Digital Tunnel for India’s Retail Business

Hi Guys,

After the TRH Open House in Bangalore (September 27,2014), I was really impressed with the vibe and enthusiasm community had and amazed to see so many people venturing to solve real problems and creating unique business opportunities while doing so.

I decided to take a plunge into entrepreneurship and knew that I couldn’t stick to a day job for longer period.

Let us limit ourselves to Provisions/Kirana/SuperMarkets vertical for now.

This was the time where there was lot of hype in the hyper local segment. Many startups in this sector had access to a good amount of funding. Everyone was talking loud about the convenience of “Ordering Groceries at your fingertips”.

Once we visited around 20 stores listed on these platforms, made some transactions there and asked them about the means of ordering for home delivery – all 20 of them gave their visiting cards and asked us to call them. Not even a single store was promoting these apps to their existing customers. They didn’t even have a sticker of these apps/websites at the store.

The first thing we realised was “If Merchants are not ready to onboard their existing customers to your platform, then getting new customers to the store is impossible!”.

At the same time while talking to merchants in our family and friends circle, we realised that there are numerous small problems these merchants have to deal with for their day to day operations. We also spoke to merchants who have invested in some POS and inventory management solutions and abandoned them due to the complexity involved. They always had to decide whether to concentrate on business or on managing these systems. We realised the current day POS solutions are not designed with Indian Merchants in mind and not solving majority of their problems. Billing and Stock Management is just one set of the problem.

We felt there is a huge opportunity to become “Digital Tunnel for India’s Retail Business” by creating the right tools/solutions/platform for these merchants and building a self sustainable ecosystem by solving the problems of other stake holders(Distributors, Manufacturing Companies …) involved.

For doing this, it was really necessary for us to create an awesome POS solution, which is connected and can be operated at fingertips. It was also necessary for us to make sure that this POS should be easily operated by any merchant, irrespective of their exposure to education or technology (Just like how people use FB, WhatsApp).

Though for becoming “Digital Tunnel for India’s Retail Business” you need to have an awesome POS solution, we also realised in India you can’t make a big business out of POS.

With these assumptions in mind, I quit my full time job in May 2015 and started to execute the first phase of Operations “Building an Indian POS solution”. We decided to start with an Android App for merchants.

We pivoted the app in small towns around Bangalore to make sure we face tougher challenges. It took us 6 months to build and align the app to the merchants thought process.

On October 15, 2015 we launched the Merchant App along with the Customer App. As the POS itself is linked to Customer App, customers can view their transactions/points/details with the Store irrespective of the mode of transaction (In-Store Purchase, Order through Phone/WhatsApp…)

In the last 9 months, with just 4 stores on boarded over a period of time, we have processed ~42K transactions worth +1.65 CR. We literally process 100% of transactions through our tunnel. 

We believed in solving real problems and making sure that the existing merchants are able to process 100% of their transactions instead of running behind the number of merchants we have on the platform. In the month of June 2016, we started reaching out to merchants and today we have an additional 6 stores on boarded for trial period of 90 days.

We are currently running a subscription based model where merchants pay 6 months in advance. We charge INR 1000/Month/Device. We haven’t spent even a single penny on marketing and freebies on both merchant side and their customers side. Any Device or other related costs has to be incurred by the merchant.

In this journey of 14 months, we took care of many things for our merchants. Starting from how much they can save on devices to saving even a cm of paper roll while printing. We have integrated our mobile app with all the POS/Regular Printers, USB/Bluetooth Scanner, Bar Code printers, Weighing Scales. Merchants are able to perform more than 95% of their operations in a tap or two.

Today in less than 5 minutes, with an upfront investment of 5K INR merchants can operate/monitor their business from anywhere. We are fortunate to serve one merchant aged around 50 with no formal education and another elderly person who is aged 75+. These people find our POS very similar to what they think while writing on paper or doing the math in brain.

We have an awesome POS which can be used by any merchant irrespective of age/gender/education/exposure.

Now comes the seconds phase:

We are planning to launch POS + B2B + Gamification on the same platform in October. We would initially working as a facilitator on the B2B side than a market place.

We are doing a survey with 1000 stores on their average sales of Dals & Pulses and the goal is to “Save 10K-15K INR/month for these merchants” with our B2B platform.

We have some ideas to link Gamification with B2B segment, which enables the POS data flow and creates a complete feedback loop on the end customer front also.

We would be doing some backpack trips to different corners of India to set up our sourcing networks.

We are bootstrapped and have raised a small seed amount from a friend.

We have branded our merchant side solutions with name Merchant@Hand and the customer side solutions with name Store@Hand.

Customer side application Store@Hand is more like a MVP with very little time spent. We have invested most of our time in building a strong foundation for the merchant side operations and management.

Merchant Side application is not open to public as of now.

We are having a development team of 4 members (3 freshers + myself). And these awesome guys have thrown me out of development now to make sure I take care of business :).

We have started building a strategic and operations team on B2B side over the last couple of weeks.

Would be interested to listen to the experts here. Would be happy to share our vision and direction and get a feedback on the same. Any connect or guidance on the B2B side would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Chandan

Twitter – @prchandan

PS: Though we had created the social identities and registered the domains, we haven’t built the websites as our target community would never look at it at this point of time. We would be getting our website up and running in a short time.