infrastructure is still rickety at best. Already, non-communicable diseases like cancer, hypertension and diabetes account for 51 per cent of old-age deaths in India, according to Global Age Watch.
Add to this the fact that 20 per cent of Indians, according to Global Age Watch, by 2050 will be over 60 years old by 2050, and the need for home healthcare becomes a significant one.
All these data points, along with social trends like a rising number of double-income households, clearly show that home healthcare will very soon become a vital necessity in India. Portea, along with competitors like India Home Healthcare, Unique Home Care by Apollo, Healers and Home and Nightingale’s, can create and capture a large market if they get their patient care model right while scaling up.
Gurgaon-resident Kaushik Nath’s daily commute to work and back is primarily spent stuck in traffic, just like many other office goers in Indian cities. “Beating traffic during office hours is like winning gold at Olympics,” says Kaushik, 28, who works at a multinational company on Gurgaon’s Sohna Road. He lives in DLF Phase II, at a distance of over 10km from his office. He has tried using on-demand cabs, autos and shuttle services, to no avail. That changed a few days ago when he used the services of a bike-taxi service. “The time taken has reduced by half,” says a thrilled Kaushik.
Traffic and traffic jams have become a daily affair in India’s cities. Memes showing sleeper bus shuttle services between locations within a city is a hilarious take on this sad reality. Bikes, which can weave their way through traffic, being used as taxis seems like a no-brainer and a couple of startups offering this service were launched a week ago in Gurgaon.
While cities like Mumbai have banned such services due to regulatory concerns, the Haryana government has allowed bike-taxi services under state contract carriage permit.
“Last-mile connectivity is a huge pain in Gurgaon. About 200,000 professionals travel to and within Gurgaon everyday for office and business meetings,” says Arunabh Madhur Founder and CEO of M-Taxi, on the opportunity he saw for this service. M-Taxi and another bike-taxi service provider Baxi launched their operations in Gurgaon in the first week of December.
Baxi’s Co-founder Ashutosh Johri says the broken public transport in Gurgaon, Noida and Faridabad adds to the commuters’ woes. “We want to change the face of last-mile connectivity,” he adds.
Currently, M-Taxi claims to do over 40 rides and Baxi over 140 rides daily. Baxi has a fleet of 23 bikes, while M-Taxi has an inventory of 10 bikes and plans to add 100 bikes more in a couple of weeks. The companies intend to move to a marketplace model, but have started off with inventory to ensure smooth operations. They are affordable too, compared to taxi-hailing apps. The bike taxis charge Rs 25 for the first three km and Rs five for every subsequent km. Ola Mini, the cheapest service offered on the platform, charges Rs 100 for the first four kilometers and Rs eight for every km after that and Reone for every minute. M-Taxi limits rides to 10km, while Baxi has no such limits.
Experts see last-mile personal transportation as a massive problem in metros and other cities and believe that addressable market is as big as $five billion. Alok Goel, Partner at VC firm SAIF Partners, says,
On-demand, two-wheeler taxi service seems to be an interesting model. Last mile is a big pain for masses in the top five cities and bike taxis can be convenient, affordable as well as efficient mode to commute for people in big cities.
However, regulations that vary from State to State can become roadblocks. Prior to M-Taxi and Baxi, Mumbai-based Hey Taxi had started a bike-taxi service in some parts of the city. However, the Mumbai Regional Transport Office suspended the service stating that operating a two-wheeler taxi service does not fall under the Maharashtra Motor Vehicle Rules. The government body also says that the city currently didn’t need motorcycle taxi services.
At present, Hey Taxi operates as a ridesharing platform and also offers on-demand parcel delivery. The company allows customers in South Mumbai localities of Mahim, Dadar and Colaba to arrange parcel, package and envelope deliveries up to five kg within a vicinity of 10 km. It claims to do over 50 deliveries on a daily basis. Manoj Maheshwari, Co-founder of Hey Taxi, says,
We are in discussions with government stakeholders to formulate concrete guidelines in Mumbai (for bike taxi services)
He plans to launch the service in Gurgaon early next year.
Interestingly, Baxi and M-Taxi had secured seed round of funding before launching their operations. According to a source with direct knowledge of the deal, Baxi bagged about Rs 10 crore in an angel round. M-Taxi has raised an angel round of between $400,000 and $500,000. Both companies declined to confirm the funding.
Motorcycle taxis are an extremely widespread mode for last-mile connectivity in notoriously congested cities like Jakarta in Indonesia. It’s also widely popular in China and Vietnam. Go-Jek, Blue-Jek and GrabBike, a unit of Didi Kuaid-backed GrabTaxi, are major players in the Indonesian market. Besides rides, Go-Jek also offers hyperlocal deliveries along with other services like intra-city parcel movement for businesses and individuals.
Authorities in India are beginning to recognise the need for such services. Saurabh Singh, Joint Commissioner of Police, Gurgaon, says:
Motorcycle taxis are bringing in smart solutions to ease the last-mile connectivity challenge for the daily commuters in Gurgaon. This mode of transportation fills an important gap in the transport landscape while delivering on aspects such as safety, security and transparency in their dealing with the commuters.
Baxi has got approval to roll out the service in other cities in Haryana including Faridabad, Panchkula and Bahadurgarh.
Balbir Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Traffic Gurgaon takes the ride on M-TAXI
While the opportunity is big, these fledgling startups need to be prepared for increasing competition. Like GrabTaxi has done in South East Asia, Ola is reportedly working on plans to launch on-demand bike taxi service. The media reports also suggested that the Softbank-funded company will have UberRUSH-like offering to deliver shopping orders like flowers, baked goods, laundry and ice-cream to consumers’ doorsteps in less than three hours.
YourStory take
Last-mile personal transport is indeed a major hassle in all major Indian cities. Existing solutions like on-demand cab services do not solve the problem of time wasted stuck in traffic and are as expensive as daily commute solutions. Autorickshaws, the more affordable alternative, in most cities, do not follow the meter and commuters end up coughing up higher fares.
On-demand bike taxi services appear to be a viable option to beat traffic and save time. The initial booking numbers for Baxi and M-Taxi are promising. However, adverse State regulations have the potential to put the brakes on their expansion plans. The regular cab-hailing app companies like Uber and Ola are still dealing with regulatory issues. However, stakeholders like Jairaj believe that other State governments will take their cues from the Haryana decision. If they do, India could well have a vibrant bike-taxi industry like Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia and commuters will have an affordable and reliable transport service that can beat traffic.
