Tag: SMBs

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Gallabox.

Digital technologies have revamped business processes, culture, and customer experience across verticals. To be competitive and profitable in a growing digital environment, end to end transformation is necessary for every business, be it a SME or the big giants.

Gallabox is an easy-to-use, no-code conversational growth engine on WhatsApp for SMBs.

Gallabox helps businesses increase sales and streamline all customer interactions. By deploying intuitive workflows, the tool puts an end to mediocre and broken conversations.

Gallabox – Company Highlights

Gallabox – About
Gallabox – Industry
Gallabox – Founders & Team
Gallabox – Idea & Startup Story
Gallabox – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Gallabox – Products & Services
Gallabox – Business Model & Revenue Model
Gallabox – Customer Acquisition
Gallabox – Funding
Gallabox – Competitors
Gallabox – Recognition and Achievements
Gallabox – Future Plans

Gallabox – About

Gallabox helps companies run their business on WhatsApp empowering them to market, sell, and support better — via a communication channel that feels robust to the core. Whatsapp is becoming India’s favourite super app and that has left room for a plethora of opportunities in the fast growing super app genre.

In terms of vision, Gallabox believes that all organisations – small, medium, and large need a powerful messaging platform like WhatsApp to manage their inbound and outbound customer conversations. Thus, Gallabox is proving to be a key player in providing customised business solutions over WhatsApp.

Gallabox – Industry

Gallabox focuses upon three major problems:

1. There are about 50 Billion WhatsApp messages that get sent and received every day, but unfortunately, businesses struggle to manage their customer interactions on WhatsApp at scale.

2. Businesses are still sending around 1.3 billion SMS Per day whereas their customers have already moved to WhatsApp

3. Businesses find it very hard to build their workflows on WhatsApp, integrating their existing databases with APIs require coding knowledge.

In terms of the industry size, they see a huge opportunity in the related circles. There are 500 million users that use WhatsApp, and at least 95% of this demographic opens the app once in a day. From this we can infer that WhatsApp has swiftly become apart of their daily lives. Among 500 million users of WhatsApp in India, there are at least 20 million WhatsApp business users. Assuming that about one-third of these businesses require a more sophisticated solution, where they are able to leverage the possibilities of WhatsApp makes this opportunity worth $4 billion per year.

The second opportunity is that the SMS market globally has reported revenues of $90 billion dollars. According to a recent study about 40 million SMS’s get sent per month and the estimation is that there are a hundred thousand businesses in India sending SMS till date. SMS is really analogue in nature and it really doesn’t allow for any kind of interactivity. So, Gallabox took this as an opportunity.

The two large opportunities for Gallabox are:

• To move businesses that are already on WhatsApp business to offering them a more sophisticated solution that can help them leverage the possibilities of this super app: better team collaboration via a shared team inbox, streamlining marketing efforts through broadcast campaigns, simplified support with chatbots and easy integrations to build better workflows.
• To move companies that are sending SMS today onto the WhatsApp messaging platform thereby empowering them to increase sales and support efforts to scale their business.

For the last three years, Gallabox’s founders have been observing and working very closely with the WhatsApp team, they recognized the kind of feature functionality that is possible. In the market today, there are some companies that are building their product to use WhatsApp as a messaging channel but over the next couple of years, Gallabox predicts that WhatsApp could transform into an end-to-end business platform where customers can literally do everything from discovery of products, to purchasing, and accessing required support. Gallabox at this position is being able to leverage this opportunity ahead of us.

Gallabox – Founders & Team

Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan, and Yathindhar Panchanathan are the founders of Gallabox. Karthik is the CEO of Gallabox, Yogesh serves as CTO, and Yathindhar serves as CPO at Gallabox.

A common denominator among the three co-founders has been that they have worked at Sulekha for almost A decade together starting from 2007/2008. All three of them have worked in different roles. It gave an in-depth view of how SMBs and midsize businesses were digitizing the marketing operations, trying to acquire leads from the internet and that was another generation where they saw the SMBs up-close.

Yogesh has 13 + of experience in full life cycle software development for consumer internet, digital marketplaces and products. Just after Sulekha, he spent three years building the fintech Marketplace at Cred Avenue. Yogesh is a largely self-taught self-made engineering person who has a fantastic balance between Engineering Technology Outlook as well as a business Outlook. He is able to toggle between the two.

Yathindhar has 17 plus years of experience managing the SMB facing product while at Sulekha, where he also managed the entire value delivery piece so they were collecting money from SMBs which means delivering value back to them in some form. Yathindhar built entire infrastructure to be able to track that and he has also spent a significant part of his career on digital marketing. Just before Sulekha, he was with Xerago, a digital marketing company that manages large clients and after Sulekha, Yatin spent a couple of years at Matrimony where he helped build wedding services Marketplace.

Karthik has 20 plus years of experience in marketing sales and overall P&L management. He has a strong India SMB focus and mid-market customer expertise. He started his career in advertising and then he spent a good part of his career at Sify between 2000 and 2005. Then after that, he worked at Tata Teleservices in telecom sales for a couple of years after which he was at Sulekha for a little over a decade, where he was part of the original founding team that built this Sulekha local services business and subsequently, Karthik spent a couple of years at Matrimony where he was the business head for the wedding service marketplace business.

They came from a very strong consumer internet background and were very interested to see how businesses can be helped using technology. This was their core focus as they dabbled in multiple Ideas.

Towards the end of 2019 is when the three of them decided that they want to start something of their own and noticed a commonality of thoughts. One was the burning desire to be on their own and found a company. Second, was their passion to genuinely help businesses using technology. Third, they felt that an era of digitisation is coming up and they should be ready for it and contribute in some form to the digital transformation. After 6 months of brainstorming they incorporated the company in June 2020.

Yathindhar manages the product design and the digital marketing piece. Yogesh takes care of the entire Technology architecture, the Visioning as well as the actual building of the product and deployment.

Karthik takes care of overall distribution which is the sales marketing piece and fundraising activities. The company currently has 24 employees and is actively growing.

The culture of the company is of shared ownership. The early team members bring a larger dose of passion into the team and new team members are equally amazing with the ability to quickly understand the business, understand the customer and being able to deploy it in the market.

Their core values are that of focusing on the customer first. They believe that they exist to grow their customers business. They like to raise the standard. The team is always curious to know more and hungry to improve its best performance. They work fast to completion. They think simple is beautiful. Simple is the most sophisticated thing that you can ever ask for. So Gallabox team work hard to make products simple and light to use.

They nurture talent, embrace the diversity of ideas and team members respect & rely on each other. They place integrity on a very high pedestal because integrity is about doing the right thing even when nobody’s watching. Each of the founders owns the cost and takes accountability for decisions & actions.

They have a lot of fun at work. They have a Badminton Court next door. So, they go out there and play once a week at least. They also have a Gallabox Shuttles League (GSL). They arrange and play tournaments. They believe that Sports brings people together and it’s a great team-building exercise even if that goal is not team building it inadvertently happens.

Their hiring funda is that they want to have people who want to build something. They want to build a product, they want to build on an idea, want to build on the career, want to build on the conviction. They look for builders. They do not look for managers. They look for team players who can take something up, own it and go about building it.

Gallabox – Idea & Startup Story

With the rapid digitization that we came to see through the last decade businesses started to rely on the Meta, Facebook, Alphabet, and Google ecosystem to attract users. They became the discovery engines to aid businesses in showcasing their product offerings and increase revenues by doing so. A key take back from this new workflow was that customer satisfaction was of utmost importance.

Brands needed a platform that is readily available to be of service, personalized, and easy to access for users and team members. When Gallabox’s founders started to ideate on the best possible solution for digitising businesses, they realized that at least eight out of ten companies had the components to put together a better workflow but they did not have a platform to bring it all together. Either they were having a CRM or they were getting a CRM done, or they had integration partners that were aiding the workflow but, they weren’t able to unify all these processes into one singular flow.

Apart from partnering platforms/services, businesses were ready to improve their customer services at scale. This meant for most of them that an increase in resources was the best possible solution. The founders of Gallabox wanted to change this thought, they truly saw potential in this grey area. This was how Gallabox was founded.

They brainstormed the best solution for any small to medium size business – a single collaborative platform that allows for engaging interactions with customers, predefined or custom integration workflows, no-code conversational bot flows to services customers 24×7, an easy to use tool to launch marketing campaigns at scale and, a shared inbox for teams to better communicate without having to switch between channels.

Gallabox – Name, Tagline, and Logo

Gallabox was named after the cash register – Galla Petti. The Galla Petti symbolises healthy business.

They focus on minimising marketing wastage, improving efficiencies in marketing as well as in sales effort and customer support efforts and focusing on enabling winning conversations with prospects and existing customers. Gallabox is building a product to streamline and reduce the multiple efforts of sales, support and marketing teams.

The three large touchpoints of the customer are – Discovery, purchase, and support. Gallabox helps businesses to manage these customer conversations across 3 milestones. The goal is to provide their clients/customers with a tool that works like a charm, is simple to use and feature rich to scale their business operations.

The Gallabox logo has two perspectives. One perspective is, it is supposed to be a box, a cube and therefore drawing parallel to the brand name. The other perspective is that of the blue arrow that is pointing towards the right side. It symbolises the rising graph of a business. The focus is to enable their clients’ business to improve. This Arrow symbolises what Gallabox wishes to provide to their clients business.

Gallabox – Products & Services

Companies want to be able to deliver a great experience to the customers across three milestones – Discovery, purchase, support and of course, there are multiple in between. In pursuit of these goals, most of them have a website, some of them have a mobile app and which is where their products, services and their profile and their reason to believe – all of these things really are sitting out there.

Several of them also have CRM which is a repository of customer information. Often, CRM is integrated with the website so therefore there is a way in which the discovery, purchase, and support functionalities could be delivered to a certain threshold level of quality but unfortunately, their customers are sitting on WhatsApp and the island is not connected to any of these. So what WhatsApp is allowed to do and what Gallabox is building on – is being able to connect the website, mobile app, and the CRM with WhatsApp and be able to offer an end to end business solution for clients.

Through Discovery, Purchase, and Support, Gallabox offers a set of features or a way in which teams can collaborate with each other, with the multi-agent team inbox, clients can run marketing campaigns with the WhatsApp broadcast feature, they can run automation capabilities with a chatbot and start a conversation with the prospect or with the existing customers and then hands off to an agent at some point of time. Gallabox can integrate nicely with that including CRM and payment systems and so on. Gallabox is working on building the E-Commerce engine and the business app templates.

The entire journey is multiple touchpoints with the customer, from the time the prospective walks in – to the time the prospect is converted to a customer, customer conversation leads to the engagement and then some kind of support to the customer request. Gallabox really offers all of these features covering the touchpoints of the customers.

It’s not easy to be able to imagine this kind of ambit. Gallabox wants to make it as easy as building a templated website. There are several tools available now on the internet you know if you have a couple of hours, people sit down and create a good looking website for yourself. They are developing the capabilities to be able to do that on WhatsApp. Gallabox builds plug-n-play tools supporting hundreds of workflows.

Let’s take an example – A travel portal integrates with Facebook & Razorpay’s payments gateway or an Edtech company integrates with Stanley to generate leads. The integration will help them send message notifications through a bot on WhatsApp or they can send automated reminders to the users on Whatsapp. They are building a library of industry-specific templates and workflows. They have already built more than 250 such workflows. Working with more clients will help the company gain more experience and expertise.

A client can come in, filter by industry and pick the workflow that they want and start deploying. So, Gallabox is really building a do-it-yourself toolkit for companies to build their business app on WhatsApp. However, the founders are also Cognizant of the fact that India and several other emerging economies are where the do it yourself phenomenon may not be as prevalent and therefore there is a dependence on developers to build software products.

So, for instance, Shopify has a fairly robust do-it-yourself toolkit for people to be able to create a website but , businesses still depend on developers to be able to build the shopping website and so is the case with Magento, woo commerce, Wix, and several others. There is a huge ecosystem of developers offering such services to clients. What Gallabox is doing is it is building a product initially which is a do-it-yourself toolkit for companies and, it is also building a platform that necessarily is a developer tool for them to build a WhatsApp business app.

Gallabox – Revenue & Business Model

Gallabox is a product, therefore, it’s on the subscription business model. Customers can pay on a monthly/annual basis. They have very comfortable pricing starting from 2500 rupees or even lower depending on prepaid going up to 9000 Rupees.

They have experimented with what clients really require and therefore based on that they have treetop rising over the last six months. The core philosophy behind the pricing is it ought to be a small ratio of a benefit that the client accrues by using Gallabox. As they focus on improving the quality of customer conversation with that two benefits accruing to their client – one is it can increase the sales and or it can reduce their support cost, which means there is an ROI by using Gallabox.

Gallabox aims to get a small percentage of the lift or on the cost savings that they are able to enable for their clients. This way they have figured out a pricing model. Gallabox pricing includes the cost of the business, WhatsApp business API and all the other related costs.

Their focus is not on profitability at a unit level but to ensure that they get the pricing right and should be fair on both parties and should ensure that it is easy for customers to adopt Gallabox and help scale the customer acquisition engine.

Gallabox – Customer Acquisition

Gallabox can be used by anyone without any coding knowledge. Most of the businesses in India does not prefer DIY and instead hire individuals like freelancers or outsource to small companies.

However, very interestingly, Gallabox is enquired by these freelancers and companies who ask them how they can use Gallabox to make their work easier for integration. Gallabox has got a great connection with the developers’ community and this is how they acquired most of their initial customers.

Gallabox – Funding

The founders bootstrapped the startup since its inception while the MVP was being built. In April 2021, Gallabox raised a pre-seed capital of Rs. 3 Crore from angel investors by issuing CCPS. They began deploying this capital from June 2021 to augment the team and acquire customers using a variety of GTM tools.

Gaurav Kumar (Founder, CredAvenue), Pramod Kumar(Cofounder, Wealth Advisors India), Kapil Ramamurthy (Cofounder, Spark Capital), Swaroop Reddy (Founder, SeedTime Ventures), and Kris Karaikudi (Global Data Strategy Lead Slalam, US) are Prominent angel investors of Gallabox. They are also the advisors for the company.

Gallabox – Competitors

‌Top competitors of Gallabox are:

• Wati.io
• Yellow.ai
• Interkat
• Engati

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Gallabox – Recognition and Achievements

Gallabox has Received TANSEED GRANT from Govt. of Tamil Nadu and CM MK Stalin.

Gallabox received the TANSEED grant funding of Rs 5 lakhs from Hon’ble Chief Minister MK Stalin on the 23rd of December, 2021. Gallabox was one of the 19 startups from across the state that was selected in the second edition of the Tamil Nadu startup Seed Grant Fund. The Grant is for a total of Rs 10 lakhs per winner, the first tranche of which is Rs 5 lakhs.

Gallabox – Future Plans

Customers make great efforts to discover and interact with a brand or business. In these countless interactions — lie opportunities for you to make the right impression. These touch-points where customers and your teams meet are sacred for a business. Gallabox powers these connections to make them more impactful.

FAQs

When was Gallabox founded?

Gallabox was founded in June 2020.

Who is the founder of Gallabox?

Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan, and Yathindhar Panchanathan are the cofounders of Gallabox.

What is Gallabox pricing?

Gallabox pricing ranges from 2000 – 9000 depending upon the client requirements.