Hiren Tambe, who owns a 500-sqft store in Navi Mumbai, has at least 800 stock keeping units (SKU). Having run the store for over 15 years, he has always understood his typical customer’s requirements. Or so he thought. But with modern retail arriving in his vicinity, Hiren realised that many of his customers were going to his store for convenience. It was then that he realised that he had to invest in consumer behaviour, which meant that he had to figure out that a customer who liked packed juices would also like to buy cheese or soups. That’s when he ran into a startup called SnapBizz, in 2012. The Founder of SnapBizz Prem Kumar walked into the kirana store and explained to Hiren about technology that could connect kirana stores with real time promotions of consumer goods companies.

Hiren was sold on the idea that this technology could not just provide insight into consumer behaviour. “This platform helps me strike better deals with consumer goods companies, and four years later the platform has kept consumers loyal to my store,” says Hiren. He says that his gross earnings have gone up from Rs 1,00,000 a month to Rs 1,50,000 a month. While Hiren was pleased with the money he was earning, Prem realised the psychology of these small business owners.

“I realised that the owner is worried about paying the school fees of his children and running his household on a daily basis. The average Indian looks at family first and his business is built around how we can expenses on a daily basis,” says Prem. He says technology implementations fail because they do not understand culture. He snapped up 50 kiranas in 2012 with the same narrative in the vicinity. This learning has helped SnapBizz become a multi-million dollar business (the company does not want to divulge revenues) that works with more than 1,400 kirana stores across the country.

What SnapBizz got right while others failed?

Startups and large corporates failed when it came to addressing a solution for kiranas or mom and pop stores because they were technology focussed and not driven by the attitude of a kirana retailer. Even the mighty Infosys had experimented – in Mysore – to implement technology with these traditional businesses and failed. Also, SAP had a programme  called “Ganges”, which was shelved because the kirana stores did not take to technology. Then came several startups which said they could provide real time delivery from kiranas and some also said they could connect kiranas to consumers. Even payment or fintech companies are trying to make kiranas work on apps and accept digital payments. Even Reliance Jio is piloting a wallet that connects kirana to consumer. However, the kirana store folks piloted with every startup out there – for the lucrative incentives provided – and once the incentives stopped they stopped using any form of technology. So what was going wrong? These were some of the many questions asked by Prem. He wondered what was wrong with the narrative – about the benefits of technology – or did these retailers not care at all. After working with over 50 kiranas in Navi Mumbai, back in 2012-13, he realised that the problem was not the technology; it was in understanding the social structures of kirana families that influenced his business model.

How does the business work?

Their business model makes money out of the entire consumer goods business chain and includes four components, three of which are paid modules. It comprises a consumer app that allows the consumer to transact with the kirana (which is offered free to the customer). The second module includes software that helps the kiranas capture data of stock that is sold in the store, which then allows them to stock goods based on consumer behaviour. The third module is to help distributors understand what sells in catchments and distributors pay for this data. The final model helps consumer goods companies promote their products in each kirana through a cloud-based promotion-placement model. The final module is the crux of the business. This is how it works?

SnapBizz sells a TV, a scanner, an internet connection and a tablet to the kirana, which the kirana store owner buys for Rs 25,000. The TV is strategically placed in the store for the consumer to view all the promotions of at least 15 consumer goods companies. These consumer goods companies pay SnapBizz to host their promotions on the TV and the kirana gets an added benefit – of discounts – on the product when he stocks these promoted products in the store. The promotions can be changed dynamically and SnapBizz manages the dashboards of consumer goods companies. These consumer goods companies are able to measure an increase in sales because of cross-promotions of their product through visual presentation.

“TV connects with customers at the store and analytics can kick if the entire chain is connected on the web platform,” says R. Natarajan, CFO of Helion Ventures.

Some of the big names that work with SnapBizz include Rekitt and Colman, P&G, Cadbury’s and MTR. A total of 15 consumer goods companies use this real time promotions platform of SnapBizz.

The beginning    

The business began in the most unlikely of ways in 2011. Global corporate Qualcomm was experimenting with the future of long tail business in Navi Mumbai – where they were working with mobile devices that capture information on consumer behaviour and stock movements. They suddenly realised that this was a business worth exploring and began to scout for entrepreneurs who could turn this into a business idea. As luck would have it Prem – who was respected veteran of the consumer goods industry in India and abroad – was living in London at the time and wanted to do something in India.

He had been quiet a successful entrepreneur between 2001 and 2010. Prem sold CISLINK.com, a B2B portal that connected business services in Eastern Europe, and also managed the distribution of a consumer goods company in Russia. In 2009, he founded FLY Mobiles, a Micromax equivalent in Eastern Europe.

“Through common connections Qualcomm reached out to me. They saw the kirana business as a billion dollar potential and I quickly prepared a business plan and flew down to the USA to win the idea,” says Prem.

Prem immediately told the global company that to crack this business one must work with the distribution muscle of the consumer goods industry in India.

“This was the only way to scale up,” says Prem.

Qualcomm conceded that Prem knew his business and helped him to own the idea by putting in seed money. There, the idea of SnapBizz was born and Prem started the company in Mumbai. He solved the distribution problem to get kiranas by working with P&G, who gave him access to the likes of Hiren. He convinced P&G to work with him because of the narrative that he had prepared. “I told them that today everyone was shooting promotions through print ads and posters. Companies were shooting in the blind and I told them that a TV-based visual in the store was far more powerful than a poster in the kirana,” says Prem.

“These businesses are built on scale, the more kiranas they convince to come on the platform the more data they have to work with to sign on consumer goods companies,” says V. Balakrishnan, Co-founder of Exfinity Ventures.

The company has raised close to $8.9 million from a clutch of investors including Jungle Ventures.

The competition

Today after 1,400 kiranas, SnapBizz plans to capture 10 percent of kirana stores in each large city in India. In Navi Mumbai alone there are 40,000 kiranas. In India there are around eight million kirana stores, and based on different reports the size of the market could be as big as 12 million mom and pop stores. SnapBizz wants to go after this market. Along with him there are folks like Xlogix, SuperZop and StockWise. These business models are similar. The management teams of these companies do not have distribution experience, but they have technology and analytics experience. SuperZop has reached 50 kiranas, Xlogix works with a corporate retailer and have reached about four kiranas. So far, StockWise has signed up with 10 kiranas and four corporate retailers. None of these businesses have crossed Rs 1 crore in revenues.

SnapBizz has managed to sign large consumer goods companies to convince their ecosystem to work with their kirana ecosystem. There are more than 200 small, medium and large FMCG companies in India and each of them works with 1,000 distributors on an average.

According to Ernst and Young, the retail market is $550 billion in size and only 10 percent is organised. With companies like SnapBizz even the traditional retailer can become organised.

Website

The e-commerce world has influenced our buying experience as never before. Products are now just a click away. The ease of buying has also helped pushing up the demand.

Now, the student community is well aware of trends in technology, fashion, food and other categories and wants to consume these products and services, but lacks money.

Rajan Bajaj and Deepak Malhotra, who are from IIT-Kharagpur and BITS-Pilani respectively, faced similar difficulties as students. The duo, who met through a common friend, observed that while there are banks offering services like EMIs and credit cards, there are no options for students to take such services. This pushed them to build a solution platform, specifically for students.

In November 2015, they launched Buddy, now Slicepay, a micro-lending platform for students. It offers credits to students without taking collateral of guarantee, recognising the fact that students in reputed institutes have the ability and intent to pay back short-term credit.

Rajan, 23, Co-founder, Slicepay said,

Our aim is to offer a unique solution to students, who are a critical part of the consumer market, and make the products accessible to them and offer a great shopping experience.

With an outlay of Rs 3 lakh, the Bengaluru-based platform began its operation in January 2016 and started offering credits to students.

The platform doesn’t offer direct cash to students, but helps them buy products and services from its partnered platforms. From e-commerce to wallet recharge to many other categories, it has tied up with over 40 such platforms and the number is growing.

According to the platform, students can buy products and use services up to Rs 60,000, which they can pay within 18 months, in various installations. The interest rate charged on it varies between zero and 20 percent.

It says that it is present in over 80 colleges and has offered credit line to 6,000 students, worth Rs 1 crore.

During February this year, the platform raised a funding of $500, 000 from Blume Ventures & Tracxn Labs and now has re-branded itself as SlicePay. The rebranding comes as a part of their expanded portfolio in the field of credit.

How to use the service?

Students who want to get a credit line fill up a form on the website and add their basic information, along with their college ID and address proof. After an hour of processing, the person receives a credit line of upto Rs 7,000, which he can use on the partnered sites.

“Now, there are various sections on the form. Every time, a user completes a section of the profile, he or she gets allotted a higher credit line based on our analysis. If all the three sections of a user profile is filled, he or she can get a credit line of upto Rs 60,000,” says Rajan.

A look on the operation side

To run the operation smoothly, Slicepay has a network of 100 students, called college ambassadors.

The college ambassadors are operation interns and growth hackers. The job of these college ambassadors is to get more customers, do thorough background checks and help in recovering money from defaulters, if any.

To raise continuous credit, Slicepay has also tied up with non-banking financial institutions (NBFCs) and takes services from them.

“Our business model is linked with both NBFCs and merchant partners. We raise credit lines from NBFCs, which we pay to students. In lieu of credit lines, of the interests we receive from students, a large part go to NBFCs and we receive between zero and four percent. From merchant partners, we receive four percent of commission on per order. It’s a high-risk business, where the cost of customer acquisition and marketing is very high,” says Rajan.

Startups rush to acquire students

With 700 universities and more than 35,000 affiliated colleges enrolling more than 20 million students, India offers a large opportunity for platforms targeting students.

And in the market, where around 25 percent of e-commerce is driven by students, many other micro-lending platforms are trying to create a niche.

Quiklo and Krazybee are two other platforms that offer credit line to students and allow users to borrow small sums of money to buy things on different payment plans.

In June this year, KrazyBee raised $2 million in seed funding from two Chinese firms.

In the past few years, there has been a spurt in lending startups targeting their brethren across the segments, categories and target groups. Such lending startups is a boon for the industry and will help building the economy of the country.

Website

In a world of mobile phones and health apps that connect you to doctors, help in consultations, and deliver medicines, there still is the problem of dealing with all the patient follow-ups and calls. This was the exact problem 22-year-old Krishna Chaitanya Aluru’s father, a cardiologist in Hyderabad, faced.

Through his conversations with his father, Chaitanya realised that it was a common problem for doctors – they kept getting calls or messages 24/7. He thought that there had to be a way to organise the process and make the funnel more rational.

It was then that Chaitanya, along with Akshat Goenka and Vamsee Chamakura, decided to start DocTalk in February this year. DocTalk is a mobile app that allows users to stay in touch with doctors easily. Akshat adds that it works as a Dropbox and WhatsApp solution for the Indian healthcare ecosystem.

The trio had earlier founded a startup that had an artificial intelligence, virtual assistant – Genie.

Easing communication between doctors and patients

Explaining how the process works, 23-year-old Akshat says:

We do not connect patients with new doctors, we just streamline the process post-consultation. A patient can subscribe to a doctor and then easily share files and past prescriptions to ensure that the doctor can quickly access the data. Doctors too can upload and share any reports that they might have.

Patients can download the app and start uploading all their reports with no cost involved. Once patients upload reports, they can connect with their doctor. The platform also validates if the patient is an existing patient of the doctor or not. This is essential as the focus isn’t on discovery.

If a patient’s doctor is not affiliated with DocTalk, the patient gets automatically subscribed after the said doctor is onboarded.  DocTalk has doctors across specialities in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Akshat adds that, through their product, the team has been able to cut down response and remote consultation time by 25 percent.

Changing from the ‘uber-like’ model

The team had initially considered an ‘uber-like’ model for doctors like those of Practo and Lybrate, but after understanding the market, the team realised that the Indian patient still strongly relies on personal referrals when identifying a doctor, unless they are stuck with no other recourse. Also, the model of finding and consulting a doctor on an app didn’t seem conducive.

Akshat says that 75 percent of follow-ups involve discussing a report or a prescription. He adds that one of the main challenges was in the ideation, followed by adding on doctors and bringing in the right connections.  Now the team claims that their doctor base is growing at 100 percent on a week-on-week basis.

The patient base, the team claims, is also growing at about 100 percent on a week-on-week basis, and revenue is growing at 70 percent week-on-week.

Future plans

Most of the patient acquisition up to now was in-clinic as they did not have payment processing built-in, but now the team plans to ramp up acquisition via patient database messages as payment processing is taken care of, thanks to Razorpay.

The health-tech space is deeply funded and has several players; the Sequoia and Tencent-backed Practo, starting from a SaaS platform has expanded to include different verticals of the healthcare system – Discover, consultation, medical records and even medicine delivery. Lybrate is another key player in the healthcare space. In July last year, the platform had raised $10.2 million funding from the likes of Tiger, Nexus and Ratan Tata.

The platform too enables ease of communication between patients and doctors. The team claims that the patients can communicate anonymously with doctors online or through a mobile app.

There is Doctor’s Circle, which manages consultations and helps in patient conversations. There also is Hyderabad-based Caremotto, which focuses on ensuring patients get connected to the right surgeon.

DocTalk is Y Combinator-backed and they are just finishing the YC Fellowship Batch 3. Typically, Y Combinator invests $120,000 in startups for a seven percent stake in equity. In a report in the Times of India, Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator, said that in the current batch, the founders have personal experience with the problems they are aiming to solve, giving them insight into the market they operate in.

He stated that India is second to the US in terms of applications received, higher than both the UK and Canada.

“Our goal is to make communication more convenient. The patient benefits significantly as they now have a personalised EMR system on their mobile, while the doctors can track patient progress and use numerous other tools that are provided on the doctor app,” says Akshat, a Wharton alumnus.

DocTalk takes an agency/service fee from doctors who charge their patients for a subscription. They take a cut of the patient’s fee.

The team intends to look at the process of patient and doctor communications more closely and make it simpler.

Website

E-commerce changed the way business was conducted and the marketplace model changed it even further. Now the space is open for millions of potential sellers to mark their presence in the online world and reach out to millions of consumers.

But, is it that easy for potential sellers to reach out to online consumers? What about creating content, branding, execution, marketing strategy and many other intricacies of the online business world? Besides, it is as important for e-commerce players to have more sellers on their platforms.

A few years ago, when the e-commerce business was picking pace in India, Ambud Sharma was observing the development from the US. He was working as a chief technology architect with Comcast then. In December 2013, observing the growth in the Indian market, he planned a business and registered a company with the name Ligo Brands.

In February 2015, he returned to India and operationalised the company in July as an e-commerce retail and services platform specialising in online retail, brand management, seller services consulting and private-label consulting.

“The marketplace model in e-commerce throws open a huge business opportunity for sellers. We observed the potential of this model in India and decided to offer market solutions. We have made the service easily accessible to merchants who can show the true nature of their brands at one junction,” says Ambud, 31.

Ligo follows three kinds of business models — aggregator model, manage services or inventory model and private label consulting model.

Also Read: Cloud-based inventory management startup Browntape raises close to $1 M from Seedfund & Krishnan Ganesh

In the first kind of model, it aggregates products and directly sells on various e-commerce sites.

In the ‘manage services model’, it manages the inventory of sellers and pushes the seller via its own platform.

The third model is private label consulting, in which it controls every part of the brand — from production to marketing to selling of products.

Besides, the company is also into exports, where it liquidates dead products of sellers into the markets of West Asia and Central Africa.

Also Read: The game is on – e-sellers versus Flipkart-Amazon-Snapdeal

Ambud says he is providing a robust in-house and technology-based warehouse. The main feature of the product is that it provides personalised customisation services to customer. It also does unique branding for unbranded stuff by adopting parallel branding or the co-branding model to leverage their brands with world-class brands.

The company works exclusively with its clients on a multi-layer contract basis. “We realise that end-to-end service is strongly needed for merchants,” he says.

Business strategy

Starting out with an outlay of Rs 1.5 crore, Ambud says the firm’s entire services are built in its own courtyard. It has a 30,000sqft warehouse space, with the capacity to deliver 5,000 units per day.

“Initially, we began working with top brands of fashion and accessories, such as Fila, Lee Cooper and Nike. Later, we opened access for less recognised fashion brands to come onto our platform and show the virtue of their products and accessories by adopting a new marketing strategy of parallel branding or co-marketing,” explains Ambud.

Also Read: Indian e-commerce to hit Rs 2,11,005cr in 2016: IAMAI study

The company clocked a turnover of Rs 5 crore last year. They are operating their flagship project in Dubai and have stretched their legs in the US market too.

The company has set a goal to hit turnover of Rs 20 crore this fiscal year and Rs 150 crore in the next five years.

The venture claims to grow rapidly across India and has plans to open warehouses in Bengaluru and Ahmedabad.

It has six customers and has been associated with 32 brands. It has 60 percent branded products and 40 percent in the unbranded fashion segment.

The venture mainly focusses on shoes and has recently introduced apparel and leather and travel accessories.

E-commerce grew, so did solution providers

In the e-commerce segment, there are multi-category e-retail companies offering full-stack solutions to sellers.

Launched in 2011, Zepo claims it can help one create and run an online store in under five minutes. The Mumbai-based DIY e-commerce platform offers a well-planned front-end, a simple dashboard and accepts online payments with a free payment gateway, as well as helps in logistics with a Bluedart partnership.

A similar platform, Kartrocket, offers end-to-end e-commerce solutions – setting up the website, integrated payment gateway, traffic generation tool, listing on marketplaces, and more than 200 apps along with automated shipping solutions. It plans to expand presence and even has an app to solve problems around cataloguing and traffic generation.

Goa-based Browntape, founded in 2012, is yet another cloud-based software that helps online merchants manage orders and inventory for e-commerce markets. It has an enterprise model crafted for large brands and retailers who have little experience in scaling sales on online marketplaces.

The initial barriers that most small businesses face are discoverability and the inability to estimate demand for their products or services. Larger and more established companies have long had the upper hand, being able to invest heavily in marketing and other outreach activities. In the past decade, e-commerce has levelled the playing field to an extent, giving smaller businesses a platform to tap into a vast, existing pool of customers.

But the ‘e-commerce story’ is still in its nascent stages in India. It is estimated that only about 2–3 percent of transactions occur online, with immense room for growth. While horizontal marketplaces have seen the most growth and popularity, there are multiple niche players popping up that aim to provide the depth and customisation that horizontal marketplaces can’t cater to. Glowship aims to help organise and improve the home utilities space in India.

Story so far

Glowship was formally launched in March 2015 by Srinivas Potukuchi, an IIT Madras and Stanford Business School alum, who spent about five years working in the solar energy and home utilities sector before venturing out on his own. Through his personal experience, Srinivas found that most companies in this space, even those with interesting and innovative products and solutions, were unable to communicate effectively and reach out to the mass market.

So through Glowship he aims to address this space, which is estimated to be a Rs 20,000-crore-a-year market in India. He also aims to help small businesses make informed choices and better handle power cuts and other issues faced because of the unreliable power grid in India.

So along with a team of eight, Srinivas officially launched Glowship in Bengaluru and currently has over 225 sellers serving customers in about 10 Indian states. The e-commerce platform is positioning itself as a unique marketplace for home utility goods and services mainly targeted at residential home owners.

While solar power solutions are one of Glowship’s main offerings, the marketplace also provides conventional power solutions like inverters, batteries, and power banks as well as pumps, water, and lightning solutions.

On the services side, Glowship offers four main service packages for solar water heater systems based on the consumer’s specific needs. Once the customer confirms their interest, Glowship then arranges for the installation of the solar system through its partner network of system integrators around India.

For consumers who are new to the sector, Glowship provides a ‘Knowledge Center’ on their platform to cater to frequently asked questions. They have also recently launched a do-it-yourself rooftop solar platform, which they claim is the first of its kind in the solar industry. It is able to recommend the optimum solar capacity and provide instant price estimates for the entire system while offering customers options to choose from either consuming solar power directly (without storage) or for the purpose of providing back-up power during a power outage.

Revenue model and marketing

As a marketplace and after-sales solutions aggregator, Glowship makes a commission for each transaction that occurs on its platform. Srinivas noted that their average ticket size has been around Rs 27,000, with a conversion rate upwards of 10 percent.

So far independent home owners have been their largest customers, followed by small and medium businesses. In terms of geography, Karnataka, Delhi-NCR, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh are among Glowhip’s top performing markets. Srinivas noted that they are trying to simplify the entire purchase decision for consumers by providing the widest range of solutions and also simplified and accurate information about different products and services in the market. He said,

We are profitable on almost every single order and have not used a discounting strategy to attain our current growth.

Glowship has so far relied only on online marketing channels and Srinivas believes that that they have been effective for their e-commerce offerings. Srinivas noted that since their home utilities marketplace is standardised for most product categories, marketing them and getting conversions is straightforward. Srinivas also sees a big market to upsell and cross-sell, based on one’s purchasing patterns. However, for some of their other custom solutions like solar panels for homes, Glowship is able to generate estimates but generally closes the deal only after a technician visits the homes.

Sector overview

With the second largest population in the world, India has a big need for reliable home utility products to make the best use of available resources. However, the country is faced with unique challenges. Srinivas notes that in the developed world, the power grid never goes down, but in markets like India power outages can vary between one and eight hours. So developed markets mainly look at solar solutions without storage, while storage is a necessity in developing markets. He said,

In India, customers don’t go shopping for solar solutions, they go shopping for power backup.

Until India’s power grid situation improves, Srinivas sees the solar segment being a big driver for growth in the home utilities space, with hybrid solutions being the key.

Solar solutions have gained mainstream acceptance in the West because of the convenience and cost benefits associated with them. Elon Musk-backed SolarCity is the most well known player in this space. The company initially started out as a aggregator leasing solar solutions to consumers and has now developed end-to-end capabilities on developing and manufacturing efficient solar panels.

Related read: Tesla Motors to acquire SolarCity for $2.6bn

Glowship too is looking to do the same in India and will seek to re-enable the growth of India’s solar market by increasing awareness and driving down customer acquisition cost.

India aims to have an operational solar power capacity of 100 GW by March 2022, which includes 40 GW of capacity from rooftop projects. In an attempt to boost the relatively neglected rooftop solar power market, various state governments have announced attractive subsidies for homeowners looking to set up rooftop solar power systems. Indian homeowners too have multiple needs ranging from heating, pumping, back-up power, home automation, energy management, and potentially even energy generation, given the falling costs of solar energy. So the sector has great room for growth in India.

Future plans

Glowship had raised a pre-seed round in 2015 from investors in the energy and solar sector and Infuse Ventures, India’s only cleantech fund (both institutional and angel money). At present, Glowship is in the process of expanding its team and raising a larger funding round to boost growth. The startup is leveraging a team of freelancers to spread awareness and knowledge through starter kits that explain the basics of solar power and battery pack solutions.

Glowship aims to reach a milestone of 500 sellers in the coming months and also expand to adjacent verticals like home automation. Glowship’s short-term aim is to address existing market problems and reduce cost at every level of the value chain by making solar and other platforms more plug and play oriented.

While e-commerce is making a transition to m-commerce, with a large percentage of transactions now occurring on smartphones, Srinivas considers desktops to be the main focus for high value purchase decisions that happen on their platform. But he believes that smartphones and apps are best suited to schedule after-sales services and solutions.

While it is currently a marketplace and aggregator of services, Glowship’s long-term goal is to grow its own intellectual property (IP) and develop its own products to help improve the home utilities space for the market. In terms of numbers, Srinivas noted that the goal is to target a 45 percent reduction in deployment time and 15 percent in cost.

Website- Glowship 

Online platforms have changed the traditional way of doing things — from shopping to travelling to searching for job opportunities.

According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, online talent platforms are increasingly connecting people to the right jobs. By 2025 they could add $2.7 trillion to global GDP, and begin to address persistent problems in the world’s labor markets.

Back in 2011, when Vivek Chandok was heading value added services (VAS) at Tech Mahindra, he hit upon a business idea that struck from his personal experience. He recounts an incident.

“I was standing outside my office. I observed a man (a jobseeker), who didn’t appear to be very educated, look at a ‘housekeeping staff wanted’ poster stuck to an electric pole. Soon, he began conversing with a nearby tea vendor. The jobseeker wanted to know if the vendor had heard about any housekeeping jobs in the vicinity. He further stated that he had paid a local agent Rs 300 to land him a job,” says Vivek, Founder and CEO of Saral Rozgar.

For blue-collared jobseekers, searching for and getting jobs is challenging. They either rely on acquaintances or pay hefty amounts to touts and agents. They also spend significant time and effort in travelling to find jobs themselves or even to get information.

For employers too, with no structured database for blue-collar and entry-level candidates, reaching the huge pool of jobseekers is a problem.

Vivek realised the evident gap here. What was needed was a job market that was easily accessible to millions of Indian workers. It also occurred to him that using technology, there was something he could do to alleviate some of the problems that jobseekers faced, or perhaps help the entire market.

He conducted surveys with his target audience to understand the pain points and how one could solve them.

Based on feedback from jobseekers and employers, Vivek launched Saral Rozgar, a VAS platform with an IVR at one end, in 2011.

Job seekers can dial a short code and subscribe immediately, and the subscription amount will be deducted from their prepaid balance. Candidates can also apply for jobs through voice-based profile creation. Upon calling the Saral Rozgar phone number, live representatives create a profile and resume along with contact details for jobseekers.

They also help candidates in searching for location-based job opportunities on the phone. Vivek says,

Employment in India is dominated by small employers and the highly fragmented unorganised sector. Non-farm, blue-collar work accounts for vast majority of employment. This provides a significant market opportunity for an omni-channel provider to help with convenient job discovery and an opportunity to extract values from both employers and jobseekers.

Saral Rozgar is an internally incubated business of Tech Mahindra.

In 2013, after TRAI’s new regulation, which led to a significant dip in the number of subscriptions, the platform evolved its business model. It introduced Saral Rozgar job card and a physical distribution model. Through this, job seekers can register via the value added service, buy a job card, or online. This turned out to be a boon for the platform and led to a rise in reach and availability.

Million want jobs

Jobseekers can avail the service by paying a minimal fee for assisted registration. Under this, job seekers receive relevant job alerts for a stipulated period. They can also register for free service. Currently, there are over 2.5 million paid job seekers are registered on the platform.

Besides, employers can purchase subscription packages (cost per connect) and can additionally buy verification services. Employers can also pay for campaigns for bulk hiring.

In 2015, the company organised more than 25 job fairs in 20 cities, which saw participation from over 25,000 jobseekers and 165 companies. More than 7,500 candidates got job opportunities.

It claims to have a jobseeker base of over six million, across 150 job categories. With over 10,000 employers on board, there are 1,50,000 live job opportunities in the repository. More than 1,00,000 jobseekers have found the right jobs using this service.

Its contact centre is equipped to service jobseekers in Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bangla, Oriya and Marathi, to address the larger market.

Market opportunity

According to the Confederation of Indian Industry, only 14 percent out of the 500 million Indian workforce accounts for the formal sector and the remaining 86 percent is part of the unorganised sector.

The total current workforce that is employed in the blue-collar and entry-level job market is 117 million. There are 51 million job providers for this segment.

To cater to the high demand market, Babajob, Aasaanjobs, Nanojobs, BookMyBai and many others are offering service in this segment.

Last year, Babajob secured $10 million funding from SEEK. Early this year, Aasaanjobs raised $5 million from Aspada, IDG, Inventus.

Next plan of action

In terms of technology, the platform claims to focus on automation, analytics and predictive analysis.

Apart from plain vanilla packages, it will provide value added packages – cost per shortlisted resume or per shortlisted candidate or interview line-up. As a logical extension, it has now introduced a hire-train-place model to keep in line with industry needs.

Going forward, SaaS solutions such as HRMS and CRM will also be introduced.

“We are upgrading services for job seekers also – we will be offering them location preference and also career counseling tips to get the right jobs basis their skills. The app will play an important role going forward as penetration of smart phones and mobile internet is increasing,” says Vivek.

Hiving off

Saral Rozgar, which began with a team of 25-30 people, is now a team of 300. It is planning to hive off into a separate business.

“Since Saral Rozgar was internally incubated, a small investment was directed towards product and technology setup. We quickly realised that the potential was much larger than we had initially anticipated. Entrepreneurship culture had to be encouraged and the idea had to be institutionalised. Over the period, we have built products, added layers and service extensions and invested in creating mass awareness of Saral Rozgar,” concludes Vivek.

Website

Twenty-seven-year old Sagar Paliwal was in a fix. His SUV had several mechanical and electronic issues, due to all the usage during floods. But when he took to to the brand’s dealer, he was asked to expect a bill for a whopping Rs 4,00,000 plus taxes.

So, like most, Sagar decided to take his car to the local vendor, but there was a problem of trust and guarantee. Being an automotive engineer from Lancaster University, he decided to fix his car himself.  In a span of two months, he was able to fix the car with all performance upgrades and in under Rs 90,000.

It was then that Sagar realised that there was no single guaranteed place where customers could source all spares and accessories. It led to the creation of AutoKartz in Delhi last year to cater to spare parts and accessory needs – whether it was accessories or restoration of a classic.

Bringing in the add-ons

“We provide owners genuine parts and accessories at wholesale rates. We also regularly educate our customers on which products would help them and help the performance of their vehicles,” says this second-time entrepreneur.

AutoKartz ships products across India and has tie-ups with service providers in over 150 cities. The team has also claimed to have tied up with Mahindra First Choice Service Centres.

The platform also works as an aggregator for car modification experts, a lead-generating platform for auto insurance and a listing platform for used auto sales. Apart from Sagar, the main core team consists of Delhi University graduates Arun Mittal, Ayush Mishra, Mukul Sood, and Farhad Khan from Greater Noida Institute of Technology.

Sagar hired the team after looking for people who had a passion for automobiles, and were willing to help build a platform for automobiles.

Breaking into an unorganised market

However, building an e-commerce platform for vehicles has its own set of challenges. Sagar adds that getting genuine parts and ensuring their quality is a big challenge in a fragmented and unorganised market. Convincing players and manufacturers is a task, as they are wary of new entrants. But once you break into the market it’s easier.

Sagar adds that they have a target market of $57 billion that is going to reach $80 billion by 2020.

AutoKartz isn’t the only player looking at this market. Over the past year several players have attempted to take a crack at this unorganised market. In the second-hand vehicles market itself, there is the heavily-funded Droom, a used automobile marketplace. There also is Cartrade, which closed a $145-million round in February last year and even acquired Carwale. There also is Cartisan, which guides users to the right auto care centre.

Carstudio provides users with needed accessories and spare parts and even helps them remodel their cars.

Expanding across geographies

AutoKartz, however, claims to be the only one to have integrated everything that a car or vehicle owner needs on one platform. “We are the only ones who have service tie-ups all across India. We are also in the process of launching insurance services on our platform,” says Sagar.

He adds that in the past seven months they have managed to grow at an average of 50 percent month-on-month. Right now, the company is clocking sales of over Rs 1,00,000 a day, with a turnover of over Rs 3 crore. Currently bootstrapped, the team is in the process of raising funds.

“We are shipping all over India and internationally. We have service partners in over 150 cities, which is expanding very rapidly. We aim to have local service presence in 500 towns and cities by the end of 2017,” says Sagar. The team is also looking to enter South East Asia, Africa, Europe and Middle East.

Website

Keeping a tight grip on their USP Direct to Home TV Channel, Jaipur-based gems and jewellery firm Gemporia India claims to witness daily sales of Rs 20 lakh, with 96 percent of the business coming from television.  Conceptualised in August 2014, the company sent out about 600 shipments a day in the first year of operations.

Manuj Goyal, Co-founder, Gemporia India, made it happen riding high on his 25-year-long experience in the jewellery and gemstone industry, while mentoring startups as President of TiE Rajasthan and also  as Co-founder of Rajasthan Angels Investor Network.

Single-brand retailer Gemporia showcases jewellery live on TataSky, Videocon D2H and Dish TV. What differentiates the company from other online jewellery firms is its omni-channel approach with presence on television, Internet and mobile apps. The company started the test phase on September 2015 on two DTH network with four hours of live telecast on Dish TV and Videocon D2H.

Looking at the growth, positive costumer feedback and organic viewership, Gemporia TV has extended the duration from four hours to 18, in six months.  All the jewellery come with certificates of authenticity, BIS hallmark for gold products and a 30-day moneyback guarantee.

Tracing history…

Gemporia was originally established by Steve Bennett in 2004 when he set up Gems TV in UK and is claimed to have sold over nine million pieces worldwide, achieving almost eight-percent market share of all hallmarked jewellery sold in the UK.  Gemporia UK currently sells about 14,000 pieces of jewellery every day and has a team of around 500.

A graduate gemologist from Gemological Institute of America and MD of Pinkcity Group of Companies, Manuj met Steve at a jewellery exhibition in Bangkok and became the manufacturer for Gemporia across UK and USA.  Before Gemporia, Manuj’s Pinkcity Gem Technologies also produced jewellery for major brands in US and Europe.

Having worked together for eight long years, Manuj and Steve entered into a joint venture to bring Gemporia to India. Gemporia India was registered as Jewel Alliance Network Pvt. Ltd.

It took over a year to sort out the legal procedures, paperwork, permissions to broadcast, getting a team and training them, setting up infrastructure and finally going on air. Gemporia went live on air almost a year ago, in September 2015,” says Manuj. Steve and Manuj bootstrapped Jewel Alliance Network with a seed capital of Rs 20 crore.

A sneak peek at the growth metrics

According to Manuj, Gemporia India earns 30-50 percent margin, depending on the category of products. With 180 employees on the sales side and 900 people in two manufacturing factories in Jaipur, Gemporia India hopes to scale up to 14,000-15,000 a day, soon.

Getting the right set of talent in a Tier-II city like Jaipur is bound to pose hurdles. Manuj says,  “The challenges began at bringing in the right people to a Tier II city, went on to building up solid logistics delivering jewellery safely, to explaining our concept to the consumer and building trust.”

However things have changed in due course and today the merchandisers, designers and craftsman of Gemporia create over 100 new products every day. The product category is divided into gold and silver, with a wide range including rings, earrings, pendants, necklaces, bracelets, bangles, ring bracelets, nose pins and charms.

Gemporia India has tied up with three e-commerce logistics players-BlueDart, EComm Express and Delhivery, covering more than 10,000 pin codes across India. Once the order is placed, it takes 3-4 days for the products to reach consumers.

With 55,000 registered customers, Gemporia India expects to achieve a Rs 150-crore revenue in the next one year and add 300 new customers every day.

Compared to our first full month of transactions in October 2015, we have already grown to about 104 percent in the number of transactions and we have made about 207 percent in terms of value,” Manuj says. Gemporia is in talks with investors to raise Rs 100 crore in private equity funding.

Market overview

According to India Brand Equity Foundation, the gems and jewellery market in India is home to more than five lakh players, a majority being small players. India is one of the largest exporters of gems and jewellery, contributing to around 6-7 percent of the country’s GDP.

As reported by PTI recently, online jewellery market in India is likely to reach $3.6 billion in the next three years, which is 20 percent of the global market size, amounting to $18 billion. The growth can be attributed to customers no longer hesitating to buy jewellery online, as each piece comes with a guarantee certificate.

Online jewellery seller BlueStone has raised around Rs 200 crore in Series-D funding, which was led by IIFL and Accel, with participation from IvyCap Ventures, Kalaari Capital, and RB Investments. While in May this year Titan group acquired majority stake in Tiger Global-backed online jewellery startup CaratLane, which is also considered as the first successful exit for Tiger and first major investment in an e-commerce firm.

Marketplaces like Flipkart and Snapdeal too retail precious jewellery. More traditional players like Tanishq and regional offline majors like GRT Jewellers have also gone online, adding to the competition.

Gemporia

Proximi.io is a unified API (Application Programming Interface) of positioning technologies, a tool for developers, a tech company. So, it comes as a surprise learning that the CEO of this Helsinki-based company is a woman with a degree in Archaeology.

Annina Koskiola was doing research for her Master thesis on how museums make use of mobile applications and noticed that there were quite a few issues with performance. “Many museums were using apps to guide the visitor around, but they didn’t know where you were. So it either showed you everything at once, or you had to click for information to pop up,” she says.

When museums inspire technology 

“That’s when I started thinking it’d actually be very clever if the app knew where you were and gave you information about a specific statue because you were standing in front of it.” Easier said than done. GPS does not work indoors, but Annina explains that at the time of her research, technology to solve the issue was just getting interesting.

“In fall 2013, new solutions were coming out like IndoorAtlas, which is based on geomagnetic fields. Also, Apple had just released the iBeacon standard, a protocol for transmitting data via Bluetooth Low Energy. This information can be picked up by nearby mobile devices, and used to determine their positions. There had been some use of Bluetooth in positioning already before that, but the release of an official standard opened up a whole new market.”

The team

So she decided to take the chance, persuaded that she should try to do something with all the knowledge she had acquired on the topic. The first step was to find a good developer, and it was easier than she expected. “I went to the first developer I knew, my sister’s husband, who’s always been my go-to man whenever I have technical questions. I shared my idea and asked him if he knew any good developer who’d be willing to start a company with me,” she recalls and, laughing, continues, “To quote him literally, his answer was ‘You’ll never find anybody who’s good enough, but I will join you!’”

Now Annina’s brother-in-law Mika Koskiola is the CTO of Proximi.io. The rest of the team joined organically through networking and connections. Proximi.io gathered talent from Finland, Germany, Slovakia and India, and formed a good group of eight.

The right product

The second step was to develop a product that would address one of the core problems of indoor positioning, “It’s very difficult for developers who want to use this technology to figure out what’s available, how to use and combine indoor and outdoor options, and then make something meaningful out of them,” Annina explains.

It took them two years and some part time jobs to bootstrap, but eventually Proximi.io took shape and launched in March 2016. “With our libraries, you can get access to all the technologies and can combine them, so you get the best position fix, and you can move from indoors to outdoors without a problem. We have a portal where you can log in, create your places, and define geo fences around interesting areas,” says Annina.

And taking off

Indoor positioning has recently attracted the attention of many, including giants like Google and Apple. Proximi.io explains that instead of competing with them with a new product, they have built a single point of access to all the existing options. Annina argues that, “This way, developers don’t need to tie themselves with one particular technology, but can combine them. We also offer them completely open interfaces and easy tools for integrating our platform with other services.”

Two months after the launch, Proximi.io already has 500 registered users and 80 percent of them are from outside Finland, mostly from the US, India, Russia and Pakistan. “We did assume our product would raise some interest because indoor positioning is so hot at the moment. But we’re really overwhelmed by the feedback we’re getting from the developers,” shares Annina,

I actually expected the US to be the biggest market because there are a lot of retailers using indoor positioning there. But it seems that even though these companies are headquartered in the US, they have outsourced their development operations to India.

Ups, Downs and the road ahead

Annina shares that there are several competitors in the market, “To mention a few, there is Pole Star, a French company that has been around for a long time. They produce their own beacon hardware, and set up positioning for large venues. Indoo.rs is a similar company based in Austria; while in Finland, our biggest competitor is Walkbase, which focuses on indoor analytics,” she says, “What sets our product apart is the simplicity of use, while our team is the first technology-agnostic developer platform on the market.”

For the moment, it is free to start using the platform, but charges are applied after a certain amount of use. It’ll take some time for Proximi.io to become profitable but, so far, they have secured some investments from Dane and Finnish angel investors, as well as 74,000 euros from the Finnish government, and 300,000 euros from the accelerator they are part of.

This seems like quite a long way for an archaeologist and Annina has obviously stumbled into some down moments, “Mostly, your struggles are with yourself and your mental locks,” she shares, “Having very little background in business and absolutely none in tech, being the CEO of an IT startup has been challenging. Everything’s been new to me. Sometimes, I found myself thinking, ‘I’ve NO idea how to do this and I am not sure how I’ll do it.’” Yet, she continues,

It’s just about forgetting that and getting over it, because you have to do what you were previously not able to do to get to the next level. It is really important to believe in yourself, because a lot of it is just about having the passion, especially when you’re talking with investors.

Now Proximi.io is focussing on establishing a global presence and will try to monetise the platform soon through subscriptions. Quite an achievement for an archaeologist who started up in indoor positioning!

Website

Anshul Maheshwari, a former marketing executive, decides to create a platform for housewives or grandmothers wanting to sell homemade delicacies and organic products. But he didn’t want to invest a lot on building an application. So he buys an application ‑Naaniz ‑ from TM store and gets his marketplace running within minutes. Since May 2016, Naaniz mobile application has onboarded 900 products, 100 sellers and 1,000 downloads on PlayStore and 500 on iOS. Naaniz is creating a C2C platform using TM Store, which is enabling technology component in their business.

Similarly, there’s Robu.in – a niche platform that provides technology and tools in the field of robotics and Internet of Things (IoT) for researchers and innovators in institutes such as  the Indian Institutes of Technology, Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Jayesh Jain wished to create a marketplace of such products. He too bought a service from TM Store and got it running. “TM Store is different in its approach because they are giving a solution as a product. Their product has scope of customisation strictly based on the need of the business at software level,” informs 27-year-old Jayesh, Founder of Pune-based MacFos Enterprise and Robu.in.

There are several other niche merchants and mobile marketplaces such as MeraHoardings (hoarding services, India); BodyBigSize (plus size fashion, Indonesia); Celler& Loom (second-hand cloth platform, United Kingdom) who have been benefitted by the TM Store Product.

What’s TM Store?

TM Store was founded in 2015 by Virat Khutal of Twist Mobile and his team in Indore but was released in January 2016. TM Store converts CMS to native mobile app/ VR view in just 15 minutes and helps early-stage startups or offline businesses have their own application instantly. There are two major gaps whenever businesses think of switching to mobile experience. Firstly, responsive web experience of CMS (WooCommerce, Magento, etc.) is very slow and jerky for smaller handsets. As a result, many enterprises despite emptying their pockets into development of a responsive website, don’t get desired results and lose customers. Secondly, if they go for mobile application development, they have to deal with a bad UX and UI in less cost or spend a lot of money and time to get a robust mobile app designed. These problems further multiply given that virtual reality is picking up pace as a marketing tool and many businesses are already finding themselves behind the race due to their existing mobile or web applications.

“In simple words, TM Store is like WordPress, you choose from several themes and create your store within seconds. Looking at the growing number of startups and more and more businesses switching to web and mobile applications, it’s a futuristic product,” shares 36-year-old Virat. The merchants buy the basic product and then may or may not choose to buy their plug-ins and support services.

Team TM Store identified 70 unique functions in CMS and standardised those functions. “Our core philosophy is that experience today is more important than the product. We believe commerce will be driven by mobile and virtual reality experiences. Data in commerce will be collected by IoT devices integrated to CMS. To achieve this, we will have old CMS with technologies written on top of it. They will change experience for consumers. We would be building technologies to enable large ecosystem of categories like fashion or grocery to get high quality mobile and VR experience,” adds Virat.

TM Store has plans of a phase-wise implementation. Phase 1 would have mobile and major CMS with category identification, while Phase 2 would be responsive VR for experiences. They have started with WooCommerce CMS and have worked with 1,000 merchants so far validating the technology. The startup has released more than 260 merchant apps, sold more than 100 copies on Android and iOS within 75 days and integrated more than 50 plugins inside its application.

There are several similar players in this space such as AppMaker.xyz, WordApp Mobile App Plug-in, AppTuse. “It’s a huge space with 1.5 million merchants in WooCommerce alone. Our approach is not about selling IT or Native App, but we will be moving towards managed services for e-commerce businesses. We are building UI Runtime creators, A/B testing features, user navigation, analytics and marketing for merchant success in ecosystem. It will enable us to penetrate in richer and deeper markets of Shopify and Magento,” informs Virat.

There are 3.2 million small merchants worldwide with e-commerce shops and web stores. “Considering that 10 percent of them are successful business, we would have 3,00,000 merchants having unique products and sustainable business,” he adds.

India alone has 50 million shop owners and merchants with non-digital presence. A rise of digital agencies, technology providers and companies deriving technology around commerce in on the anvil.

How does TM store make money? 

“We have a pay-as-you-go model among merchants and developers. We charge merchants on the basis of platform, say Android and iOS App with $100. If they want to integrate payment SDK, multi venderSDk (Dukon), shipping SDK or Multi-lingual, they pay based on the plug-in component. This process is generating reusable inventory of plug-ins with us. We believe top 200 plug-ins can cover very large market for us,” says Virat.

Secondly, they pay for analytics, push notification, targeted push notification based on their needs. “We would be releasing A/B testing and actionable analytics with monthly subscription in coming months,” he adds.

Future plans

“I am convinced that the app ecosystem will be converted to web-ecosystem in the next two years. Instant Apps and App on Cloud will change the behaviour of Apps to Web. Our solution will solve this problem and give good experience to 3.2 million e-commerce portals with our technology,” informs Virat. TM supports all features in case of payments such as RazerPay, PayUMoney, PayUBiz, Paypal, CC Avenue, etc.; or order status and notifications like Push Notify; WooCommerce, WordPress Custom Menus; Google Places API and the likes. They have integrated Hotline Chat for instant 24/7 support. It is a product of Freshdesk,” informs Virat.

TM Store claims to have 100 percent growth with sales of $5,000 per month since May. They have not started full marketing and developer reach programme yet.

In future, they want to unify product sourcing technology while integrating merchants with each other to enable them for international product reach and knowledge. “Imagine Indonesian merchants having product access to Indian merchants. It will become product discovery for all the merchants to increase their product reach,” adds Virat.

Watch the making of Naaniz and making of TM Store.

Website 

It is not every day that you meet entrepreneurs who have a very minimal social media presence. These are individuals who know that business is ultimately about presenting solutions that increase revenues and benefit consumers. This being the core of their narrative they go after the long tail of the Indian market, which is yet to get onto any form of social media. Three entrepreneurs Raj Pyla, Santhosh Rapeti and Sridevi Singaram, all three in their early 40s, built a Rs 125 crore optical business in less than eight years. Ben Franklin is now a 230 store chain, which retails optical needs in over 107 Indian towns and cities. The three entrepreneurs have raised Rs 40 crore from Venture East last year and are now eyeing to expand their store count to 500 stores in the next two years. They also hope to double their revenues by then. However, all good things have a beginning and have their share of ups and downs.

The UK connection

Back in 2004, Raj was a technology consultant based out of Reading, UK. He had, in his younger days, worked as an entrepreneur building medical equipment and had soon realised that being an entrepreneur requires not just capital and knowledge, but also the acumen of the market that one is serving for. “I had given up the hope of becoming an entrepreneur and had worked in various corporations till I met Srinivas, who was an ophthalmologist, in the UK,” says Raj, Chairman of Ben Franklin. He adds that it was after a game of tennis did Srinivas and he began to think of opening ophthalmology stores in India. “The idea sounded compelling because there were no organised or branded chain of stores selling frames, glasses and lens,” says Raj. Srinivas’s wife ‑ Sridevi, who was a practicing doctor in the UK ‑ too jumped into this idea. Santhosh, who was also a technology consultant and a family friend, joined them within days because the business proposition sounding compelling. They named their company Ben Franklin because it was the inventor Benjamin Franklin who invented bi-focal lens.

Think about it, young people in India will eventually require glasses for correction and lifestyle. The type of frames and lenses also differ based on the requirement. For example, a sportsman will need a shatter proof lens, and those with high eye power will need thicker lenses.

With this in mind, in 2006, Raj frequently travelled to India to study the market. He realised that the numbers were staggering because two-thirds of people in India aged above 40 years needed some type of eye correction. Sridevi stopped practicing medicine to get into the business full time and so did Raj and Santosh, who stopped their consulting business and dived into running Ben Franklin. To their credit, the market was there. There was little competition; there were the likes of GKB Opticals, Himalaya Opticals and the Sunglass Hut. But this was a multi-billion dollar market with very few national chains. This was the gap that Ben Franklin hoped to fill.

Market Scope’s report titled “India Opthalmic Market Report” An analysis for 2015 to 2021” forecasts that over 140 million people in India ‑  who are above the age of 60 ‑ will require eye care due to an upsurge in dietary change-related eye diseases and growing incidence of myopia.

Market Scope estimates that there are more than 180 companies competing in India’s ophthalmic market. Twelve companies (Alcon, Carl Zeiss Meditec, Bausch + Lomb, Genentech/Roche, Allergan, Abbott Medical Optics, Bayer Healthcare AG, Santen, Topcon, Nidek, Cipla Limited, and Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.) make up more than two-thirds of manufacturer revenues. The market is estimated to be more than $1 billion today and is expected to double by 2021.

After two years of research, Ben Franklin opened its first store in Hyderabad in 2008 and quickly opened 10 stores in high street locations, with the average store size of 800sqft. The company stocked the best brands – like Zeiss, Baush+Lomb and Roche – and combined with their superior service they expected the business to soar. “It hit us very hard,” says Raj. High rentals, low margins and inventory pile up made the business bleed. The rental itself was 25 percent of the sales and when combined with other costs, the company began losing cash.  By then, the company had invested Rs 4 crore and was in a precarious situation. That’s when Raj and Sridevi decided to study their own business again and turn it around.

The second coming

Around 2009-2010, the three founders met a doctor who had a large eye care clinic. Upon visiting the doctor, they enquired about the number of lens they bought directly from him. The doctor said he would sell four to five lenses a day and that it became part of his additional revenues. That’s when the trio asked him if he could take 100sqft space in his clinic and retail optical products to increase revenues for the clinic. The doctor agreed and quickly the Ben Franklin team set up a small store. To the team’s credit, the doctor began converting a lot of his patients into customers for the retail store. This model worked like a charm and helped them scale up their revenues to Rs 70 crore in three years. The model worked because it had low rentals, it reduced the manpower cost – as the store was manned by only one or two persons and then it increased revenues because of the captive patients from clinics. There are 10,000 small sized eye hospitals and large clinics – in India – and each of them is yet to have their own captive eye care retail store. The number of stores increased from 50 in 2011 to 230 by 2016. The company had reinvested all the cash into the business and had further invested Rs 6 crore by 2012.

“We began to break the mindset of the doctors and made them believe in our business model,” says Sridevi, Co-founder and director of operations at Ben Franklin. She says that the small store format also coincided with their private label strategy.

Kishore Biyani, Chairman and Managing Director of Future Group says,

Every retail business should be focussed on private labels to increase margins and for that they need to improve their supply chain and manufacturing capabilities.

Increasing revenues and private labels

Around 2011, the three entrepreneurs landed up in Hong Kong to figure out suppliers of frames, lenses and sunglasses. They had no idea who to contact and how to go about it. It took them six months to figure out that they had to meet manufacturers in China to get factories to build their private label frames and lenses. They went the private label route because they did not want to be dependent on distributors that supplied products. Like any retail business, their business is based on volumes and net margins can be as low as three percent. Today, the company has 70 percent of their inventory as private labels. However, lenses and eye care from big brands still account for a majority of their revenues. “We organised our business with our own internal ERP and automated some of the processes by connecting our brand offices on web-based data capture,” says Sridevi. The company had raised some more money (in the form of debt) from friends and family at the time. But their business had crossed Rs 100 crore and suddenly it captured the attention of venture capital funds. Around four or five funds chased the company. “We thought we were not good enough for raising money, and that’s when we realised that young people were raising large sums of money with just paper ideas. So we decided to raise money,” says Raj.

VentureEast managed to invest Rs 40 crore in the business along with some secondary investment from the founding team’s family and friends.

“We invested in the company because the entrepreneurs have an eye for efficiency in operations and management of capital,” says Jagannath Samavedam, General Partner at Venture East. The money will be used to double store expansion and improve the digital play of the company. It will also increase its store presence in Northern India. For the due at Ben Franklin, Rs 500 crore is just around the corner.

Website

While 2016 has seen a rise in fintech activity, there is another segment that seems to be catching the fancy of young entrepreneurs.

With players like ClearTax, TaxZippy, and Makeyourtax already claiming the space, tax filing and management is surfacing as one of the key playgrounds for young entrepreneurs.

So why are startups still flocking to this space? Abhishek Soni’s [24] story might provide some answers.

Working as an auditor with Ernst & Young in Gurgaon, Abhishek used to travel to work in an Uber provided by the company. More often than not, he used to find a few familiar faces ferrying him to work and back. During the journeys,  drivers would often clear their doubts on the various complicated processes of tax filing or even better, just ask Abhishek to file their taxes.

This left him with two strong points to ponder upon. First, due to the plethora of job opportunities, there was a newer segment of individuals falling under the tax filing bracket. Second, in spite of several players, there were still not enough resources to help this newer breed of tax payers with their IT returns.

This is the story of how he decided to start up. How he justified his decision to his family is another story altogether. For obvious reasons, they didn’t understand why Abhishek would leave a well settled job to foray into untested waters.

During this time, Abhishek reconnected with Vertika Kedia [24], whom he knew from his CA internship days, and explained his decision to her.  Seeing the idea’s potential, she plunged in and together they founded online professional tax filing service Tax2win in July 2015.

Filing returns, one at a time  

Another major validation to Abhishek’s idea came when the firm launched the Beta version of the product. Within the first 10 days of launch, the firm got close to 1,000 users on their platform, filing 300 returns while forging three corporate partnerships around the same time.

Abhishek says,

Tax filing is a very subjective process, with each case being different from the other. In such a case, technology cannot fully standardise the process.

This was one of the basic fundamentals behind providing a differentiated experience to their consumers.

At the start of the process, users are asked certain basic questions, like whether they have a fixed salary or any assets or savings. Based on these responses, users’ journeys are customised, asking them to fill up only the relevant fields of information. Abhishek remarks,

The amount of information thrown at an individual can be overwhelming. This is one of the major reasons why tax filing in India is considered to be such a complicated process.

The platform also provides a CA Assistance feature for individuals still unsure about filing their taxes. On booking the service, the platform asks individuals to upload their documents, which are reviewed by a CA who then shows them the best way forward. All doubts are answered by the accountant within 24 hours of raising the request. Priced at Rs 299 annually, the service also allows users to be connected to their personal accountants all year round.

However, the team didn’t stop there. Abhishek rightly says that even after being confident of their filings, individuals still wish to get them cross-checked by CAs or professionals thorough with the process.

Keeping this tendency in mind, the platform has a ‘CA Reviewed’ feature where the filing is cross-checked and reviewed by a CA before submission. The firm charges a nominal fee of Rs 99 for this service. Though it has not yet been marketed, the firm is expected to fully roll out the service by September this year.

During the current tax filing season, 30,000 users used the Tax2win platform, of which 4,000–5,000 opted for the CA Assistance service.

On the B2B front, the firm ties up with corporate houses and sets up helpdesks in their office premises to help employees file their taxes. As of now 30–50 percent of the firm’s revenue comes from the B2B side of the business.

Tax2win’s clientele includes names like the Indian Railways, Marriott Group of Hotels, Fortis Healthcare, Idea Cellular, and IndiGo, amongst others.

The firm also claims to have raised an investment of one million from a business house in Jaipur.

Moving forward, the platform plans to introduce TDS filing and tax-saving services along with newer product lines for these B2B clients. Having a team of 45 people (of which more than 20 are CAs), the firm also plans to expand rapidly in the next four months, setting foot in Mumbai and Bengaluru.  In fact, Abhishek claims that the firm is also looking to shift its headquarters and core team from Jaipur to Bengaluru.

However, for the founders, the vision remains to make Tax2win the ultimate destination for any tax- related tasks.  In line with this vision, the firm is also introducing technologies which will allow CAs to remotely track an individual’s financials through consent from their personal smartphones.

This will remove the friction of uploading documents, with the CA being completely aware about an individual’s financial status and health.

The market

Speaking about competition, Abhishek states,

“There is only three to four percent of the total Indian population which really file their taxes today. Out of this percentage a mere, 0.2 percent file their taxes online, leaving the market still nascent and untapped.”

On the other end is competitor ClearTax, founded in March 2011, which as of the last tax season claimed to be helping 10 lakh individuals file their taxes. The firm also claims to have an army of 10,000 CAs and experts registered on its platform, while raising a funding of more than $15 million this year.

Further, fintech players like Zerodha and Taxmantra are also getting into the game with Z-Connect and Makeyourtax respectively. However, the audience targeted might be different (Z-Connect is focused on traders).

But like other fintech segments, the focus for the tax filing sector remains to be on growing the pie and getting more individuals to file their taxes online. With a new player sprouting up every tax filing season, the competition is also on the technology backend and simplicity of the experience provided to the user.

With multiple players existing, it might be possible to see future consolidation in the space.

Website: www.tax2win.in

Back in 2012, Indore had won the ‘Best Foodie City Award’ by NDTV Good Times Food Awards. Food startups have a competitive market with a plethora of options from local vendors, street food shops and established brands. When Oye24 charmed the demanding people of Indore with its 24/7 AFAP (as fast as possible) delivery, it became a feat.

Oye24 is an Indore-based food producer, aggregator and delivery startup. It offers 24/7 free delivery services with no minimum order size, consistent food quality and pocket-friendly prices. It serves multiple cuisines from various vendors along with food cooked at its own in-house kitchen.

The startup has earned a reputation, especially among a large student population, with its late-night food delivery services. Started in November 2015, Oye24 today delivers around 350-450 orders per day during the week and during weekends it goes up to 450-550 orders per day. “We have delivered over 30,000 orders and served more than 10,000 customers so far. Since January our order volume has increased by six times,” informs 47-year-old Manish Chhajed, Co-founder of Oye24.

The idea of Oye24 was born during a family get-together. It all started when the co-founders were trying to order food for their kids and to their surprise found that none of the food delivery applications had free delivery and has minimum order size. The co-founders then finalised on the idea of Oye24 that day.

Online Indian food business and competition

According to India Brand Equity Foundation report, Indian food service industry is expected to reach $78 billion by 2018. The Indian gourmet food market is currently valued at $1.3 billion and is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20 percent. India’s organic food market is expected to increase by three times by 2020. The online food ordering business in India is still in its nascent stage, but has an exponential growth ahead. The report also stated that the organised food business in India is worth $48 billion, of which food delivery is valued at $15 billion.

Source

There has been an exponential growth in the number of  food aggregators  (Swiggy, Food Panda, Faasos, Dazo). However, rapid growth has also resulted in faster failures. For example, Tiny Owl closed down and  Zomato shut down its operations in many cities. The future of the food tech startups has been a hot topic of debate in the ecosystem. Yet, there are examples of food recommendation apps such as Bingage (Indore) or FoodbyMood (Nagpur) that scaled up fast. How does Oye24 plan to compete in case more food recommendation startups surface?

“We are aware of the competition Faasos and Food Panda post in similar space. But more than companies coming into the space, the challenge is to compete with home-made food. We have decided that we will not offer discounts, either now or in future even if competitors do. We would instead maintain this seamless process of quality food supply that would surely keep people coming to us,” adds Mishal, 24, Co-founder of Oye24.

Oye24 has a fleet of 60 people including cooks, delivery boys, administration and operations team.

A family that started up

What’s interesting is this disruptive startup was born within a family. Mishal earlier worked in Tata motors for about two years, while the rest of the three co-founders and family members Rahul Badhera (48), Ritesh Chhajed (42) and Manish had their own business.

Ritesh says, “We ran a pilot assignment in November 2015 when we began with 10-15 orders per day. By December, we were touching up to 60 orders per day. We became confident of the acceptance.” The co-founders invested Rs 12 lakh from their personal savings to set up a complete and advanced infrastructure of the kitchen and re-launched Oye24 in January 2016.

Currently bootstrapped, Oye24 has been a profitable proposition right from the start. The vendors pay a certain commission for listing their dishes on the web application. “Our daily sales vary from Rs 40,000‑60,000 on weekdays and Rs 55,000‑85,000 on weekends,” he adds.

Oye24 lists food items in more than 11 broad categories including midnight snacks, combos and add-ons. Oye24 delivers food value of as low as Rs 24 (creamroll) or Rs 75 (Puribhaji) without charging for delivery.

Oye24 aims at opening six to seven more kitchens within the city soon. “We are desperate to start on-demand food meaning whatever customers wish to eat, they can customise instead of choosing from existing lists. We have plans in place for scaling up to multiple locations, catering to parties and conferences along with starting up with subscription facility for various customers, companies, organisations,” informs Rahul. Oye24 is targeting a revenue of Rs 70 lakh to Rs 1 crore per month by November 2016.

Website

Advances in cloud computing have brought in a technological revolution in recent years. Now, small and medium scale businesses don’t need to physically invest in infrastructure like servers and then worry about changes they need to make while scaling up, or even cutting back and scaling down during lean business cycles.

Cloud computing has also brought in a new era of business, with ventures that are being termed ‘born-in-cloud’ companies. Bengaluru-based Powerupcloud is one such company, and it has an interesting story.

Story so far

PowerupCloud initially started as a Cloud and Big Data consulting startup in June 2015. The founding team consists of Ankit Garg (COO), Ranjeeth Kuppala (CTO), Siva Surendira (CEO), Ram Kumar (Director-Engineering) and Arun Britto Lawrence (Director-Analytics). Like every startup in a competitive space, Powerupcloud faced multiple challenges from different fronts in their early days. The biggest struggle though was when the team was bad mouthed unfairly by one of their ex-employers, which prevented Powerupcloud from closing three massive deals. Siva noted that they had done everything right, both legally and ethically, but their ex-employer didn’t want them to rise because of the extremely competitive nature of the big data and cloud business.

Siva though is happy that, inspite of all the odds, they are stronger now and growing day by day. Powerupcloud considers itself to be a ‘Born-in-Cloud’(BIC) company and helps several large enterprises and leading internet companies with cloud and big data consulting services and supports their clients in delivering complex solutions in an agile manner.

Headquarted in Bengaluru, Powerupcloud has a 24/7 Global Support Center in Coimbatore that supports the cloud monitoring and management for their international and local customers. Powerupcloud also has sales offices in Pune and Chennai, and recently set up an office in Singapore.

On the services front, Poweupcloud offers three main services- consulting, big data and managed services. Powerupcloud claims to be one of India’s fastest cloud companies to become an advanced consulting partner with AWS and is also a HiPo (High Potential) partner with Microsoft Azure. They have partnered with several teams within Microsoft to take new technologies to customers.

Powerupcloud has been bootstrapping since inception and the team is currently 62 members strong across its multiple offices. Powerupcloud claims to be doing a million dollars in revenue already and aims to double this by FY16-17. Siva noted that they have started competing with mid-size system integrators and technology services companies and going forward aims to take large Global System Integrators (GSIs) head-on in enterprise deals.

Like every other high-growth startup that does well, Powerupcloud faced four situations where they had acquisition offers on the table. But the founding team took a decision not to sell as they were passionate about taking the startup further, in-line with their long term goals. Siva declined to disclose the names of the four interested companies for privacy and ethical reasons.

In April 2016, Powerupcloud decided to expand their horizons from the services side and launched IRA, their first product. Siva said, We have built IRA, a real-time AI-based customer support engine which has had great reception from the likes of Microsoft and AWS.”

We have built IRA, a real-time AI-based customer support engine which has had great reception from the likes of Microsoft and AWS.

What is IRA?

IRA is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine which interprets support mails written by customers, figures out the problem category, interacts with the company’s CRM and ERP databases and responds to the customer with the right solution.

Based on their research and experience, Powerupcloud is confident that IRA will be able to respond to customer queries in under a minute without committing ‘eye balling’ errors, which humans are prone to. IRA is available to customers for a $15,000 one time licencing fee, followed by a $999/month subscription fee.

Siva said that IRA has seen great adoption with a large set of enterprises in India and Singapore because the key differentiator for IRA is being an enterprise platform. IRA gets deployed in customers’ cloud accounts, which gives them complete control over their data.

Sector overview- Cloud wars

The cloud and big data space has been growing exponentially in the past decade globally and in India, with a lot of companies now opting to move completely to cloud services because of the ease and convenience involved. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a dominant player in this space and competes with the likes of Microsoft Azure.

Siva notes that the cloud and big data space is still a largely untapped market in India with room for exponential growth. He said,

The entry barrier in the space for big consulting companies is almost zero. Heavy investment is not needed and India has good tech talent.

But a vast majority of the startups in India focus on consulting and services, while very few have the technical capabilities and resources to develop products from scratch. Starting out as a consulting services company, understanding the market and then developing products seems to be a viable option that many startups are embracing.

Related read: “There is no compression algorithm for experience” -Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

Future plans

Powerupcloud’s long term vision is to become the numero uno cloud company in India by 2017.

The startup is also planning to setup a technology hub in Chennai to cater to application development and IoT projects. While they have been bootstrapped and self-sustainable so far, Siva noted that Powerupcloud is now actively engaging in discussions with investors to raise a Series A round of funding, which will be primarily earmarked for geographical expansion to other global regions and support innovation within the startup.

While India is a big market in itself, Powerupcloud aims to focus on more mature markets like the USA, Europe and Asia to further boost growth. From their recent expansion to Singapore, Siva found that doing business is easier in more mature markets because of easier regulations and clients who understand the needs for cloud solutions better. Siva said,

Geographically, Singapore, which is one of the five financial powers of the world, is the closest mature market we have. The results there have been very encouraging.

The core team at Powerupcloud plans to disperse themselves in different geographies to better oversee the expansion plans and also hire from the local talent, who understand the market and its dynamics. Powerupcloud has opened their first overseas entity in Singapore in July 2016 and they are planning to enter the US market by setting up an office in Chicago by early 2017.

Website- Powerupcloud

It was late Sunday evening, but Sunita Verma was hunting for things to do and planning activities for her upcoming holiday. She knew that the hotel had a concierge that would possibly help her with the tours, but she liked planning in advance.

It was a problem 38-year-old Manoj Tulsani saw with most hotels in the UAE; the guests would be able to book accommodation in advance but not the tours. Realising that people who go on holidays don’t confine themselves to hotel rooms, Manoj along with his friend Kamlesh Ramchandani decided to start Rayna Tours, started as Iamonholiday in Dubai, in 2006.

Finding a gap in the market

Venturing outside the single-point turf of catering to in-house guests’ tour needs, Manoj began to target all the hotels without a travel outlet. They began with opening a travel outlet in Flora Grand Hotel in Dubai.

“Despite the sudden industry shift then, I found it far more intriguing to be involved with the travel industry than I had ever found the trading industry, which I originally came from,” says Manoj, a former trader and analyst.

This, however, was not that easy in the beginning due to many significant obstacles. One of the biggest challenges was learning the industry, knowing the interests of customers, and convincing the clients.

Opening new horizons

Without any reference or a viable business model to follow, the overall performance had been unpredictable. They gradually extended their services to the B2B market by creating an exclusive portfolio of their own products and unique travel services.

From just working on an offline model, Manoj realised that the company couldn’t evolve or innovate with just a direct marketing strategy. He realised that the world was going online.

They created a refined online platform to put up all their tour products, services and packages. Backed by a dedicated client support system and highly secured payment modes, it not only made their customers’ travel experience smoother and smarter, but also helped the team build more robust customer relationships.

“Moreover, at a point when social media platforms and mobile apps began to manipulate sales, we implemented pre-emptive solutions and smart strategies to pull through changes. The efforts finally paid off; what started as a modest setup with just two of us, evolved into a team of more than 30 with six to seven outlets over a course of two years,” says Manoj.

Growing numbers

Today, bootstrapped Rayna Travels has evolved from a mere travel boutique to an industry-recognised Destination Management Company. Rayna Group is now responsible for more than 250 employees, in five locations across two countries.

Manoj adds that they started with personal savings and an investment of AED 500,000 and have now incredibly developed top and bottom line profitability, crossing AED 150 million in revenues per year.

He adds that this growth has been possible thanks to extensive analysis of market trends and knowing the demands of clients, the improvement of operational efficiency by eliminating expenses, the implementation of an effective business strategy to capitalise on their strengths, and the diversification of the business.

The team earns revenues through both online and offline bookings, the latter of which covers conventional reservations, walk-ins, and telephone and travel desk bookings.

Breaking an aggressively competitive market

The online travel and package booking space is not only growing, but practically exploding. The overseas travel industry is growing at 40 percent CAGR year-on-year. The leisure travel market in India as of today is about $80 billion annually and is set to grow to $150 billion by 2024.

One player that just cannot escape mention in the space is Makemytrip; this year the company raised $180 million from Chinese travel service provider Ctrip and it also opened its new technology centre in Bengaluru earlier this month. Cleartrip has also built a strong focus on activities and things to do.

Bengaluru-based TripFactory, the online customised store, raised Series A funding from Mohandas Pai’s Aarin Capital. Also, last April, Delhi-based travel marketplace Travel Triangle had raised $8 million in Series B funding from Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investor SAIF Partners. Tripoto had raised a Series A round of funding from IDG Ventures India and existing investor Outbox Ventures.

Adding to the point on competition, Manoj says:

When you’ve many competitors, it’s important to think outside the box. Our strategy is to do things internally. For instance, most of our tours and activities do not have a middleman, which means we can assure our clients of fair prices with huge savings. Physical presence in major tourist spots is another of the company’s set apart aspects.

Apart from branches in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, Rayna tours operates in Singapore and Malaysia and now plans to venture into other Southeast Asian destinations like Thailand.

Despite the ever-growing challenges and aggressive competition in the industry, Manoj adds that they have never compromised on the quality of service and have always believed in delivering ‘the best tours products and services with the best pricing.’

“Alternatively, a significant percentage of our business comes from good word of mouth and referrals.   Now that we’ve established ourselves as one of the leading players in the UAE and India, our main focus is to fuel our infrastructural capabilities and resources to expand and grow globally,” says Manoj.

Website

Before the internet took over the world, man’s best friend, the ever loyal dog, was traditionally tasked with the important chore of fetching the newspaper from the sidewalk every morning. In the excitement to get their owner’s affection, many dogs have been known to go overboard and fetch other newspapers from neighbours sidewalks as well. While newspapers are still popular, a vast majority of the global population has now switched over to digital editions of newspapers and rely on websites or mobile apps to get their daily dose of news and stories.

Hacker Interstellar, a Chinese company recently forayed into India, setup a local team and launched a news aggregator app – ‘News Dog’. It aims to function as a ‘digital version of a dog’ that fetches local, national and international news based on the reader’s interests. In a relatively short span of five months, News Dog claims to have reached a milestone of seven million installs (across Android and iOS) and sees great traction for their Hindi offering. Here is their story.

The lightest news aggregator?

Headquartered in Honk Kong, China, Hacker Interstellar consists of a 25-member team spread across India and China. Currently available in two main languages, English and Hindi, NewsDog aggregates news and stories from a collection of top publishers that it has partnered with. While Amit Tewari, Operations and Business Development of NewsDog, declined to disclose the exact number of publishers they have partnered with, the apps ‘subscription section’ and Google Play description hints that their publisher partners range in the thousands.

Based on personal interests, users can choose to follow specific sectors and even publishers to keep track of updates in the ‘For You’ section of the app. Users can also swipe right or left to read stories on niche sectors too. At 2.8MB in size on Android and 14.9MB on iOS, NewsDog claims to occupy the least space compared to its peers in the news aggregation space.

Amit also noted that NewsDog runs on algorithms and a recommendation engine to find most relevant news for users. It also sends timely push notifications in case of breaking news stories or other important updates.

Interesting features

Read offline news – NewsDog lets users download news and stories for offline reading. The goal is to help save on mobile data and continue reading even if one doesn’t have internet access.

Personalisation – Through the recommendation engine, NewsDog claims that it can effectively analyse user preferences from browsing and reading habits and then send push notifications of news and stories that are relevant to users.

Local news – While NewsDog provides access to national and international news, it considers its ability to cater to local news – by city – to be one of its USPs.

Social features– Users can subscribe to specific publishers based on their interest, bookmark stories and also search for news articles through the app. The app also includes social features such as the ability to share stories across different social media channels and an in-app comment section for readers to share views and opinions.

Revenue model and marketing

NewsDog is free to download and use for the end consumer. The company works on a revenue share model based on the readership and traffic that they provide to their publishing partners.

Out of all the categories on offer, NewsDog notes that 28 percent (2 million) of the users subscribe to news and articles related to business and technology. Entertainment and sports are popular too. They also see Hindi to be more popular than English at this stage.

In the month of July 2016, NewsDog was the highest ranked app on Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store as well. Amit noted that their growth has been fuelled by word of mouth, social media marketing and their affiliate network partnerships. To better cater to the Indian audience, who are on low end smartphones, NewsDog also has a ‘bare bones-lite version’ of its app. In the coming months, NewsDog aims to partner with more small and big media houses to boost growth. The startup is also looking to expand their team and is currently hiring for its editorial team.

Almost all media platforms have their own brand ethos and loyal fan base. News aggregators provide an interesting value proposition to both publishers and end consumers. Publishers get access to a new-found audience who may have otherwise not heard about them. End consumers get a bird-eye view of the best and most popular content across different platforms.

In the past few years, news aggregator apps have gained mainstream popularity abroad and in India. Flipboard, News Republic and Nuzzel are popular globally, while Inshorts, DailyHunt, Way2News and the latest entrant to the unicorn club Hike are popular in India.

While news aggregator apps are popular now, many experts believe that chatbots and messenger bots could be the future as they eliminate the need of installing an app. Many global publications already push their content through Telegram messenger and Facebook Messenger and it may only be a matter of time before news aggregators enter this sector too. Amit noted that the chatbot space does look promising and that NewsDog is working on releasing its own chatbot in the near future.

Related read: Is regional language content the next frontier to reach India’s 1.2 billion people?

YourStory take

On first installing NewsDog users are asked to pick the language of their choice, followed by the sectors (entertainment, technology, sports, etc.) they prefer to read before finally being taken to the home screen. NewsDog has several USPs which add value for users, such as the ability to read news offline, subscribe to specific channels along with the in-app social features. The ability to comment within the app is also a great feature that has potential to drive user engagement.

NewsDog’s recommendation engine is not always accurate. Users may sometimes see push notifications they have not shown interest in reading. For example, even though I didn’t opt for entertainment or browse through stories of that genre, I still found many push notifications for stories that were not relevant to me. Giving users more customisation features regarding push notifications such as the kind and number of push notifications they wish to see on a daily basis could increase stickiness for NewsDog.

Website- NewsDog

You can download NewsDog here for Android or iOS

What do you think about this app, do let us know in the comments below. Also do check out other apps under our App Fridays series.

Also download the YourStory Android or iOS app for more updates

The early years of this decade witnessed a huge proliferation of edutech startups; most of them preferring to offer solutions in the examination preparation category.

During this period of high activity, Vibhu Bhushan, Sanjeev Kumar and Shobhit Bhatnagar decided to enter the segment, targeting mobile devices. They observed the growing market for smartphones and foresaw the impending boom, with the market standing at 220 million users today.

With an aim to make education engaging and available on the go, the trio launched GradeStack in 2013. The platform partnered with educational publishers to create mobile-friendly exams with interactive content for students preparing for various competitive examinations.

Within a year’s time, the Noida-based company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Times Internet Limited. In a year’s time, it touched over half a million downloads across more than 30 courses.

However, this was the maximum growth GradeStack could achieve. There was no progress from this level and finally, it had to shut down.

This was, however, not the end of the entrepreneurial careers of the three cofounders. In October 2015, they bounced back and launched another platform called Gradeup, a mobile-based community for students preparing for examinations like IBPS PO, SBI PO, SBI Clerk and more. The platform caters to students studying for over 30 different exams.

An education networking platform

“On this platform, students can post their problem in the community section of the app, which comprises of students preparing for competitive exams and mentors in that field, and have it answered by any other student. If such an answer is not forthcoming from the student community, mentors take it forward and solve it with the process,” explains 29-year-old Shobhit. The IIM-Calcutta graduate leads the company’s strategic direction and business execution. Prior to GradeStack, Shobhit led Business Advisory at Ernst & Young, India.

The platform connects peers, mentors and resources which help students in achieving their educational goals.

Shobhit adds that it is not just about uploading content like the previous model. There are 40 freelancers and a 15-member content team that build seed content for this platform.

The key features of the platform include daily tests, interactive polls for practice, live sessions, and exam related queries answered in real time.

According to the co-founder, the app has gained widespread acceptability among students and has been downloaded by 8 lakh users on Google Play and iOS platforms. Of the total users, over one lakh are active users that interact on a daily basis. The average time spent on the platform is 30 minutes a day. The company expects the number of users to rise to 10 lakhs by the end of the current financial year.

Experiment continues

The platform, which recently raised Series A equivalent funding from Times Internet Limited, has been trying various models to create a more robust business this time.

“Our first target is to acquire more and more consumers and engage them on the platform. This will bring in more data and open various business opportunities for us,” says Shobhit.

On the revenue model, he says that they can engage in pure-play sale of content with partners. Besides, there exist other models like contextual ads and delivery of content through videos, to name a few. “However, we would first have to meet the requirement of more customer acquisitions.”

The edtech market

In India’s online education market, which is predicted to grow to $40 billion by 2017 from the present $20 billion, there are multiple players in the edtech space, some of them being well funded.

According to Docebo, the inflow of venture capital in the e-learning space has been $6 billion globally in the past five years. A TechNavio report states that the Indian online education market is expected to grow at a CAGR rate of 17.5 percent from 2014-19.

Some emerging companies in this industry include Simplilearn, Embibe, Toppr and EduKart. Simplilearn has already set up its operations abroad.

In May 2016, Prepathon, a learning app for competitive exams from PaGaLGuY, announced an undisclosed amount of funding from Blume Ventures as a part of their pre-series A round.

Further, Byju’s raised funds of $75 million in February. Earlier this year, education content company S Chand & Co Pvt Ltd also invested an undisclosed sum in online test prep platform Testbook.

Survival technique

Amidst the giants of the segment, Shobhit says that Gradeup has been recognised as an example of a new and improved form of pedagogy in the exam prep space, especially for students in Tier-II and Tier-III cities.

With the intent to ride this wave of growth with a mobile first approach, Gradeup envisions becoming the largest and most engaging community of students and teachers, where students of all ages and subjects can learn in a collaborative and engaging manner.

Seeing the immense popularity of the app in its first year and its increasing reach, it is planning to launch the web version of the platform to act as an extension and ensure that smartphones do not act as a hindrance when it comes to catering to the student community in the remotest of corners.

The industry is in a high growth phase, especially with increased investor interest in education after the overall slowdown in investment activity. The challenge of building profitable and scalable revenue models, however, still remains, and it is yet to be seen how the many entrants in the sector go about achieving profitability.

App

Varun Gupta, a 29-year-old former IIT-Madras alumnus, was always interested in analytics. During his college days, he founded a startup that built a talent discovery platform for sports. The business did not take off because he did not know how to tie in the relationships with sports people, agencies and scouts.

Endeavouring to earn greater returns for investors

After graduating, he worked for a couple of years in an analytics firm before setting up his own analytics company called Decision Point in 2012. When he was at this firm, he realised – based on his and his friends’ experiences – that there were no savings instruments in India that gave good returns. He took it upon himself to build an automated advisory platform that could plug in to some of the liquid mutual funds data and invest on behalf of customers. “The technology allows a customer to choose his own product based on data and not be dependent on a sales person,” says Varun.

Most financial products in India are high commission products and the charges are more than 30 percent of the invested premium. Liquid mutual funds are a viable product for most people who want to increase their returns on a weekly or monthly basis. He teamed up with an old friend Shailesh Mehta, who was former Wipro employee and IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus to start this automated financial platform.

FinoZen is one of the new breed of startups that operate under the term “RoboAdvisory”, where the platform is intelligent enough to suggest investments. It takes away the inefficiency of distribution systems and training sales staff. “Most of the sales people have targets and it harms the individual more than the brand of the company when it comes to financial investments,” says V Balakrishnan, co-founder of Exfinity Ventures. He says that 90 percent of the sales staff in India does not know how to sell a financial product based on the financial needs of the customer.

The trigger of the idea and the market size

Varun founded FinoZen last year around September and launched the app in January. Since then, the app manages Rs 1.6 crore (assets under management) on the platform. The trigger, apart from personal experiences, was a hypothesis of Indian savings habits.

Indians love to save and their life is secured with life-insurance policies or depositing cash in a bank. Although India has a considerably high savings rate of 33 percent of household income, these savings are not invested in equity markets. The system of savings in India for long worked on a system of closely linked communities watching out for each other. But with the market economy displacing several people from these communities, especially in major Indian cities, savings need to be invested wisely to meet unforeseen life experiences and old age.

Most of the savings mechanisms in India give the consumer an annual return of 7 percent of the sum invested. Little wonder Indians invest in gold and property to meet unforeseen financial requirements. “Our target is to go after the current and savings account customers and tell them that this app works to increase their savings more than bank interest rates do,” says Varun.

The size of the total assets under management (AUM) in the Indian mutual fund industry is $202 billion. The insurance industry on an annual basis sees new business income top $20.5 billion. Even with all this growth, the insurance industry is still only 5 percent of the total GDP of the country.

How does the app work?

The consumer must login and provide his/her Aadhaar details, and in two minutes, they can start choosing their weekly investment plans. The money is deposited through the app and the customer can start saving with as little as Rs 100. The customer can track the money on a daily basis and see the gains and losses from their investments. FinoZen is an exclusive platform for liquid mutual funds which invest money on daily basis in instruments like term deposits, commercial papers and certificates of deposits.

These being short term investments, they are churned very fast with no cap on the withdrawal period. The gains and losses are transparent, the customer being able to track them on the app and decide when to withdraw the cash. The money when withdrawn goes straight to the bank account. The app has been downloaded by more than a 1,000 individuals in six months. The company has tied up with Reliance Mutual Fund to sell their liquid investment funds. It is still too early to disclose revenues as the business is only seven months old.

The future of financial planning

The company has invested Rs 50 lakh to build the platform. FinoZen is in fund raising mode and is scouting for $2 million to scale the product.

It has competition in the form of Finomena, WealthTrust Direct Investment, Scripbox and Credex. These startups are similar in many ways and some of them even provide credit to entrepreneurs and use their apps as delivery mechanisms. The margin they make on an investment of Rs 1 crore is as low as 20 paise. This is a high volume business and the technology players expect the 100 million young Indians who use smartphones to come in for this form of investment over the next four years.

“If robo-advisory services are implemented correctly, the adoption will increase. Financial planning is a growing concern and if their solutions are able to integrate good design into all the workflows, then financial planning will become a success for the new generation in India,” says Pranav Pai, founder of 3One4 Capital.

Varun is on the right path to make money for both his customers and his company. Hopefully, people will take to the platform for real savings and plan their returns better.

Website

A family of doctors and pharmacists, the Khemka family always wanted to do something related to healthcare. And they got the required push and inspiration in the US.

“When we were in the US and had to visit doctors, we realised how streamlined the processes were: from searching for a doctor to booking an appointment, getting the medicine and tests, all of it was done online through connected systems,”  says Shilpi Khemka, CEO and Co-founder of MedDNA.

They were moved to action, and they did, creating a similar ecosystem back home.

With an outlay of Rs 15 lakh, Shilpi, along with Abhishek Khemka and Ankit Vijayvargiya, launched MedDNA, a patient-focused independent medical platform, in January 2016. The amount was spent on platform building and human resources.

“The platform is built on four pillars — doctors, patients, pharmacies and laboratories. The patient is an essential part of the system, he/she initiates a request for an appointment, from then on, all pillars fall into place,” says Shilpi.

The process within

MedDNA is trying to connect its four pillars via mobile application and website. The first step involves appointment with the doctor. Upon patient’s visit, doctors provide prescriptions via MedDNA. This prescription is uploaded on cloud.

The platform will then send information to nearby pharmacies based on the patient’s preference. In case the doctor recommends tests, the request will be sent to the nearest lab. If everything goes as planned, MedDNA will launch these two solutions soon.

“Thus, MedDNA not only provides management of clinic, pharmacies and laboratories, but also connects these independent entities under one roof for the patient’s convenience,” says Shilpi.

A working business model

It is an SAAS-based product where doctors, pharmacies and labs need to subscribe to the platform. However, it is free for patients, except for the service of e-consulting.

“We launched our web application in the beginning of this year and since then we have more than 2,500 doctors listed from Pune and Mumbai, of which 200 are paid subscribers. We are expanding and signing up 10 doctors a day on an average. Apart from that, we are boosting our mobile platform as well, which is gaining traction,” says Shilpi.

With such level of functionality and services, the website claims to be competitive at pricing. MedDNA plans to reach out to Tier II and Tier III cities. Besides, it’s also planning home visit by doctors.

We shall overcome…

Implementing a million-dollar idea is a challenge for anyone.

According to Shilpi, in the real world, it is hard to convince a person to change their way of working, especially doctors. They are busy people, who have to focus on diagnosing diseases and providing healthcare advice to patients rather than giving precious time to technology.

“But we are trying to help them find a balance between the two,” she explains, adding: “One way of doing this is a smart prescription pad. It replicates the paper prescription, with the difference being that doctors write on it with our proprietary pen and save the text on computer, which then sends it over to the respective pharmacy or laboratory.”

In pharmacies, MedDNA is aiming to change the model of business operations and how medicines are sold with its direct-prescription-to-pharma step. This way the patient need not visit the pharmacy.

Shilpi sums up her endeavor: “What we are doing at MedDNA is to build a system which can easily be used by anyone and we have targeted various platform devices for this. It will also help increase the revenue for all participating entities by reducing overhead costs.”

Flourishing market

According to a report released by India Brand Equity, the market size of the health sector in India was estimated to be $75 billion during 2012-13 and is projected to reach $280 billion by 2020.

Tencent-backed Practo is among the leading players in this space, having acquired multiple startups such as Fitho, Genii and Qikwell. Practo has also entered the online medicine ordering segment.

Accel-backed Portea and Tiger-backed Lybrate are other established players in this sector. In the past few years, the healthcare segment has witnessed the mushrooming of digital healthcare startups.

Besides patient-centric startups, some doctor-centric startups have also come up. Curofy and Buzz4Health, medical networking apps that power communication between doctors, are other solution providers in this area.

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History has shown us many successful companies that have had their origins in colleges. In most cases, college students or recent graduates have co-founded companies with their peers or have gone ahead to start companies solo. It is slightly rarer though, to see a college professor and student teaming up to start a company. Bengaluru-headquartered Royal Brothers, a self-ride bike rental platform, is one such startup, which recently completed one year of operations and has an interesting story.

The story so far

Co-founded by the professor-student duo of Manjunath T N and Abhishek C Shekar in July 2015, Royal Brothers claims to be South India’s first RTO authorised self-ride bike rental platform. Based on their personal experience, both founders were aware of the difficulties involved in getting access to good quality rental bikes. They even got feedback from Ramesh Babu, the famous barber who owns a Rolls-Royce, and was the first to get an RTO permit for four wheeler rental vehicles in Benagluru.

So in April 2015, Manjunath and Abhishek saw an opportunity and decided to start a self-ride bike rental platform that took care of the entire value chain instead of the more popular aggregator solutions which were already prevalent in the market.

Manjunath, CEO of Royal Brothers, obtained a Mechanical Engineering degree from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Belgaum in 2006 and went on to pursue his masters in Machine Design from the same university. He then taught at different engineering institutions in Bengaluru for over eight years and met Abhishek during his time at RV College of Engineering. Manjunath has a keen interest in improving transport services in grey areas which are yet to be tapped in the Indian market.

Abhishek, COO of Royal Brothers, is also a mechanical engineer and graduated from RV College in 2015. Royal Brothers is his second attempt at starting up. During his third year of engineering, he had co-founded Awed By Creativity, a card designing startup, with one of his batchmates.

Before starting up officially, Manjunath and Abhishek had an intense discussion, which set the tone for their one-year-long startup journey. Being the more experienced of the two, Manjunath warned Abhishek that the journey would not be easy and that if they decided to take it up, there was no looking back. Reflecting on that conversation now, Abhishek notes,

Because of the fast pace at which startups run, we do have arguments and even now there are miscommunications and disagreements from time to time, but we understand each other well and know that our decisions are always for the good of the company. Over the last year, he has become a father-like figure for me.

Royal Brothers currently consists of a five member team, which includes Sharique Samsudheen, who heads marketing and sales, and Nikhil Raj and Akash Suresh, who lead on technology. Over the past year, Royal Brother has served about 7,000 customers and crossed about 1.3 million kilometres through their fleet of vehicles, which now consists of 250.

How Royal Brothers works

Currently available in six cities- Bengaluru, Manipal, Udupi, Mangalore, Mysore and Goa, users have the option of booking vehicles such as Royal Enfield, Suzuki Access and Honda Activa bikes on an hourly or daily basis. Royal Brothers facilitates booking online through their website and also at select offline centres. At their current pace, Royal Brothers claims to be seeing about 1,300 bookings a month, with an average ticket size of Rs 900.

Based on their experience in the sector, Abhishek and Manjunath believe that the optimal condition of vehicles is critical for success, and hence an aggregator model has lower chances of delighting customers. Abhishek said,

At Royal Brothers, we own all the vehicles in our fleet and ensure that they are in optimal condition before and after every ride. Having end-to-end control of this process is critical.

To ensure the safety of riders, Royal Brothers has capped the speed limit on their vehicles to 90 Kmph for Royal Enfields and 70 Kmph for Honda Activas. The startup monitors riders through in-built GPS trackers on their vehicles and levies warnings and fines on riders for overspeeding. The GPS trackers also provide the Royal Brothers team with a bird’s eye view of their vehicles on the road and helps in predicting supply and demand.

While Bengaluru is their most active market, Abhishek noted that the Mangalore-Udupi-Manipal stretch also accounts for a significant portion of their bookings. Abhishek’s initial plan was to just focus on Bengaluru and capture the market, before venturing to other cities. But Manjunath realised that there was a lot of demand in some cities and it would make a lot of sense to expand through a franchisee model quickly. Looking back now, Abhishek believes that this was a great move for the company as they could experiment in multiple cities, which each have different riding patterns.

Marketing and revenue model

As a bootstrapped startup, Royal Brothers has so far relied on word of mouth, social media marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) and customer referrals to reach out to their target audience. While most of their regular customers belong to the youth population, looking to hire a bike for a weekend getaway, Abhishek found that a significant portion of bookings were also coming from senior folks going on business trips. The biggest challenge for Royal Brothers has been battling the general perception and pre-conceived notion that rental vehicles are mostly second hand bikes that are not well maintained.

While they have a straightforward revenue model based on bookings, Royal Brothers is also exploring a semi-franchise model, where a new outlet is set up and the vehicles are owned partly by Royal Brothers and partly by the franchise owner. Royal Brothers will still take responsibility for the servicing and maintenance of vehicles.

Sector overview and future plans

As we move to a ‘sharing economy’, where a majority of the population is relying on cab aggregators such as Ola and Uber to commute to work, more people are now opting out of purchasing their own vehicles. Consumers always have the option to rent vehicles for outstation trips. Zoomcar is the most prominent player in the car rental space and had recently raised a $25 million series C round, led by Ford Motor Company. Coming to two wheelers, there are players like Broadbean Capital-backed Wheelstreet, Wickedride, SelfDrive.in, Rentongo and Dryve.

Royal Brothers aims to capture the South Indian market first and then expand nationally in 2017. To fuel their expansion plans, the startup is currently in talks with multiple investors to raise a pre-Series A round. While the startup isn’t profitable yet, the founders claim to have broken-even and doing well financially.

They also aim to move from a semi-franchise model to a full franchise model in the coming months. Royal Brothers’ in-house team is working on a data management system (DMS) for vehicles to help them better monitor and manage their inventory of vehicles. In the full franchise model, Royal Brothers will help the franchise owner procure the vehicles under the Royal Brothers licence and then earn revenue as a percentage of the bookings and will also charge the franchise owner a fee for servicing the vehicles. After capturing the Indian market, Royal Brothers’ long term aspiration is to expand to international market like Sri Lanka, where they see tremendous potential for a bike rental offering.

Website- Royal Brothers

Related read: Rajputana Custom Motorcycles: where passion fuels the engine