StartupTalky

Tag: 📄Company Profiles

  • The Rise and Fall of ‘Doodhwala’: India’s Largest Online Milk Delivery App

    Startups fail and the reasons are many. While everyone loves to hear about success stories, it’s the failures that teach a greater lesson. Bangalore based ‘Doodhwala’, a promising startup delivering fresh milk and groceries direct to doorstep, recently stopped operations and the news has concerned the startup community. However, the reason for the shut down is not known yet. As communicated by the founders of ‘Doodhwala’, ‘FreshToHome’—another Bangalore based startup delivering meat and sea food—will now serve the subscribers of ‘Doodhwala’ in Bangalore. While we are still figuring out what could be the reason behind the wind up, lets have a look at Doodhwala’s journey.

    Doodhwala Highlights

    Startup Name Doodhwala
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Co-founders Ebrahim Akbari & Aakash Agarwal
    Sector Ecommerce
    Founded 2015
    Parent organisation Banger Tech Pvt. Ltd.
    Website www.doodhwala.com

    Doodhwala – About
    Doodhwala – Founders and Team
    Doodhwala – Starting up
    Doodhwala – Name, Tagline and Logo
    Doodhwala – App
    Doodhwala – Business Model and How it works
    Doodhwala – Funding and Investors
    Doodhwala – Advisors and Mentors
    Doodhwala – Startup Challenges
    Doodhwala – Competitors
    Doodhwala – Growth
    FAQs

    Doodhwala – About

    Founded in 2015, Doodhwala was the first in Bangalore to bring fresh farm milk directly to customers. Besides Bangalore, Doodhwala operated in Hyderabad and Pune. The startup delivered milk, fresh dairy products, groceries, fruits, and other fresh daily essentials direct to home.

    Doodhwala was launched with the vision to be the largest and most loved fresh milk & daily essentials delivery service across India, taking pride in excellent customer service and enhancing India’s disorganized milk delivery network, employee satisfaction, and return on investment.

    Doodhwala shut down

    Doodhwala – Founders and Team

    Doodhwala - Founders
    Doodhwala – Founders

    Ebrahim Akbari and Aakash Agrawal founded Doodhwala in 2015.

    EbrahimAkbari, is an engineer by training, a serial entrepreneur by profession, and a marketer by passion. Along with his co-founder, he scaled Doodhwala from a 5 member team to a 400 member company in just three years, making Doodhwala India’s largest subscription-based e-grocer. Ebrahim leads Doodhwala’s growth and geo expansion. He brings on board a unique perspective on business strategies combined with rich experience of effectively deploying business resources. A savvy negotiator with inherent entrepreneurial skills, he understands the entire supply chain industry and has co-founded a business model that has revolutionized the way people in India are buying milk and local dairies are selling milk.  

    Prior to establishing Doodhwala, Ebrahim Akbari was heading a 20-year-old family business of Industrial Field Supplies in Oman. As a Managing Partner, his focus was on scaling the business across and outside Oman along with looking for new growth areas and markets. Within a year of Akbari’s leadership, the company’s turnover increased by 30% and geo-expansion in Dubai proved to be a profitable move within the first year of operations.  

    Ebrahim, is a skilled theatre artist, an avid reader, and a gold medalist swimmer. A regular speaker at industry forums and platforms, Ebrahim recently spoke at the VCC Food and AgriSummit and The National Food Processing Conclave, in New Delhi.

    Aakash Agrawal has a proven track record of successfully leading a company’s operations and sales. He previously co-started a steel fabrication company, UPPL, in 2010 in Odhisa where he drove operations and infrastructure implementation. Under his leadership, the firm within 5 years of successful operations clocked INR 20 crore of turnover, and won the ‘Vendor of The Year’. Post Aakash’s exit, UPPL is one of the very few board run SMEs in India catering to the heavy engineering industry.  

    Aakash spearheads the logistics and operations of Doodhwala. He possesses an entrepreneurial mindset, employing strong team leadership to create an outsized impact with limited resources. With rich and multi-functional expertise, Aakash has created competitive advantages in key operational areas for Doodhwala and developed a cost-effective omni-channel distribution/logistics network.

    A great believer in the saying, ‘we will either find a way or make one’, Aakash spends much of his spare time reading about politics, history, current affairs, and traveling around the world.    

    Within three years, Doodhwala grew from two people to an organization of 1000 people.  

    Relevant Read: Watasale- A Cashier-free Grocery Store

    Doodhwala – Starting up

    One late night in 2014, Aakash and Ebrahim were working on a different business project, working and munching on cereal with milk. They realized that there was no milk for the second serving of cereals. This left them wondering how life would have been easier if there had been an app for ordering milk. Soon they grasped that they unknowingly stumbled upon a great business idea which was too exciting to let them sleep.

    They wanted to immediately check the feasibility of this idea, and so around 4 in the morning, they were out and about to see how the milk supply market actually worked. This was followed by weeks of research and surveys and finally, they launched a beta version to test the market. They were amazed at the response they received. Consumers loved the idea of hassle-free home delivery of milk. They were looking for a new age ‘Doodhwala’ (milkman in Hindi), and this laid the foundation of Doodhwala.

    Consumers were looking for better ways to find good quality unadulterated farm milk, they are for an organized hassle-free way to get milk. They, in a nutshell, wanted a punctual, cost-effective, and a non-traditional option. Led by the increasing level of urbanization across the Indian population as urban consumers prefer clean, hygienic and ready-to-drink milk and dairy products – quoted Doodhwala co-founder Ebrahim Akbari

    Doodhwala was designed to be the 2.0 version of the traditional Doodhwala. Doodhwala’s tagline is “India’s largest fresh milk delivery app”.  

    In a nutshell, the tagline spells out that we set standards of excellence in fresh milk & daily needs delivery by being one of the pioneers in this space, and by innovating cutting edge mobile technology .

    Doodhwala Logo

    Doodhwala – App

    The Doodhwala mobile app lets users order fresh milk and groceries easily.

    Fresh milk is a part of every household’s regular purchase. Traditionally, Indians have been reliant on their local milkmen for milk, but the urban India crowd needed something more than just milk – they need ease, freshness, and reliability. That’s the problem Doodhwala solved.

    Variety of milk is a convenience that neither the local doodhwala nor the kirana store can match. Doodhwala boasted of the largest variety of milk. The platform had 70+ types of milk. Be it A2 milk, organic milk, goat milk, camel milk, or lactose-free milk, Doodhwala offered varieties to suit eclectic dietary requirements, making it the ultimate destination for all kinds of milk.

    Besides milk, Doodhwala also delivered fresh dairy products, confectionery, bakery products, juices, fruits and vegetables, other grocery consumables, personal care products and many other items of your daily needs right to your doorstep.

    Some USPs of the Doodhwala app were:

    • An easy to use app to manage for all your daily essentials, with trusted deliveries before 7 am even for orders placed until 11 pm the night before.
    • Subscription or creating a customizable delivery schedule made it easy to plan all repetitive purchases.
    • One can easily modify, cancel or pause one’s subscription at any given time.
    • The no checkout feature (no constant topping of wallet) was a sure favourite amongst customers.
    • Zero delivery charges.
    Doodhwala Warehouse

    Doodhwala – Business Model and How it works

    There many things Doodhwala did differently than previous and current players that made its business model robust and cost-effective.  

    The main highlights of Doodhwala’s business model were:

    • The hybrid model for last mile workforce – Consisted of existing milkmen and part-time workers.
    • Efficient mapping of delivery routes – Significantly lesser number of delivery executives were required to complete ‘x’ amount of deliveries since all the delivery routes were mapped efficiently.
    • Lower dependence on manual strength – Planned delivery leading to a lower dependency on delivery executives as well as inventory.
    • Unlimited Delivery Base – Focus on morning delivery helped easier hiring – basically, anyone interested in working for a few hours in the morning could be a Doodhwala delivery executive.
    • Resource optimization – Planned demand reduced inefficiencies and optimizes better utilization of resources.
    • Drastically reduced cost – The right combination of technology and process in every step of the cycle – procurement, warehousing, and sorting reduced cost.
    • Predictive inventory – Subscription model made way for strong predictive inventory algorithms which ensured almost zero wastage.
    • Advanced algorithms – Cost-benefit approach towards technology laid such that every implementation either increased revenue or decreased cost across Doodhwala’s supply chains
    • Single delivery slot network – The network of milk delivery guaranteed low mid-mile costs due to an obvious reason i.e, no traffic in the morning hours. Plus, it also guaranteed no peak hour rush.
    • Market and Demand Analysis – Adoption of Omni channel is driven by digital demand. It allows optimization on the logistical front, better inventory management across all points of sale.
    • High customer density – To curtail last mile costs, Doodhwala completed 10000 deliveries every hour. Each delivery executive completed 100 deliveries in a 3-hour shift.
    • Efficacy of micro-delivery model over on-demand fleet – Ensured higher customer engagement and focused on high frequency – everyday delivery.  

    Since milk allows for high frequency and a daily delivery model which means for an ‘n’ number of deliveries to a customer we don’t have any additional cost i.e, no incremental delivery cost. Secondly, focusing on high density allows for costs which are 1/10th with 6-10 times efficiency. We also implement a clever usage of modern-day Technology. Thirdly our Unique business model has allowed us to scale and stay one step ahead of the competition – Ebrahim said explaining the business model.

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    Doodhwala – Funding and Investors

    Doodhwala raised more than $14.2 Million in funding in 3 rounds. Doodhwala’s funding details are:

    Funding Date Funding Stage Funding Amount Investors
    August 2017 Seed Round Undisclosed Tom Varkey
    February 2018 Seed Round $2.2 million Omnivore Partners
    November 2018 Series A $12 million Undisclosed

    We have always believed that the philosophy of ‘raise only when you need to’ is a golden rule which is ignored too often at an early stage of a business. Most founders raise too early and end up diluting a significant portion of their equity before the business establishes itself. Aakash and I retain over 80% of the equity even though Doodhwala is the largest milktech company at 13 lakh liters of milk a month. Having a sound cap table is particularly attractive to potential investors, for it greatly assists founders in later stages of their business – Ebrahim

    Doodhwala – Advisors and Mentors

    Cristina Berta Jones, the former COO of Naspers, served as an Advisor and board member. Cristina brings several years of strategic leadership experience in spearheading mergers and acquisitions, portfolio management, and strategy for prominent B2C E-Commerce companies. She led the largest divestiture of Allegro group for $3.25B and was pivotal in driving the MakeMyTrip and Ibibo merger. She previously served on the board of Flipkart, Souq.com, eMAG, Takealot, Konga, and TBO Holidays.    

    Doodhwala – Startup Challenges

    According to Ebrahim, the last mile delivery is the biggest challenge for every e-tailer in this country. Low efficiency of resources and route-planning problems are the core issues that cause the whole system to be inefficient and expensive. This paired with the challenges in delivery infrastructure bring additional problems to the state of the last mile. However, Doodhwala had a hybrid model for its last mile workforce which consisted of existing milkmen and part-time labor.  

    We require a lesser number of boys to complete x amount of deliveries since our delivery routes are mapped efficiently. in other words, we have a lower dependency on labor. This ensures we never have peaking problems.  

    Doodhwala – Competitors

    Doodhwala – Growth

    Within 3 years of operations, Doodhwala witnessed extremely rapid growth:

    • The company was doing around 30,000 deliveries a day.
    • It grew 5 times during 2018-2019 with an 85% customer retention rate. While most companies and online e-commerce retailers struggle with the frequency of purchases, Doodhwala received customers at a minimum of once a week for a recurring purchase, making its retention rates one of the highest in the industry.
    • Doodhwala was one of the largest milk e-tailers moving 13 lakh liters monthly and had the highest delivery fulfillment rate at 99.8%.
    • Doodhwala had industry’s lowest operational cost at 5% cost of sales.  

    Doodhwala’s shut down, despite having a wide base of happy customers, left many guessing the possible reasons behind the shuttering.

    FAQs

    What is a Doodhwala?

    Doodhwala was a milk delivery startup.

    Who has founded Doodhwala?

    Aakash Agrawal and Ebrahim Akbari has founded it in 2015.

    When did Doodhwala shut down?

    It shut down in october 2019.

  • Sigmetic – Startup that lets you Explore the Trends of your Software Team!

    In the world of modern software development, the expectations of the software products we use are getting increasingly higher, and the demands on the team’s software development process are increasing proportionally.

    In a world where distributed teams and remote work is here to stay, it is also of crucial importance to keep the development cycle open, transparent, and allowing more close collaboration on the team.

    Teams seem to struggle with the same recurring issues: Code reviews that are taking forever, PRs that cannot get merged due to missing dependencies from other branches, an almost grotesque meantime to restore a bug and a missing overview of the lead time it takes to ship a new feature. These issues are exactly what inspired Simon to create Sigmetic.io to gain insight into these processes. Because, essentially, that is the only way we can start improving!

    Sigmetic – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Sigmetic
    Headquarter Copenhagen
    Sector Technology
    Founder Simon Høiberg
    Founded 2020
    Legal Name Silind Software ApS
    Website sigmetic.io
    Contact contact@sigmetic.io

    About Sigmetic and How it Works
    Sigmetic – Target Market Size
    How was Sigmetic Started?
    Sigmetic – Product/Services
    Founders of Sigmetic and team
    Sigmetic – Startup Launch
    Sigmetic – Startup Challenges

    Also read: Taski – Your Journey to Productivity with Better Decisions!

    About Sigmetic and How it Works

    Sigmetic is a toolkit for the data-driven software team. It collects data from your GitHub organization and provides a full picture of the habits and trends in your team by exposing various KPI metrics from the team’s performance. The founder believes that continuous improvement starts with insight.

    Sigmetic
    Sigmetic

    We already have a series of useful tools for monitoring the performance of our servers and infrastructure, but if we really want to secure the quality of the products we ship, we need to start applying the same effort on monitoring the team’s development processes. That’s what Sigmetic is all about!

    Sigmetic – Target Market Size

    Sigmetic is in the industry somewhere between a productivity tool and an analytics tool. We mostly consider this a productivity tool for development teams, and according to BusinessWire, “the business productivity software market is expected to register a CAGR of 12.6% during the forecast period 2019-2024.”

    We believe that analytics tools used for team behavior and performance will have a significant role in the future. With the rise of Machine Learning, we also believe that performance prediction and estimates will be impactful – an area where we see Sigmetic fit in the future.

    How was Sigmetic Started?

    In Simon’s career as a freelance consultant, he noticed how teams seem to struggle with the same recurring issues: Code reviews that are taking forever, PRs that cannot get merged due to missing dependencies from other branches, an almost grotesque meantime to restore a bug and a missing overview of the lead time it takes to ship a new feature.

    Simon initially spoke with the managers that he was working with at the time, and they were thrilled about the idea. They had but one important request – the ability to embed the KPIs on their already existing dashboards. After talking to managers in other companies, there seemed to be a general interest in the idea, and the ability to easily embed the KPIs seemed to be a shared request as well.

    The initial research was overly qualitative and feedback only came from a small set of managers from companies that Simon Høiberg, founder of Sigmetic, had worked with earlier.

    He created 3 prototypes of embeddable KPI Widgets and created a landing page. He also added the ability to sign up for early access, offering a forever-free-account. The landing page went public and Sigmetic got a lot of interest and sign-ups.

    Relevant read: How to Boost Productivity- Make Every Minute Count With These Hacks

    Sigmetic – Product/Services

    The building blocks that make up Sigmetic, are the various KPI Widgets that you find in the Widget Library. You can use these widgets to compose your own dashboards exactly the way it makes sense to you and your team.

    Sigmetic Dashboard
    Sigmetic Dashboard

    Sigmetic connects to your GitHub account and collects data from the developer behavior. This enables you to visualize metrics such as commit trends, issue burnup, meantime to review, and much more. It provides a full picture of the habits and trends in your team, but it also enables you to narrow in on the potential bottlenecks that may hold your team back.

    “I guess we pivoted very slightly from the initial idea of Sigmetic, which was more oriented about performance – today, Sigmetic focuses more on trends and behavior”, says Simon, owner of Sigmetic.

    Founders of Sigmetic and team

    Simon Høiberg is the founder and CEO of Sigmetic.

    Simon Høiberg with graphic designer/UX consultant that's been a part of Sigmetic
    Simon Høiberg with graphic designer/UX consultant that’s been a part of Sigmetic

    He has two permanent consultants that are involved on a freelance basis. But they are not a core part of the team, per say.

    Sigmetic – Startup Launch

    Sigmetic’s primary channel of communication and marketing has been Twitter. The startup runs ads through its ad-program, but the biggest source of acquisition has been through content marketing.

    I’m deeply passionate about open-source, so we have open-sourced one of the most essential parts of the technology stack, Direflow, which is used to create embeddable micro-frontends, says Simon, founder of Sigmetic.

    Direflow was started just before the development of Sigmetic and has been a part of the very first prototype. Additionally, they’ve published blogs about how they build various parts of the platform, and – in general – been very generous with sharing as much as they can. That part has been the biggest lead-generator, by far.

    Also read: How to Do Competitors Analysis for The Website?

    Sigmetic – Startup Challenges

    Getting proper feedback, in the beginning, was surprisingly difficult! A lot of users were keen on signing up before the initial launch, and a lot of users immediately churned without leaving any kind of comment or feedback. When reaching out on email, users were mostly unresponsive.

    The team implemented a chat directly in the application that would forward the message to a designated Slack channel. That helped a lot. They also benefited from channels such as Reddit’s startup for finding beta-testers. But generally speaking, getting people into a conversation was a huge challenge.

  • An IIT Delhi Alumnus startup – AppDynamics aquired by Cisco for $3.7 Billion

    Jyoti Bansal, the former alumni of IIT Delhi, founded AppDynamics in 2010. In January 2017, Cisco acquired AppDynamics for the whopping amount of $3.7 Billion. Through this aquisition, they intend to create a combined portfolio for unprecedented application, business and infrastructure analytics. So here’s the journey of Founder & Chairman of AppDynamics – Jyoti Bansal in his own words.

    What a journey! 12 years ago today, in January of 2008, I was a young software engineer with a dream and determination to start my company. I spent my days making the rounds on Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley, trying to generate interest from venture capitalists. On nights and weekends, I sat on my couch in San Francisco and wrote code.

    In the nine years since, AppDynamics grew from that initial dream to a successful technology company that today is a strategic software vendor for the world’s largest enterprises.

    First and foremost, I want to sincerely thank all of the incredible AppDynamics employees — past and present — who were indispensable in getting us to where we are today. I am a firm believer that our successes in life are never individual journeys. I am honored and humbled to have worked with such talented and committed individuals. Your belief in our mission, your passion, your creativity and your hard work have made all of the difference. You are “AppDynamos,” indeed.

    In this journey of the last nine years, building the company as Founder & CEO for first eight years, and as Founder & Chairman for last one year, I learned a lot. However, one of the most important things I learned is that you have to have a big dream, a big goal, and a big vision; BUT, you have got to implement it “one milestone at a time.” There will be stumbles — but you get up and keep going until you reach that next milestone.

    AppDynamics Story from idea to $3.7 Billion

    The beginning called Appdynamics

    Every startup begins with a vision — a burning desire to solve some problem. In 2008, I was fully convinced that software would transform the world for the better and change everything we do. But I was equally convinced that if the whole world was going to run on software, someone had to make sure all of that software worked really well, all the time! I knew from my previous work experience that existing solutions weren’t cutting it. My burning desire to solve that problem became the genesis of AppDynamics.

    From a personal perspective, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I grew up in a small town in India, and on weekends I’d help my Dad with his small business. I loved it. My other passion was software, and so I went to college (IIT Delhi) to get my degree in Computer Science. As a software engineer, I’ve always felt like software was like “magic clay” and I could use that magic clay to sculpt solutions to so many different problems. I wanted to build companies that would leverage the power of software to make a difference in the world. I brought that dream to Silicon Valley as a 21-year-old fresh out of college and AppDynamics for me was the beginning of fulfilling that personal dream.

    Getting funded

    Once you have an idea and a vision, the first milestone for any startup is to secure funding. Only one in 25-30 software startups gets institutional venture funding, so as an engineer turned first-time entrepreneur, it was a bit of a challenge in the beginning. I pitched about 20 VCs and got many rejections. I quit my job, continuing to pitch VCs during the day, while coding during nights and weekends. After a few months, I had refined my story significantly and was able to get the company off the ground with $5.5M of Series A funding in April 2008.

    Also Read: Funded Indian Startups with Investors [June Updated]

    Building the Initial team at Appdynamics

    Suddenly I had $5.5M in the bank and one employee: me. I needed a team! For the founding team, you need some very special traits. You need people who are not only very talented in what they do, but who also love the uncertainty and pace of an early startup. The first call I made was to my good friend and one of the most creative and passionate engineers I knew — Bhaskar Sunkara. I was fortunate that Bhaskar agreed to come onboard as our first founding team member. Over time he became my close partner in leading and building our products at AppDynamics and today he leads our product organization as CTO and Head of Product.

    It took us another three to four months to assemble a full team of founding engineers, all with those special traits. It wasn’t easy, but by being patient and selective in our hiring, we were able to assemble a winning team.

    Finding product/market fit

    It’s one of the earliest and the hardest tests for any startup — finding the initial product/market fit (that is, a good market for the product you are planning to sell). Eight out of 10 startups fail at this stage.

    There were times at AppDynamics when we didn’t think we would make it. The economy was awful. It was 2009 — one of the worst times to raise any additional venture capital. I knew that if we launched our product and hired sales teams before we were 100℅ sure we had identified a strong product/market fit, we might run out of cash and fold.

    It took us 15 months and few key pivots to find our product/market fit and ship a good v1 product, a product we knew we could sell a lot. The key was talking to many potential customers, re-thinking our assumptions, iterating and redesigning until we got to that point. Our first paying customer was a company called Yap (now part of Amazon) in October 2009.

    The Launch- Appdynamics

    Soon, we had a handful of paying customers and a very healthy pipeline of interested prospects. It was time to take the next step — investing in sales and marketing. So the next major milestone was to launch the company out of stealth. We hired our first few marketing and sales employees and publicly launched AppDynamics in February 2010. The shop was open for business.

    We soon launched a free version of our product AppDynamics Lite. Because of our highly differentiated product, its ease-of-use and our large number of free trials, demand skyrocketed. Now we were in the “hyper-growth” phase and ready for the next step.

    Scaling Sales to a Competitive Advantage

    In 2011, I met Dev Ittycheria (now our Board member and CEO of MongoDB) for breakfast. He asked me to articulate the primary competitive advantages that were fueling our rapid growth. I listed out all the massive advantages we had in our product (the core architecture of our transaction tracing, the self-learning instrumentation, the ease-of-use, etc). He then encouraged me to think about what could be possible if we could build an enterprise sales force that was every bit of a competitive advantage as was our product.

    That inspired me to make that the next big company milestone. I resolved to learn everything I could about the art of enterprise software sales. We invested heavily in bringing some of the best enterprise software sales management into the company and over time built a highly skilled and methodical enterprise sales force. Meeting that milestone was key to our continued hyper growth for many years to come.

    Customer Success 2.0

    As we were rapidly scaling up sales to the world’s largest enterprises, I realized we needed to re-think the traditional customer support and delivery models that most enterprise software companies employed. Simple fact was, most large enterprises were unhappy with their software vendors, as illustrated by Net Promoter Scores (NPS) — a common measure of how satisfied your customers are — averaging around 20. (Contrast that with leading consumer tech companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, all of whom typically boast NPS scores of around 70!)

    At AppDynamics, we wanted our next milestone to set a new standard — build a customer support and delivery model, which we called Customer Success 2.0, that would delight enterprise customers in the same way leading consumer tech companies delight their customers. The key elements of that were about having a strong process to hold ourselves accountable for delivering the business value we promised during the sales cycle, and to directly align our teams’ incentives with the success of the customers — both things very different than traditional approaches.

    Establishing the culture for a long-lasting business at Appdynamics

    The next big milestone for us was to make sure we established a very strong cultural foundation, one that we could build on for years or even decades. Also, I realized that for this to be a long-term success, I had to personally own it and drive it. We defined our core cultural values in 2012 — relentless focus on customer success across the organization; open, data-driven and disruptive thinking; constant innovation and pushing the boundaries; collaboration and working together as one team; winning and consistently producing big results. I firmly believe that because our employees live these values on a daily basis, we are where we are today.

    From single product to a platform

    Our market for our first product, Java APM, was massive. And we had only captured a fraction of it. But I realized that to become a long-term strategic partner to the IT teams in large enterprises, we had to evolve from one product to a broad platform. We set expansion of our product to a broad platform — the application intelligence platform — as our next major company milestone.

    Most startups are challenged when trying to expand the product portfolio. Many times the core product teams find it tough to master the necessary adjacent technology areas. And often the sales teams find it harder to sell follow-on products.

    Early on, we stumbled. But once we adopted a “Startups within a Startup” model — bringing the same very small startup mindset to new products as we brought to our first product — we were successful.

    In a couple of years, we had multiple very strong products (APM for .NET/ PHP/ Python/ Node.js, Real User Monitoring for Mobile & Browser, Database Monitoring, Server Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, Application Analytics and others) as part of our comprehensive platform.

    Also Read: 20 Alternatives of Raising Funds from Investors

    Continued rapid growth

    As we established ourselves as a strategic platform for the enterprise, built the right cultural foundation in the company including a relentless focus on customer success, and instituted a world-class sales force, we continued to grow rapidly and meet many other milestones as part of that growth journey. That included triple-digit sales growth for many years in a row, multiple rounds of financing (and a “unicorn” status, for what it’s worth), and our global expansion.

    After eight intense years of running the company from the driver’s seat as Founder and CEO, about a year ago I handed over day-to-day operations of the company, and now I focus on helping with our vision and strategy.

    Today’s milestone, and the many milestones ahead

    All of the above led us to where we are today. My congratulations and sincere thank you to all of my journey mates in getting us here. However, the journey continues — and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity ahead as AppDynamics continues to achieve many more big milestones over the coming years, joined together on a bigger journey with Cisco.

    Disclosure: This is a curated column. The statements, opinions and data in these publications are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of StartupTalky or its editor(s). The article was originally published by the author here.

  • Taski – Your Journey to Productivity with Better Decisions!

    Decisions are hard and time consuming. Taski helps you make right decisions every-time. Taski is trying to cater to this problem by providing a web app which helps you take better and faster decisions with a wide number of frameworks like SWOT, RICE, etc. It has been featured as #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

    Read this article to know about Taski, products, founder, business model, startup launch, challenges and future plans.

    Taski – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Taski
    Headquarter Bengaluru, India
    Sector Productivity, SaaS
    Founder Mohit Khare
    Founded 2020
    Website usetaski.com

    Taski – Target Market Size
    How was Taski Started?
    Taski – Product/Services
    Founders of Taski and team
    Taski – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Taski – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Taski – Startup Launch
    Taski – Startup Challenges
    Taski – Future Plans

    Check out this List of Top Startups in Bangalore | Best Bangalore Startups

    Taski – Target Market Size

    Taski works in the productivity domain. The market is growing highly as more and more people get on internet and want to sort their busy lives.

    Some research shows that every person takes around 70 important decisions and over 35,000 simple decisions daily. Surely, this domain is going to expand much more in coming years with daily increasing internet users.

    How was Taski Started?

    Taski originated from a simple problem. We all make decisions! Sometimes it’s as simple as tea vs coffee and can be as complex as deciding new product features.

    Taski founder Mohit personally faced a lot of problems in making decisions on which framework to choose, which companies to apply to, and which features to build first for his ideas. He did some research and read some brilliant articles on taking decisions.

    After browsing through multiple articles, he found there are so many frameworks that work perfectly in certain scenarios like SWOT and Eisenhower Matrix.

    Taski SWOT Analysis
    Taski SWOT Analysis

    Unfortunately, there are no proper tools for people to use frameworks to make decisions. Mohit Khare did some research and asked around many product managers on how they make decisions. Many did use such frameworks, but mostly on excel or on paper, which is not the best solution. He even got a very good response and interest in the idea of improving decision making.

    Taski Ikigai
    Taski Ikigai

    Finally, he decided to build something clean and simple which almost anyone can use across any platform (web/mobile). Mohit’s idea for the MVP was to keep it as simple and intuitive as possible, give users a way to make and share their decisions.

    Also read: How to Boost Productivity- Make Every Minute Count With These Hacks

    Taski – Product/Services

    Taski is a simple responsive web app which works both on mobile and web platform. As you go to usetaski.com, you see a set of tools to make your decisions. Head over to the “how it works” page to learn more about each of the available frameworks. Suppose you start with the SWOT framework, you see a list of predefined sections where you can add your tasks, you also have the option to mark them as done, Ability to delete the task and easy task addition with just enter key.

    Taski website snapshot
    Taski website snapshot

    Taski also provides an option to share your decisions and research in multiple formats like Image, PDF, Markdown, and Document.

    Founders of Taski and team

    Mohit Khare is the founder and maker of Taski.

    He is currently focusing on building core features of Taski. Although a lot of people have reached out to collaborate, he will be focusing on expanding team as the platform gets more users.

    Relevant read: List Of The Best Calendar Apps to Stay Organized in 2020

    Since the product was focused around increasing productivity with decision making and at its core, it uses the task model, Taski came up as a short and subtle name for the product. Most importantly, Mohit could find a good domain for this.

    Taski Logo
    Taski Logo

    The logo again is highly inspired by the task and checklist model. Since essentially Taski uses a checklist to get work done, the logo signifies that with 2 symbolic checkmarks.

    Taski – Business Model and Revenue Model

    Currently, Taski is free for everyone. The founder initially wanted to see how people respond to it. There have been multiple feature requests, some of which will come up with a pro plan where you can save your decision in a personalized dashboard and have access to many other frameworks. Stay tuned, a lot of features are already in development.

    The plan is to go with the Freemium business model, core features of Taski will remain free for use but you wouldn’t want to miss out on the Pro version. You will see the pricing and details around it soon.

    Also read: Pabbly Connect: One Platform to Automate All Your Integrations

    Taski – Startup Launch

    Taski has got over 10K page views in its first week and over 3000 users have already tried the platform. Right now, the only platform Mohit used for marketing was social media like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and product launch sites like Product Hunt, Betalist, etc.

    Taski – Startup Challenges

    One of the challenges was actually figuring out which frameworks and decision tools people actually use and how do they use it right now. You need to find the problem before building a solution. There were minor tech blockers as well but that is always there and you get past them eventually.

    Taski – Future Plans

    Future plans include launching a personalized dashboard for users for easy management. They also have a plan for launching a team-based version for Taski.

  • HappyEasyGo – This 3 Year Old Startup is Fast Capturing the Indian Online Travel Booking Segment

    Tourism and Travel never fail to fascinate people, and it never goes outdated. In 2018, Indian travelers took approximately 2 billion domestic and international trips, and spent over $94 billion on transportation, accommodation and consumption during travel. The travel and tourism sector in India is growing fast and another trend we see is the increasing share of online travel bookings. As per reports, the share of online travel booking was 25% in 2018, and is expected to increase to 35% till 2021, with increase in internet penetration. Keeping up with this trend, many Online Travel Agencies have come up, of which Make My Trip, Yatra, Cleartrip etc are some well know names, but there are also some other players that are quietly but fast gaining a higher position for itself in the online travel booking segment. One such company that is now posing threat to the market leaders in the OTA segment is  ‘HappyEasyGo’. Founded in May 2017, this company has achieved quite a lot just within three years of its inception. Let’s have a look at HappyEasyGo’s journey so far.

    Company Highlights

    Startup Name HappyEasyGo
    Headquarter Gurugram
    Founder Boris Zha & Vivek Prabhakar
    Founded 2017
    Sector Online Travel Agency
    Parent Organization HappyEasyGo Travels Private Limited
    Website www.happyeasygo.com

    About HappyEasyGo
    HappyEasyGo – Founders & Team
    HappyEasyGo – Growth & Revenue
    HappyEasyGo – Funding & Investors
    HappyEasyGo – Business Model & Revenue Model
    HappyEasyGo – Competitors
    HappyEasyGo – Future Plans

    About HappyEasyGo

    Gurugram based HappyEasyGo offers flight and  hotel booking services at very modest rates. Founded by Boris Zha, HappyEasyGo initially started only with booking tickets for domestic and international flights, and later it incorporated hotel booking facilities across India. It provides convenient booking solutions for customers in its mobile application and through their website, with easy cancellation and rescheduling options, which helps the customers to save more in their travel packages.

    Also Read: A List of Top Popular and Innovative Travel Startups of India

    HappyEasyGo – Founders & Team

    Boris Zha founded HappyEasyGo in 2017, with the vision to provide convenient ways of reservation for business and leisure travelers at affordable prices. Boris who is from Singapore also founded Lvbanx.com in 2012, which is now one of the top top B2B OTAs in China. Prior to venturing into the online travel segment, Boris made a mark in the education sector too. Boris Joined Neworld Education Group in 2006, as a founding member of  Sakura International Japanese.  Boris also served as the CIO of Neworld Education Group.

    HappyEasyGo Founder & CEO Boris Zha
    HappyEasyGo Founder & CEO Boris Zha

    Vivek Prabhakar  is the co-founder of HappyEasyGo . An alumni of Jawahar Lal Nehru University (Chinese Language and South East Asia Studies) and Harvard Business School, Vivek founded VINI Group prior to joining HappyEasyGo as the cofounder.

    HappyEasyGo Co-founder Vivek Prabhakar
    HappyEasyGo Co-founder Vivek Prabhakar

    The three main directors of HappyEasyGo are Rajesh Kumar Dathik, Zhou Lei, and YanqiuZha. As per LinkedIn, HappyEasyGo has around 500-1000 employees.

    HappyEasyGo – Growth & Revenue

    Within a short span, HappyEasyGo has become the leading online travel platform in India, and has over 10 million user base. As reported in 2019, HappyEasyGo was doing around 25,000 air ticket transactions daily, while it did a little over 1000 hotel bookings as day, as revealed by the HappyEasyGo CEO Boris Zha. HappyEasyGo’s annual revenue is estimated to be around $3 M per year (as per Owler), and has an authorized capital of INR 15 Cr. As revealed by Boris, till April 2019, 80% of HappyEasyGo’s air ticketing volume comes from individual consumers, while only 20% came from corporations and business accounts.

    Also Read: Success Story of RedBus – a Startup that is Simplifying Bus Travel

    HappyEasyGo – Funding & Investors

    HappyEasyGo has raised total funding worth INR 3.5  billion till date. Here are the funding details of HappyEasyGo.

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    September, 2018 Series A Undisclosed Korea Investment Partners (KIP), Samsung, China-based CITIC Capital
    July, 2019 Series B – Korea Investment Partners, CITIC Capital Holdings, 10Fund, CVCapital, Chengdu High-tech Zone Venture Angel Fund
    November, 2019 Series B – Samsung Ventures, UOB Venture, 58.com
    December, 2019 Series B INR 3.5 billion Samsung Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Zero2IPO Ventures, UOB Venture, M&S Partners

    HappyEasyGo – Business Model & Revenue Model

    OTAs like HappyEasyGo earns revenue from various sources like-

    • Commission – Here the company earns commission when customers purchase air tickets or book hotels through their platform. In case of hotel booking, merchant model is also followed. In the merchant model, OTAs like HappyEasyGo books hotel rooms in bulk at discounted price, and sells the same to the customers at market price and thus earns profit.
    • Advertising Revenue – OTAs also lets Hotels advertise on their platform and earns money from it.
    • Earnings from Tie-ups – OTAs also ties up with banks and financial institutes to provide various facilities like travel insurance, for various offers on travel bookings etc, and earns commission when consumers buy insurance or avail services from banks or financial services through their platform. For example, HappyEasyGo tied up with MobiKwik, whereby customers can avail offers on making payment through MobiKwik, and also HappyEasyGo earns commission on the same.
    HappyEasyGo offers discount on making payment through MobiKwik
    HappyEasyGo offers discount on making payment through MobiKwik

    HappyEasyGo – Competitors

    The major competitors of HappyEasyGo are MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Cleartrip, Ixigo and Paytm. Though there are a lot of competitors in the travel industry, HappyEasyGo with its great performance is fast and steadily rising above the competition. As reported in 2018, i.e just within one year of its inception, HappyEasyGo went ahead of Paytm (Paytm started its travel business in 2014). In 2018, HappyEasyGo was doing around 1,80,000 to 2,00,000 flight ticket booking a month, which is more than that of Paytm which then was doing 100,000 to 120,000 flight ticket bookings a month. While, during the same period, Yatra and Cleartrip were processing between 2,30,000 – 3,00,000 flight tickets every year.

    Also Read: How Travel Startups are Planning to Recover after the Corona Virus Outbreak

    HappyEasyGo – Future Plans

    HappyEasyGo intends to extend the hotel booking allocations across the country and to build up its air ticketing services with increased market shares. With the motto of sustaining the lowest price, the company ascribes with popular brands to expand its services. Amidst the current Corona Virus Crisis, HappyEasyGo is not only letting its customer reschedule their travel dates without paying any rescheduling fee, but has also tied up with healthcare brands like 1mg, Medlife, Himalaya etc, whereby the company will provide discount coupons of these brands to its customers.

    As said by HappyEasyGo founder Boris Zha, the company is looking forward to closing 3000 hotel bookings a day and aims to become the best online travel aggregator in India.

    “India is the third-largest air travelling country in the world and we are confident to utilize the fresh funds towards gaining a commanding position in the cluttered online travel market in India”, added Boris after HappyEasyGo’s latest round of funding raised in December 2019.

  • Adapty – Increase Revenue from Mobile Subscriptions!

    Competition is extremely high now among mobile developers, so it’s important to manage customer retention, find the right price for each user, and precisely calculate unit economy. Therefore, there is a need for a one-stop tool for mobile subscriptions with a focus on marketing. Vitaly Davydov and Kirill Potekhin founded Adapty which is a service for analyzing and growing mobile in-app subscriptions.

    Read this article to know about Adapty.io, services, founders, logo, business model, funding, wiki, and investors.

    Adapty – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Adapty
    Headquarter New York with a dev team in eastern Europe
    Sector B2B SaaS
    Founders Vitaly Davydov, Kirill Potekhin
    Founded 2019
    Legal Name Adapty Tech Inc.
    Website adapty.io

    About Adapty and How it Works
    Adapty – Target Market Size
    How was Adapty Started?
    Adapty – Product/Services
    Founders of Adapty and team
    Adapty – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Adapty – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Adapty – Startup Launch
    Adapty – Funding and Investors

    About Adapty and How it Works

    Adapty is a service for analyzing and growing mobile in-app subscriptions. The company builds a set of tools that help mobile developers and marketers to increase the conversion rate to paid subscribers and manage subscription infrastructure.

    “Only in the App Store, there are over 2M apps and 90% of them are monetized with an in-app subscription. 5 years ago when we were working on Easy Ten (mobile language learning app), market was 10 times smaller than now. So we see that subscription is dominating the mobile market”, says Vitaly Davydov, Adapty founder.

    Adapty Features
    Adapty Features

    Adapty.io is a service for growing mobile subscriptions. It has the following features:

    • Quickly deploy in-apps with mobile SDK
    • Increase revenue with A/B testing for paywalls
    • Convert more subscribers with Promo campaigns
    • Analyze recurring payments with Dashboard

    It also integrates with 3rd party analytics and attribution services and forward subscription events to them.

    Adapty – Target Market Size

    According to App Annie, 94% of top-250 apps are monetized with in-app subscriptions. Only on iOS mobile, apps have made $4.6B in revenue and the number of subscribers has grown 5 times for the last 5 years. So mobile subscriptions are dominating the market. It’s pretty hard to guess what the next instrument will be for mobile monetization, but it’s for sure that it’d be recurring. Such payments are profitable both for mobile developers and Apple/Google, remember that vendors take 30% cut.

    Also read: Pabbly Connect: One Platform to Automate All Your Integrations

    How was Adapty Started?

    Adapty was started as an internal product for solving the co-founder’s own needs. One day, they realized that there’s a market for the product! They’ve seen some companies appearing with similar products and decided to join the race. The founders talked with 12 mobile devs companies and they all confirmed a need for features they’d like to develop. So, Vitaly and Kirill started Adapty.

    “After 4 months, we had an MVP and got our first customer. After that, we acquired 5 more and started to work with them very tightly so that they use Adapty on a daily basis”, recalls Vitaly.

    Adapty – Product/Services

    Adapty works in two modes. The first one is available without any coding and from a Free plan. Add App Store Connect credentials and you’ll get detailed analytics and reports. Real work starts with the SDK installation. It’s written in pure Swift (Kotlin for Android) and weights 100Kb.

    Implementing subscriptions in the app is really a pain, it requires a server to validate receipt, handling events from Apple, linking events to a user, and finally store it somewhere. It usually takes at least 3 months to correctly deploy subs without losing data. But with Adapty, SDK companies can deploy in-app subscriptions super easy in the app and sync subscribers between platforms including the web.

    But this feature is just a start. The dealbreaker is paywall A/B testing. It allows customers to customize UI and change products on paywall without app release. Companies can tune pricing for different cohorts and grow revenue.

    The last big feature is a promo campaign in push notifications. 97% of mobile app users are freemium, but some of them are willing to subscribe, but they need a little push. Sending a limited discount subscription offer might be a nice thing to do.

    Adapty is a one-stop tool developer and marketers need to work with a subscription. Some features can be replaced via 3rd party services, but getting all in one place when it’s related to the economy is important for a business.

    Relevant read: List of Free Tools You Can Get While Working From Home | Deals on Tools in Coronavirus

    Founders of Adapty and team

    Adapty is founded by Vitaly Davydov and Kirill Potekhin.

    Owner of adapty
    Kirill Potekhin and Vitaly Davydov | Founders of Adapty

    Vitaly Davydov is the Co-founder and CEO and Kirill Potekhin is the Co-founder and CTO of Adapty.

    The co-founders have been working together for 6 years. They’re a team of 11 people now, most of them are engineers. Everyone in the team has tech backgrounds in computer science, however they split out responsibilities.

    It’s a legacy. Vitaly and Kirill started another product in 2016 and it was doing ad optimization via adaptation. That’s how they get Adapty.

    Adapty Logo
    Adapty Logo

    Adapty – Business Model and Revenue Model

    Adapty.io has a freemium SaaS business model. Core features such as SDK for payments are available right on a Free plan. They have 2 paid plans starting from $99/month.

    Also read: Appsumo LifeTime Deals with Comparison – [May 2020]

    Adapty – Startup Launch

    The startup grew organically and used the network to start. After that, it launched on Product Hunt.

  • Explara – Helping Startups in Monetizing and Generating Audience for their Events!

    We keep hearing about the milestones and challenges that startups keep facing in their initial years. One of the most prominent ones is that creative entrepreneurs and businesses have to struggle a lot to monetize their events with also bringing the audience to these events.

    Therefore to empower these entrepreneurs to explore their endeavors and grow their business while taking it to the customers across the globe, Santosh Panda launched Explara in 2008. Explara helps creative entrepreneurs and small businesses to monetize from events, online selling, community, and crowdfunding.

    Explara – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Explara
    Headquarter Bengaluru, India
    Sector Online Ticketing, Event Promotion, SaaS
    Founders Ashok Kumar, Santosh Panda
    Founded 2008
    Legal Name Signure Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
    Website explara.com

    About Explara and How it Works
    Explara – Target Market Size
    Founders of Explara and team
    Explara – Startup Launch
    Explara – Startup Challenges
    Explara – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Explara – Competitors
    Explara – Funding and Investors
    Explara – Acquisitions and Mergers
    Explara – Growth
    Explara – Future Plans

    Check out this List of Top Startups in Bangalore | Best Bangalore Startups

    About Explara and How it Works

    Explara is a SaaS (Software as a Service) based platform that sells tickets in different event categories like sports, travel, and food, and has tied up multiple theatres and multiplexes in states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat. Explara is a great combination of an event platform combined with a me-too ticketing site which is a boon for event organizers.

    So ideally, Explara takes care of pre-event, event-day & post-event needs of the organizations. Cutting the long story short, it covers the end-to-end needs of an event and therefore becomes the go-to place for organizations that want to create mega-events.

    Explara has events majorly in:

    • Biz & tech
    • Learning & classes
    • Entertainment & shows
    • Sports & outdoor segments.

    Explara offers the following products:

    • Event Ticketing & Registration
    • Online Selling & Payment Solution
    • Crowdfunding & Donation
    • Community & Membership

    Explara’s Enterprise Products ranges in:

    • Event Management Cloud
    • Membership Cloud
    • Event Day Mobile App
    • Submission Software

    Explara – Target Market Size

    According to a RedSeer report, the online ticketing market in India has recorded quarterly revenue of $28 million.

    Moreover, RedSeer’s Online Ticket Market Updates states that 50% of the industry revenue has been coming from movies, with the next big contributor being events. Sporting events, concerts, and other live entertainment shows were the significant money-making aspects of the almost $330 million in revenue generated by the online ticketing industry in 2017.

    With the big guns relentlessly acquiring smaller competitors in this domain, according to Wikipedia, a CAGR of 20% is expected in the online ticketing industry by 2020. According to reports, the global online event ticketing market size is expected to reach USD 67.99 billion by 2025.

    Relevant read: BookMyShow – Saving You The Hassle Of Booking Entertainment Tickets

    Founders of Explara and team

    Explara is co-founded by Santosh Panda and Ashok Kumar.

    Co-founders of Explara
    Co-founders of Explara

    Santosh has an MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School and is CEO and Co-founder of Explara. Before launching Explara which was formerly known as Ayojak, he was a member of the board of advisors of Target and was a Senior Software Engineer at eBay.

    Explara founder Santosh has a decade of diverse experience in the software industry in the UK, USA, Finland, and India. He has extensive experience in product development, consulting for FTSE 100 companies, and start-up companies across the globe. Some of the organizations for whom Santosh, owner of Explara, was involved in building products are BBC iPlayer, eBay UK, Cyclone Commerce, OnStation, William Hill, Spoke Software, and Vodafone.

    Ashok has an MBA from the University of Bradford. He is the co-founder and Vice President – Operations at Explara. Before Explara, he was a tech lead at MindTree Ltd.

    Explara – Startup Launch

    When Santosh launched Explara in 2008, he did see that this industry was an unorganized marketplace. But fortunately, it started through a supplier marketplace route. This means that the startup is offering a robust platform paired with a set of event ticketing/registration & management solutions to make it easy on the event organizers & promoters.

    Explara – Startup Challenges

    One of the biggest milestones that Explara faced was an intense competition. And to combat that and to engage more users on its platform, it has devoted consistent efforts and has been seen innovating in the existing features and also launching new and exciting features from time to time.

    Going along the same lines, Explara came up with a solution for solving the event discovery on the social horizon by launching a new feature called “Event Discovery Solution”. This new feature brings all the events at one platform of the users’ interest. Also, one such initiative in the past was when Explara had launched a feature called Community Solution platform.

    Also read: MeraEvents: Redefining Event Ticketing And Management

    Explara – Business Model and Revenue Model

    As we know, Explara is a cloud-hosted event solutions platform, it mainly focuses on four service areas namely event ticketing/registration, payment processing (online, offline), merchandise selling, event marketing, and logistics.

    Explara Logo, tagline
    Explara Logo

    Now, a user can create an account on the platform for free and organize free events at zilch cost. And if you’re wondering how does Explara make money? This is how. Explara charges a nominal fee applicable when the event organizer uses the platform for a paid event/conference/meet-up.

    Explara – Competitors

    The top competitors of Explara are Townscript, MeraEvents, BookMyShow, KyaZoonga, Nearify, Magnet, AllEvents.in and Events High.

    “There has been competition from the day we launched in 2009 to date. Our focus has been to remain focussed on customer needs and build to solve their pain points. We as an organization believe in the culture of heads down work-in-progress models. Hence we didn’t pay much attention to how competitors were doing”, said Santosh Panda, the founder of Explara.

    Also read: Online Marketplace for Venue Booking ‘VenueLook’ Forays into end-to-end Event Planning Services

    Explara – Funding and Investors

    Explara has raised a total of $486.4K in funding. Here is a list of all the funding rounds:

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    February 2013 Venture Round – HBS Alumni Angels, Srijan Capital, Blume Ventures, Rajan Anandan, Kishore Warrier
    November 2015 Seed Round $486.4K Hyderabad Angels, Ness Wadia

    The investors include Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Angels, Srijan Capital, Blume Ventures and angel investors including Google India MD Rajan Anandan, Kishore Warrier, businessman Ness Wadia, Singapore Angel Network and Hyderabad Angels.

    Explara – Acquisitions and Mergers

    In April 2015, Explara acquired IndianStage. It is an event ticketing platform for performing arts. With this, Explara was all set to add more cities to its kitty with access to the theatre and entertainment segments.

    Also read: BunnyBash- Making Event Hosting Effortless

    Explara – Growth

    • More than 20,000 suppliers
    • Serves 5000 events every month.
    • Handles more than 1,000 transactions a day
    • Has executed more than 50,000 events

    Explara – Future Plans

    “Our current focus is India, though we are digitally growing in other countries. We intend to serve India fully before we look for our physical business presence in other countries”, concluded Santosh Panda.

  • Oxedent – Make Your Business Reach New Heights with Stunning PPC Management Services!

    There is a lack of access to digital marketing for small businesses looking for ways to grow their business. Big agencies don’t really work for the SMEs and people/agencies that work for SMEs are not effective at making them profitable from online ads spend. Biplab Poddar started Oxedent with the mantra to make them profitable, not just maintain the digital presence. The company has created an online advertising strategy exclusively for SMEs that turn their Online Ads into a profit center.

    Read this article about Oxedent, how it works, founder, tagline, business model, challenges, growth, and future plans.

    Oxedent – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Oxedent
    Headquarter Kolkata, India
    Sector PPC Management, Online Ads management
    Founder Biplab Poddar
    Founded 2017
    Parent Organization Oxedent Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
    Website oxedent.com
    Contact hello@oxedent.com

    About Oxedent and How it Works
    Oxedent – Target Market Size
    How was Oxedent Started?
    Oxedent – Product/Services
    Founders of Oxedent and team
    Oxedent – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Oxedent – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Oxedent – User Acquisition
    Oxedent – Startup Challenges
    Oxedent – Growth
    Oxedent – Future Plans
    Oxedent – Recognition and Achievements

    Check out this List of the Best Startups in Kolkata | Exhaustive List of Kolkata Startups [Updated]

    About Oxedent and How it Works

    Oxedent deals with Pay per click (PPC) management which includes Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads campaigns setup, and management.

    The company has been successful in executing 250+ projects since the last year across 54+ countries with the maximum clients from the UK and EU Countries.

    “We ensured that our clients get the maximum of the ads spent. Our average client sees a 6.5x ROI, meaning every $1 they spend on ads we gave them a sale of $6.5. We want to expand to a 50 people team and expand our reach to the Australian market.”, says Biplab Poddar, Founder, and CEO of Oxedent.

    The company is working on building a SaaS app which won’t just automate the campaign setup and optimization but also make the campaigns profitable for eCommerce businesses. E-commerce business owners will be able to tell the app their advertising goals and the system will choose the audience, ad platform channels, placements to get the most out of their ads spend and increase store revenue.

    Oxedent – Target Market Size

    There are an estimated 20 million – 24 million e-commerce sites across the entire globe, with more and more being created every single day. Only about 2M of them generate $1000 per month in sales. On the other hand there are 2.05 Billion active people shopping online. So there is clearly a gap or limitation in the way e-commerce businesses advertising online.

    Also read: ADOHM- Optimizing Digital Marketing Campaigns for the Indian Businesses!

    How was Oxedent Started?

    Biplab Poddar, the owner of Oxedent, pursued a B.Tech Degree from Kalyani Government College in Electronics. Like all other parents, it was expected from him too, to get a 9-5 job in an MNC and get his life settled. But it was way too different from what he thought.

    Biplab started doing paid internships right from 3rd year of his college and helped many startups with their digital marketing who were just starting up and can’t afford full-time employees. Going forward he started learning advanced techniques and tools of Digital marketing.

    “I read an interview of a freelancer making $30000 per annum from consulting on digital marketing to foreign clients, then I learned about freelancing platforms like PeoplePerHour and UpWork. I created a profile immediately, got my first job in about a few weeks. It was a London based Law firm, I helped them create Google AdWords campaigns, and they are still my client”, recalls the Oxedent founder.

    This was the turning point of his life and since then, he never looked back and was making a handsome sum of money every month in the final year of his engineering days. Poddar never wanted to join a full-time job but was unable to convince his parents and had to join a full-time role as Digital marketing manager in a real estate company.

    The founder paralleled freelancing with his job and continued like this for 3 months after college. More companies were inquiring for his services and single-handedly he couldn’t deliver.

    “Then finally the fire in me made me quit my job to be on the crest on a wave and hired more digital marketing enthusiasts, trained them, and made them a part of my team. It was September 2017, I registered Oxedent as a Pvt. Ltd company”, says Biplab.

    Oxedent – Product/Services

    The company is into PPC management services and the biggest USPs are:

    • They’re ROI & Focused
    • One of the few Google Partners
    • They only do PPC unlike other agencies that do everything from social media management to SEO, email marketing etc.

    Relevant read: Digital Marketing Agencies of the East: The Rise of Online Marketing

    Founders of Oxedent and team

    Biplab Poddar is the founder and CEO of Oxedent.

    Founder of Oxedent
    Biplab Poddar

    They are a 9 person team at the minute. They maintain a very friendly environment in the office, all of the team members are under 30 so there is a lot of work and a lot of parties.

    Hiring: It doesn’t matter if the candidate has a college degree or not as long as he/she knows what he does (PPC) and how to make campaigns generate sales.

    Oxedent has its name derived from the term “Oxygen” for the company acts like oxygen to the brands who are suffering due to online absence and who need a complete transformation in the digital sphere.

    Oxedent Logo
    Oxedent Logo

    The company has a distinct clear vision to break through the clutters of internet marketing agencies, hence the name Oxedent, far unique than the typical “solutions”, “info” in the names of most marketing agencies.

    Also read: C Com Digital: A 360 Degree Digital Marketing Agency

    Oxedent – Business Model and Revenue Model

    The company has a very simple flat fee business model based on your marketing budget. This is a list of ad spend vs company price:

    Ad Spend (INR) Oxedent’s Fee (INR)
    70K-100K 20K
    100K-150K 25K
    150K-200K 30K
    200K-250K 35K
    250K-300K 40K
    300K-350K 45K
    350K-400K 50K
    400K-450K 55K
    450K-500K 60K

    Oxedent – User Acquisition

    Biplab already had a client base and a strong portfolio since he was doing freelancing for 2 years before he started the company. The company has got its first 100 clients organically through the website. They also have an amazing blog where they share how-to, strategy and step by step articles on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, conversion rate optimization(CRO).

    “As I mentioned earlier most of our clients are SMEs and they try to run ads of their own and look for help online and found through our blog and we help them get maximum ROI from their ads spend”, says Biplab Poddar, owner of Oxedent.

    The team hasn’t spent a single Rupee on ads in the first one and half years but focused on creating content that helps business owners utilize the Online Ads to scale their business/sales. They have 100+ amazing articles on their blog that brings them 80% of the website traffic.

    They also have tie-ups with UK and USA based digital marketing agencies and offer white label PPC services to their clients.

    Relevant read: Pulno – Ace the SEO Game with This Website Audit tool!

    Oxedent – Startup Challenges

    Hiring the right talent was/is a challenge in Kolkata for a very niche service (PPC management). When Poddar was managing clients’ ad campaigns single-handedly, he ensured all of them are profitable (made sure they get at least $4 in sales for each $1 they spend on ads). While growing the client base it was his main concern that the quality of his works is the same and clients get maximum ROI.

    Biplab Poddar initiated a training program called ‘oxedent mini’ where he teaches PPC & CRO to candidates with digital marketing experience and then hire them, to maintain the quality of his service and highest ROI for the clients.

    Oxedent – Growth

    • Operating locations: The majority of the clients are from the UK, EU Countries, Middle East, and the USA.
    • Revenue: About 1 crore
    • Profit: 25-30 Lacs
    • Userbase/Client base: The team has worked with 250+ clients so far. They are currently working with 18 clients.
    • Notable clients: Tata Housing, UNICEF Ireland, Boy London.

    The revenue of Oxedent has grown from 22 Lacs in the first year to 47 Lacs in the second year to 1 Crore in the third year.

    Also read: Mad Influence – Get the Best Influencers to Promote Your Business

    Oxedent – Future Plans

    There are an estimated 20 million – 24 million e-commerce sites across the entire globe, with more and more being created every single day. Only about 2M of them generate $1000 per month in sales. On the other hand, 2.05 Billion active people are shopping online. So there is clearly a gap or limitation in the way e-commerce businesses advertising online.

    Oxedent is building a SaaS platform where the e-commerce business owners can reach engaged shoppers with buying intent and only spend on ads channels and audiences that are likely to generate sales and revenue. The platform will automatically suggest the best advertising channels, keywords, ad copies by scanning their website, and products.

    Oxedent – Recognition and Achievements

    Oxedent Awards, recognition, achievements
    Awards won by Oxedent

  • Amar Canvas – Creating a Glorious Marketplace for Artisans!

    As we all know India is a place for Art and Culture, but if you look at the current situation, most of the people here are losing their hobby or passion and young people are not getting the opportunity to make their hobby in the profession. But there is a market place which is big enough to purchase the artworks from them.

    Here comes Amar Canvas with a vision to create a bridge between the artist and the buyer globally. Amar Canvas was launched by Mr. Rahul Basak & Mr. Amit Kumar Mahishya Das in 2018. Read more about Amar Canvas company profile, founders, growth, funding, and future plans.

    Amar Canvas – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Amar Canvas
    Headquarter Kolkata, India
    Sector E-Commerce
    Founders Mr. Rahul Basak & Mr. Amit Kumar Mahishya Das
    Founded 2018
    Parent Organization ADRB ART PRIVATE LIMITED
    Website amarcanvas.com
    Contact Email contact@amarcanvas.com

    About Amar Canvas and How it Works
    Amar Canvas – Target Market Size
    Founders of Amar Canvas and team
    How was Amar Canvas Started?
    Amar Canvas – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Amar Canvas – Startup Launch
    Amar Canvas – Startup Challenges
    Amar Canvas – Funding and Investors
    Amar Canvas – Growth
    Amar Canvas – Awards
    Amar Canvas – Future Plans

    Check out this List of the Best Startups in Kolkata | Exhaustive List of Kolkata Startups [Updated].

    About Amar Canvas and How it Works

    Amar Canvas takes sign-ups on its website by the artists and after the documentation and verification, it allows the artists to upload their product pictures. And after the second round of verification, it allows the product to be in the product list for the buyers to buy. The great part here is that this platform provides 100% profit to the demand of an artist.

    “In this way, we believe people will create more art because they can as well earn from it and not only that, they don’t have to choose any other profession apart from their hobby.”, said Rahul Basak, founder of Amar Canvas.

    Amar Canvas – Target Market Size

    The market is definitely a big one if one calculates including the hospitality industry of India. On the contrary, Amar Canvas is focusing more on the Interior designing industry which includes interior designing of houses and offices.

    Founders of Amar Canvas and team

    Amar Canvas was founded by Mr. Rahul Basak and Mr. Amit Kumar Mahishya Das in 2018.

    Founders of Amar Canvas
    Mr. Rahul Basak and Mr. Amit Kumar Mahishya Das

    Rahul Basak is the Co-founder and CEO of Amar Canvas, and Chief Editor of “My Canvas Talk”. He is also the director of ADRB ART Private Limited. Apart from these Mr. Basak is a documentary photographer, the projects done by him were featured in MTV NESCAFE LAB. He is also one of the Indians to hold Adobe’s Behance Coin. He is currently working on his first book.

    Amit Kumar Mahishya Das is the Co-founder and COO – Amit is an experienced director with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He is skilled in Customer Service, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Strategy, and Team Building. He graduated from Techno India, Salt Lake.

    The team strength currently at Amar Canvas is 10 people.

    Also read: BigBasket – Success Story of India’s Largest Online Grocer

    How was Amar Canvas Started?

    All of this started when Mr. Basak visited Hong Kong, and being an artist himself he noticed the gap of the market. When he was studying engineering, whenever he talked about making his art as a profession, there was no scope available at the time.

    While returning to India, he talked to his close friend Mr. Das, (now the co-founder) about this. And after that within a day, they arrived at the mission of creating a company to help the young artist and everyone who is seeking the market. After this day, there was no turning back and as of today, these co-founders have started their second company as well which is My Canvas Talk.

    The main perspective of creating or coming up with the name was, the co-founder duo wanted to make an international service but keeping in mind that it originated from Kolkata, they used a Bengali word called “Amar” which means your own and the second part is the most famous word among the artists all around the world “Canvas”. So all in all, it means “A canvas of your own.”

    Amar Canvas Logo
    Amar Canvas Logo

    Relevant read: Zomato – Delivering Delicious Happiness to Your Doorsteps!

    Amar Canvas – Startup Launch

    “The day when we launched the company we already had close to 20k+ followers on our online portals. And we did one of Eastern India’s biggest startup launch press conferences at Kolkata Press Club in front of 60+ journalists. Most of the things we did were via social media as well via collaboration with My Canvas Talk.”, added Rahul Basak, Co-founder of Amar Canvas.

    Amar Canvas Launch
    Amar Canvas Launch

    Amar Canvas – Startup Challenges

    The most challenging part for Amar Canvas and the team was believing in things when they were not even real.

    “We crashed so many times and I believe as a friend to me, Amit was always the biggest support, that helped us to grow. So, trust me, your co-founder matters the most.”, added Rahul Basak, owner of Amar Canvas.

    Amar Canvas – Funding and Investors

    Amar Canvas is a bootstrapped startup.

    Also read: MakeMyTrip – Success Story, Founder, Business Model, Funding, Revenue, News

    Amar Canvas – Growth

    This venture is growing regularly. Soon, all the products will be available according to the global region in dollars or euros. And not only this soon they will start taking the artist registration from different countries as well.

    Amar Canvas – Awards

    The awards and recognitions backed by Amar Canvas are:

    • “The Best Organization Facilitating Artists” By Indian Women And Youth Skills Foundation
    • Amar Canvas won the title “Best Social Impact Startup” from all over INDIA by The Indian Awards
    • “The 10 Most Promising Startup of The Year 2019-20 in India” by The Intellectual Indian

    Amar Canvas – Future Plans

    Amar Canvas is now working towards taking the artist registration from different countries.

  • HackerEarth – Crowdsourcing Solutions from the Developers’ Community!

    As it is correctly said, people who solve problems the best have suffered the most. Similarly, Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash being app developers themselves launched their startup HackerEarth in 2012 with the motive to build an entirely meritocratic system using a sufficiently objective measure for an app developer’s skills.

    Their initiative was driven by the fact that the number of technology employment opportunities are growing at an exponential rate. And with the advent of digitization, more and more jobs are being available to Information Technology (IT) professionals. Still, there are a bunch of app developers who do not get the job they deserve.

    HackerEarth – Company Highlights

    Startup Name HackerEarth
    Headquarter San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US
    Sector Edtech and Recruiting Platform
    Founders Sachin Gupta, Vivek Prakash
    Founded 2012
    Parent Organization HackerEarth Inc.
    Website hackerearth.com

    About HackerEarth and How it Works
    HackerEarth – USP and Innovation
    Founders of HackerEarth and team
    How was HackerEarth Started?
    HackerEarth – Startup Launch
    HackerEarth – Business Model and Revenue Model
    HackerEarth – Startup Challenges
    HackerEarth – Funding and Investors
    HackerEarth – Growth
    HackerEarth – Future Plans

    Check out this List of EdTech Startups in India | Emerging Education Startups

    About HackerEarth and How it Works

    HackerEarth mainly focuses on crowd sourcing solutions from the developers’ community. So, it ideally provides enterprise software solutions that help organizations to manage the firm with effective innovation and solve their technical recruitment needs.

    HackerEarth Logo
    HackerEarth Logo

    They also have launched a second version of the innovation management software. This new version focuses on creating a holistic innovation management unit within the company itself. This, in turn, paves the way for enhancing greater creativity and a culture of innovation in the organization. Also, the new version puts extra focus on security, customization, and verticalization of the product across various industries.

    All in all, HackerEarth’s innovation management software is a superiorly indispensable platform for enterprises that helps them to tackle various problems through internal and external audiences respectively.

    HackerEarth – USP and Innovation

    • HackerEarth holds a community of more than 2 million-plus app developers coming from more than 57 countries backed by robust platforms to swiftly drive superior innovation in the industry.
    • HackerEarth also has launched an initiative where they enable enterprises to host innovation challenges for business-related problems and the startups can participate. This initiative is called Startup Connect.
    • The startups who perform well are shortlisted and get a chance to work with enterprises to co-create creative and innovative solutions.

    Also read: Aviate – Making College Students Job Ready

    Founders of HackerEarth and team

    HackerEarth was founded by Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash in 2012.

    Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash are founders of HackerEarth
    Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash

    Both of the co-founders, Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash, are hardcore programming graduates from IIT Roorkee. And both of them at different points interned and also worked with Microsoft and Google

    Sachin Gupta, CEO, and Co-founder – Having been a startup founder for most of his professional life, Sachin Gupta is an entrepreneur by heart. He claims that he absolutely loves doing whatever it takes to build a company and is powerfully driven by things that challenge him.

    Vivek Prakash, CTO, and Co-founder – A programmer at heart, a dual degree holder in computer sciences. Vivek leads the Information Management Group at IIT Roorkee and has also been a part of Google Summer of Code program.

    Currently with 120 members, HackerEarth has close to 45 people in engineering, 15 marketers, and 25 sales representatives, with the rest in operations.

    How was HackerEarth Started?

    Like many other startups, HackerEarth also started in the dorm room. These two individual’s passion for app development was at an all-time high when they were in college. Taking the same passion forward, they thought that it’d be a great idea to build a product that cultivates the culture of coding amongst the students in India.

    And that’s how they came up with MyCareerStack. After its huge success, they again put their passion for driving seat and thought of exploiting the problems that companies face while recruiting. And to create a solution to this, they launched HackerEarth.

    Relevant read: Skillate- Solving the Complications of Recruitment Flawlessly

    HackerEarth – Startup Launch

    HackerEarth penetrated in the market with the strategy for creating programming courses to majorly serve two purposes:

    • To enable the programmers to practice and learn code.
    • And to allow the programmers to compete with other programmers through exciting and meaningful contests.

    HackerEarth has created some interesting programming challenges with certain levels of difficulty which appeal to all the developers on a global level. They are called Hackathons.

    Hackathons provide a great platform for developers to showcase their talent. These type of programs keeps the programmers engaged and allows them to practice and learn code in a fun way. At HackerEarth, the range of learning varies from basic concepts to advanced ones. The basic concepts include modules like Algorithms and Data structures and the advanced concepts include modules like Machine Learning.

    HackerEarth – Business Model and Revenue Model

    So ideally, there are two products that HackerEarth has to offer. Both the products are essentially sold as SaaS:

    • HackerEarth Sprint– It is an innovation management software that helps companies drive creativity and innovation through internal and external talent pools. This includes its global community of 2M+ developer and they work with large enterprises, SMBs, Universities, and Government entities to help them effectively solve their innovation needs.
    • HackerEarth Recruit– This is a more on the technology side. It is a technical recruitment interface that helps in optimum technical talent screening which allows its clients to build a strong and proficient team.

    HackerEarth – Startup Challenges

    The biggest challenge for HackerEarth like any other startup is to scale the programmers and keep them engaged on HackerEarth. It seems like stronger the hub, easier is the business operations. So for HackerEarth, everything stems from the hub and scaling it across the world is the biggest hurdle to toss.

    Relevant read: How Hiring is Affected due to Coronavirus Outbreak?

    HackerEarth – Funding and Investors

    HackerEarth has raised a total of $11.5M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 1, 2018 from a Series B round.

    Here is a list of all the funding rounds of HackerEarth-

    Date Stage Amount Investor
    June 2013 Venture Round – –
    February 2014 Seed Round $500K Prime Venture Partners
    April 2014 Seed Round – –
    February 2017 Series A $4.5 Million DHI Group Inc
    November 2018 Series B $6.5 Million –

    HackerEarth – Growth

    • HackerEarth’s corporate client’s list is seamlessly unending. This list includes huge companies like Wipro and Adobe.
    • Since the launch to now, HackerEarth has been growing exponentially. Now, they are a team of 120+ people, are catering to more than doubled user base and grew their revenues 5X.
    • Also, HackerEarth has grown into a global community of 2+ million developers driving creativity and innovation to the field like a force.

    Also read: Colangels – Connecting you with right people

    HackerEarth – Future Plans

    • Expanding the brand presence across other countries with a prime focus on US, Europe, and SouthEast Asia is number one on the list of HackerEarth’s plans.
    • HackerEarth is aiming to be the largest platform for developers. Hence their long term plan is to add over a million more programmers to this community over the next few years.

    “This is the right time for us to look at markets overseas, when our India business is still growing, rather than a time when we are reaching saturation in this market. At present, 85 percent of our revenues come from India and 15 percent from international markets. In three years, we see this balancing out to a 50-50.”, said Sachin Gupta, co-founder of HackerEarth.