Child’s play: http://www.flintobox.com
Who doesn’t like to get a magic box? Especially, if it is a box full of toys that can set your imagination soaring. This was the idea with which Chennai based e-commerce start-up Flintobox started selling toys conceptualised by educators, prototyped by designers, and manufactured by top-of-the-line printers, all shipped in a box to little customers every month. And it wasn’t just kids and their parents who loved the idea.
Considered to be one of the coolest start-ups in India, Flintobox got the best start-up award in the education sector by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). It is also the winner of the Wharton India Economic Forum start-up competition.
Started in 2013 by three friends—Arunprasad Durairaj, Vijaybabu Gandhi and Sreenidhi Srirangam, at the heart of the venture was a simple idea —learning is fun. Says Durairaj, who is the CEO of the company, “We thought it would be a great if someone could curate new activities and ideas which would engage kids positively, at home, away from the television set and not need the parent’s constant supervision. We couldn’t find anyone doing it professionally. So we decided to do it in such a way that other parents and children benefit from it.”
What the three did was to bring in people with expertise in child develop-ment, game design and education to build and test the first prototype. This was then tested by 60 parents and children.
“We found that the parents and the children loved the freshness of the idea and the quality of the product. This encouraged the team to take a plunge to build Flintobox as a company,” says Durairaj. Today, it has 5,500 customers across 200-plus cities in India. Durairaj is convinced that this model can be scaled up. There are 70 million urban kids in India in the age group of 2-7 years, he says. Early child development only occurs in play schools. But kids spend only three to four hours in play schools and more than eight hours at home.
“We bootstrapped on investments during the initial phase in order to build the test kits. Soon, we were selected for GDF Accelerator , a seed funding entity, where we fine-tuned the product and established the product-market fit,” he says. In October 2014, the company secured $300,000 seed funding led by GSF Super Angels, AECAL Germany and Globevestor USA. “We are in talks with a couple of external investors to bring in additional funding soon,” he says. “We believe that most of the growth is going to come from tier two cities where the demand for niche e-commerce offerings is high, as the supply is limited.”
The model is extremely safe, he asserts. Today, they have pre-orders for the next six months and they manufacture as per demand. There is no distribution cost as they sell directly to customers. There is hardly any inventory on hold.
** “Most of the growth will come from tier two cities where the demand for niche e-commerce offerings is high.” said Arunprasad Durairaj
CEO, Flintobox.
Safety First: http://www.safetykart.com
An e-commerce site called Safetykart.com is symptomatic of the unpredictable times that we live in. This start-up stocks up on more than 3000 safety products from across 200 categories. The range of products covers everything from pepper sprays to anti
pollution masks to mosquito killers and surveillance equipment. The site says that its raison de etre is to protect users from any kind of calamity
or disease.
SafetyKart.com was started by SRV Damage Preventions, exclusive partners of ShockWatch Inc., based out of Texas. In Sept 2014, a separate company was formed under the name of SafetytKart Retail Pvt. Ltd. “The idea to start something in the space of safety came post the Nirbhaya rape case of December 2012. The objective was to build a platform where unique and innovative safety products and services are made easily available to consumers and at the same time, it builds awareness about the importance of safety in our daily lives,” says Partha Sarthi Guha
Patra, co-founder and director, Safetykart, who spent more than 26 years working with Wipro including a position as the global business head for defense and aerospace.
Guha Patra says that the company caters to various consumer segments and work profiles – senior citizens to adventure sports, travel, home and office, etc. The products are sourced from across the world and allows customers to compare before arriving on a purchase decision. This area of business is niche, and in his estimate, is less than 5% of the total e-tailing market.
This doesn’t really perturb him, as he believes that niche verticals are really the flavour of the season, as far as investors go. “The nature of the business will create a market of its own. Like any digital start-up, we would also need external investors and are open to funding. Till now, we used our internal funds and have invested as much as R1.5 crore in the venture. We are still very early in our growth trajectory and because of our exclusive products; we would be raking in operating profits soon.” He says that they intend to be remem-bered as “the incubator of a safety ecosystem in India”. “We will be adding many more safety specific services to create this eco-system,” he says.
Currently, Safetykart.com gets over 1200 unique visitors a day from India. Its Alexa rankings have improved from 20,000 in India to a rank of 2600. “The conversion rates are high for niche e-commerce models. As many as 7-8% of visitors on site are converted as customers, in comparison to barely 2% on more mainstream e-commerce sites. The audiences on some of these focused sites know their requirement, unlike when they cruise a general e-commerce site. Right now, 80% of our demand comes from urban cities. In time, we expect this to swing dramatically to tier two-three towns. But we would have to consider the logistics too. New investments will help,” says Guha Patra. “A lot of the mainstream e-commerce ventures are using the investor’s money to offer discounts to win the numbers game, which may not last long. Niche categories like safety will continue to remain profitable and create value for shareholders.”
Click, pay, pray: http://www.epuja.co.in
The start-up allows customers to offer prayers at 3600 temples across India and is planning to tie up with job sites and matrimony portal.
You’ve been meaning to connect with god, but just can’t get past the files on your desk or the overwhelming traffic in the city. But the answer now lies in e-commerce. Log on to e-commerce portal http://www.epuja.co.in and you can book a puja across 3600 temples in India. The site is looking to start an online store called “Bhakti store” which will stock at least 2000 articles of religion based merchandise. It is also looking to expand its footprint to at least 4500 temples over the next few months. “We bring people closer to god,” says Chetan Merchant, chairman and managing director of ePuja Web Solutions, “We are India’s largest Hindu puja booking service. The rituals market is a $30 billion industry. Our target audience is 1.2 billion people in India.”
Merchant says that his partner Shiva Kumar who began the firm as a proprietorship has toured over 4.5 lakh kilometres across the length and breadth of India for information on these temples. Shiva Kumar’s strength emanates from his constant involvement with cultural bodies and temples across India, which started out as a passion, but in time, evolved into a serious life pursuit. “ I came into the picture six months back,” says Merchant, adding, “I came in as an angel investor and we formed a private limited company called ePuja Web Solutions. My partner is not a man of technology. He has a passion for temples. He needed an investor and someone to oversee business matters. Today, he owns 30% in the company, while I own 70%.” Merchant says that they have more than 150 remedy pujas on the site. For instance, course correction on marriage hurdles, financial matters, career related issues, etc. “All you need to do is to log on the site and fill out details of yourself and three family members, for whom the puja is being done. And you list your nakshatra and gothra. Or place and time or birth. We need three days lead time to do the puja. We then send the prasad in a non-perishable form.”
The cost of these pujas start from R500 and go up to R54,000 which is inclusive of temple charges, courier charges, etc. The company retains a
percentage of that figure. It has launched an application on Android, and is soon to launch on IOS, Blackberry and Windows platforms. The ecommerce firm will soon start VIP darshan, where they enable patrons to get past long queues at temples with the help of a points man. What is interesting is that Merchant wants to build the brand in the offline space too. He has plans to start a franchise—tying up with local kirana stores who will be enabled with tablets. Customers can walk into their trusted grocery store and book pujas across temples, or buy merchandise. He also has plans of starting kiosks and Bhakti shops outside temples, in the four metros.
Merchant says, “We are looking to expand the brand. So if you are a Ganesh devotee and are at the Siddhivinayak temple in Mumbai, you may spot a Bhakti store in the area. You may decide to book further pujas. I have an offering on Ashtavinayak—eight Ganpati temples in Maharashtra. After the puja is done, we will send you the prasad in an envelope,” says Merchant. The company is also contemplating putting up a service, where priests can be sent to a client’s home for hawans and religious rituals.
Hard to believe, but some time back, Merchant was heading client acquisitions in the wealth management division of Development Bank of Singapore (DBS). He has earlier worked with companies such as ING Vysya Life Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Tata AIG Life
Insurance and ICICI Bank. “Well, I am still doing client acquisitions, but in a different form,” he says.
The e-commerce firm which was launched in January this year, needs $1 million for its first leg of expansion plans. It is in talks with venture capital firms, and also a large media conglomerate entity for dilution of equity. Merchant adds, “We are also looking to tie up with cross portals such as job sites and matrimony sites. They can direct their traffic to our page, and it would be a revenue sharing model.”
At your service: http://www.urbanclap.com
The company intends to use technology and smart processes to restructure the highly unorganised services market in India.
UrbanClap is an online platform for customers to scout for the best professionals in the service industry—be it architects, wedding photographers, yoga teachers, educational counselors or lawyers. Simply put, it connects online users with offline businesses. UrbanClap was launched in September 2014 and the website has been live since November 2014. It has three founders—Abhiraj Bhal, Raghav Chandra and Varun Khaitan. Bhal is responsible for operations and service provider on-boarding at UrbanClap. Chandra leads the technology and product development whileKhaitan is responsible for marketing and product growth. The company intends to use technology and smart processes to structure the highly unorganized services market in India. Their vision is to build a “powerful black hole network”, much like Facebook or Google. Users need to share their requirements through simple, intuitive questions and without any phone calls. Within hours they receive proposals from 4-5 trusted professionals who want the job. They can quickly chat with them and decide whom to give the assignment.
Khaitan says that the venture was born out of their passion to solve a large-scale consumer problem in India—one that could be solved using mobile internet. “All founders have closed earlier start-ups that were doing well, in search of bigger goals and as we stumbled across the local services industry, we realised how central it is to our lives and yet how broken. Painful memories from the past, finding a guitar teacher, a home designer, tailor, wedding decorator, house broker came to mind and motivated us further,” he said. Realisation then came that there were so many resources at disposal—directories, Just Dial, Google or Facebook—but all randomly dispersed phone numbers and made people do the difficult task of searching, finding and choosing.
“Things haven’t changed a bit in the last decade and we want to bring in mobile innovation to completely disrupt how consumers and service professionals connect with each other,” says Khaitan.
Revenue, he says, is not the focus of the company at this point in time. “We are working to create a large enough platform and create value for our customers. Profits will follow. We will look to raise funds in the second half of the year.” He says that they have created a product that is helping 100-plus customers to complete their personal projects every week. And on the flipside, they are helping more than 300 smart professionals create their online store and grow their business with ease. “Ours is a very highly scalable business—akin to a Facebook or Google. We are targeting a very mainstream audience. The urban Indian consumer wants to use all the services we are offering today,
it’s just that the unorganised nature of this market makes it hard for them. We are working hard on our product experience and will be aggressively growing across service categories (currently 10) and expand to all top cities by the end of the year,” says Khaitan. Currently, they don’t charge the providers for the platform.
“Going forward, the model will be to charge professionals a percentage for the business we generate for them. But this will be a very unique model, linked to the performance of the platform.”
Scout and guide: http://www.timesaverz.com
The home services start-up has a network of 1000-plus service partners across Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore.
New to a city? Finding a good electrician or a skilled plumber can be trying. Timesaverz calls itself India’s first on-demand platform dedicated to home services. If you are looking for the right handyman, this is the right place because each service agent’s background is checked and skills verified. The site was founded by entrepreneurs Debadutta Upadhyaya and Lovnish Bhatia in 2013. They offer services such as cleaning, repair of appliances and handyman services. Upadhyaya previously worked as the Asia Pacific head of mobile video advertising firm Vdopia and has spent over 16 years in media and communication working with Yahoo and The Times Group. They have already seen one round of seed funding from a clutch of angel investors led by internet specialist Neville Taraporewalla and GSF Accelerator founder Rajesh Sawhney. The other investors include Ashish Jalani, founder at eTailing India, Dinesh Agarwal, founder of Indiamart, and Nish Bhutani, COO of Saffronart.
The founders take pride in calling themselves MAD (MAD standing for make a difference) people who left their cushy, comfortable, media jobs and plunged into organising the very unorganised services sector that was hitherto untouched by the digital revolution that the country was witnessing. Their experience of building an ad network in the digital world came handy while starting the process of aggregating the service partners on ground and the journey that started with two stations in Mumbai with 10-odd service providers has now grown into a network of 1000-plus service partners across the three cities of Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore catering to over 5000-plus households fulfilling
almost 70% of their home-service requirements.
Upadhyaya says there is an increasing tribe of the upwardly mobile, urban working class population willing to pay a price for convenience. They are comfortable getting their household chores organized by service men who are trusted and verified locally. It’s a struggle to get the right help, at the right price, and at the right time in metros, she says. More so, if you are a nuclear working family with no support system in place. “Today, the dependence is still on online classifieds or the building watchman to get help in this regard, but the need to get skilled, verified, local help for the home jobs is on the rise and that’s where companies like ours will make a difference,” she says.
In her words, “Timesaverz wishes to cover as many metros in the shortest possible time and add on more services in the home service category. Timesaverz recently added pet grooming at home as one of the service offerings, which has been getting tremendous response.” The business model is based on a commission structure wherein Timesaverz retains around 20% of the payment made by the end consumer and passes on the rest to the service partner as fees for jobs done.
As per her, it’s a completely scalable model. “As we speak today, there is a 12 million urban online shopping population that is quite comfortable ordering things and services online at the click of a button. And if one were to look at an average spend that these households make on an annual basis around home-services management it is around R15,000. That itself is a $4 billion market and it’s growing at a steady 20% year on year,” she says.
Talk to me: http://www.frankly.me
Frankly.me has received $600,000 funding from Matrix Partners and is looking at an ad based revenue model.
E-commerce venture Frankly.Me empanels celebrities from diverse fields such as politics, law, films, etc., and offers a platform to ordinary people to ask them questions. The start-up was founded in March last year by IIT Delhi alumni Nikunj Jain and Abhishek Gupta. Jain had earlier founded a venture called InoXapps and is also an investor in online travel start-up Tripoto. Gupta had previously worked at Zumbl.com.
“I have always been a great believer in the power of beautiful conversations. I thought I would democratise this power and let everyone have access and opportunity to have beautiful conversations with the people that they look up to. I believe mobile video is the future of content consumption and question and answer is the basis for human conversation,” says Jain. Co-founder Abhishek Gupta seconded the idea. Delhi-based Pochi Media runs this e-commerce venture.
Frankly.Me received $600,000 (R3.8 crore) in seed funding from multi-asset investment firm Matrix Partners India. The funds will be used for product development and expansion. Frankly.me, which currently supports only Hindi and English feeds, is focusing on the India market as of now. The service is also available on mobile apps. The start-up claims that it has 25,000 registered users. On board are 95 speakers /celebrities /experts that include political leaders, movie stars, authors, etc. Jain says that his immediate plan is to expand reach by adding more celebrity verticals on the application, along with increasing the user data base to half a million within the next few months.
“We have not put in a single penny from our own pockets. The company was made by investors first and then we started working. Regarding the profitability factor, we are still in the pre-revenue stage and haven’t started earning money yet. We did our beta testing with the Aam Admi Party (AAP) and they really liked it to the extent that they believe we played a role in their winning so many seats in the Delhi elections. Every contestant of their party was able to connect to the general public at a very personal level which has never happened before in the history of elections,” says Jain.
The company is contemplating an ad based model for the future. Jain says that Frankly.me does not charge any fee from celebrities for getting on board. “There is definitely a potential growth in niche specialised areas but the only difference is how ahead, or what phase and time of economy are you in currently,” he says. “We do not intend to make money for the next six to nine months. However, getting an ad based revenue model would be easy for us because we are generating a lot of rich content including video. There is a lot of selfie content which is being liked by various people and this model is easier for us to execute. We are contemplating an industry feedback model,” he says.
For example, if Samsung launches a Galaxy S6 and they want to have feedback from users, then people can record their observations and
record via video selfies and this would be the most authentic feedback they would ever receive. “These are a few of the models we are considering,” he says.
Party all night: http://www.gigstart.com
A platform for performing artistes, much of Gigstart’s growth in the next few years is expected to come from small towns which are reserviors of rural talent.
There’s no business like show business and who would know this better than entertainment services start-up Gigstart. Gigstart.com is a bridge between performing artists from across disciplines and regions, and event organisers and party planners who seek them out for entertainment projects. Its co-founders, Atit Jain and Madhulika Pandey, met while working on The Weekend Consultant (TWC), an online guide for reviewing eating places, films and getaways and the rest, they say, is destiny. The two were looking to build up TWC as a sustainable model and in the meantime, decided to launch Gigstart as a platform for artistes, performers and entertainers to get discovered. Press the hit button on the website and you see a huge banner ad that says “Find and book entertainers for your party”. You come across a barrage of entertainment professionals – magicians, solo artists, bands, anchors and photographers. The business model – the site gets a fixed percentage of the fee charged by the artist.
While Jain is an engineer from BITS Pilani and has worked with JP Morgan for two years, Pandey is an MBA with an interest in reviewing films and food. She worked with Airtel briefly and then took up start-up assignments. The site began operations in December 2013. Jain says that the idea was to build an online marketplace that offers transparency for those who want to hire performing artistes. It not only helps individuals and event planners, but also becomes a destination where artistes can get the visibility that they require, especially those from the Indian hinterlands who don’t have access to viable platforms. Jain says that he has always followed events related to the entertainment industry with keen interest, but what really inspired him to kick off a venture such as this one, was the multitude of opportunities for the service industry in the electronic commerce space. “In the long run, we aim to create the biggest vendor specific service market place in the world. We have already crossed R1 crore in revenue since Gigstart’s inception. We have more than 4000 artists belonging to 16 different categories and the number of new sign-ups are increasing on an every day basis,” he says.
While the initial investment was R20 lakh, the firm raised seed funding of $210,000 from investors such as Powerhouse Ventures, Rajesh Sawhney of GSF, Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal, Narendra Singh Rawat (FG Wilson and BITS Spark), TA Venture Holding Ltd (Ukraine), Roshan Abbas (Encompass Events) and Anand Chandrasekaran (Airtel). The funding came in less than a year after Gigstart commenced operations.
“We will utilise these funds to strengthen our technology, our list of artists and also marketing. We are currently not looking for more funds.
We are actually cash negative because we are focusing our energies on developing the product for the next phase. To put it in simpler words, we are investing in our future.” In his view, it is not important how niche or mainstream the idea for a new venture is, as long as it can be incubated and scaled up. Angel investors and venture capitalists have their reasons for putting money in a start-up. As long as it is transaction based and there is a demand for the service, there is capacity for attracting funds. Sometimes they put in capital because they are sold on the team behind the idea—they believe that this is the right mix of talent to make a success of it. “Globally, the services which come under our current offering are sized at $60 billion. In India, the market size is $3 billion which is growing 25% year on year. The driving factor behind this growth is the fact that people are more open to different kinds of art forms. They are ready to try something different from the regular old Bollywood entertainment fare.”
A lot of the firm’s growth, he admits, will come from smaller towns and cities which hold so much talent. This is both a challenge and opportunity, he believes as a lot of these places are technology-impaired, and yet a lot of the talent is just waiting to be harnessed. “For promotions and the tying up of new venues, we will move to new cities. We want to partner with 10,000 event planners in the next 12 months. We also aspire to create a property called Gigstart Nights which will become India’s first gig destination for discovering new independent artists,” Jain remarks.
Right now, Gigstart’s advertising is limited to social media and search engine optimisation. It plans to focus on-ground activities and co-sponsorship of events that can become regular affairs and help build the Gigstart brand. Over the next five years, Jain hopes to morph Gigstart.com into a “skill based market place” and not just restricted to entertainment. “As more of the Indian population moves online, we will broadbase ourselves into a service based company. A skill based portal where you can search for people with specific skills,” he says.
