Takeaways from Startup India Campaign by Modi
On Saturday, 16th January 2016 The Indian Prime Minister announced a number bounty points for the Indian Startups & Entrepreneurs. The campaign called “Startup India” saw numerous Indian Entrepreneurs getting into some rigorous discussion. At the end of the program, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the gathering. Here are some highlights of Startup India Action Plan, presented by him.
1) Income Tax exemption for first 3 years.
2) Fund of Rs. 10,000 crore (with 2,500 crore each year) to be invested in Startups in next 4 years and a Credit Guarantee Fund for Rs. 500 crore each year for next 5 years.
3) Capital Gain exemption if Startups invest capital by selling their personal assets.
4) 80% Rebate in registering Patent.
5) Easy Exits in 90 days.
6) Self-certification compliance.
7) No kind of Inspection for first 3 years.
8) Incubation program to be started in 5 Lac Schools and setting up of 35 new Incubation Centers.
9) No Govt intervention in Startups.
10) A scheme for Women Entrepreneur to be announced soon.
11) A group of lawyers to be setup who will help resolving Patent related problems for free.
12) 7 New Research Parks to be started with a fund of Rs. 100 crore each.
13) Organizing Startup Fest all over India and abroad regularly.
14) Mobile App based registration for Startups from April 1, 2016.
15) Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) for encouraging Innovation among Startups.
Download the complete Startup India Action plan here: https://t.co/baQ4SxwaZe
- Published in Blog, Entrepreneurship
What, why and how Digital Marketing?
Very often we hear the of buzz of the digital ads, internet marketing, social media marketing, etc. Today in this blog I thought of taking you into the world of digital marketing and how it can be a generate more revenues. In this blog I shall talk about digital marketing, its importance, the process, how it you can make it a part of your business and then I will touch upon types of ads, targeting, engagement and measurement.
WHAT is Digital Marketing?
Any marketing activity done over the Internet using various digital devices is called digital marketing.
WHY Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is the most effective and widely used method of marketing in today’s world. The key reasons why it so popular among the marketers
- Its wide and effective reach.
- It’s cost effective as it’s measureable.
- Easy process to target your niche.
- Optimization based on the performance of your campaigns.
- Due to the tracking and monitoring, performance and retargeting is made easy in Digital Marketing.
Understanding the process of Digital Marketing.
- The first step and the most important step is to identifying your Customers, which will consist a detailed research in order to target the only the potential buyers.
- Once the target audience is figured out it’s time to work on the brand awareness, that’s working on the visibility of your products.
- Based on the brand awareness campaigns, we get in the targeted customers.
- Once the customers comes in, it’s important to Engage with the customers.
- After Engagement with the customers, they convert into Leads/Sales.
- The fifth step is measurement of the campaign, based on which optimization becomes easy.
- Retention.
Before going forward i would like you to see the Video posted in this blog, in order to understand how digital marketing can change your business around.
From where do i start?
Assume I sell a particular cosmetic products which caters the need of a girls, from a store based out of Jayanagar, Bangalore. Let’s try to integrate Digital Marketing into my business.
- Identifying the potential customers, so as the cosmetic product I sell is to cater the need of a girl. Say the age of my audience is aged between 18 and 24 years. Now moving towards to geographical research of the potential audience, say my business is set up in Bangalore and I want only people in Bangalore to see my ads. One more targeting I want to aim for is device on which I want to place my ads, say I want to display my ads on mobile only or desktop only.
To sum up my research, the gender I am targeting is females aged 18-24 years, based in Bangalore using mobiles (you can also target specific areas in a city and particular digital devices as well). Suppose you don’t have an online store then you are restricted to put up ads which are aimed to get footfalls in the store, and target only people in Bangalore so your number of potential customers are restricted. If u have an online store then your target can be a country, just imagine the number of specific customers you will have!
- Now the Visibility, Brand Awareness & Targeting. Increase visibility – It’s a good practice to have to an online store, as this helps to increase your horizons. So I will have a website, a page on various social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These online properties are owned by you, hence we can call this a owned media it is to bring in traffic to your site by inbound or outbound marketing ways. You can say it’s like push and pull in offline marketing, however this is much more effective than offline world. You can also go in for paid media, where you can advertise on various platforms by using various platform the best are one been Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Emails Campaigns, etc
Google Ads – Google ads is an advertising program by Google, which lets advertisers target potential customers by showing ads on Google search engine result page based on the keywords. The other service of Google Ads, is the Display Ad Network where Google lets you advertise on the network of its partner websites, currently there are 2.5 million websites registered with Google to facilitate display advertisements. What makes Google Ads effective is you pay Google only when someone clicks on the ads, you don’t pay Google if people don’t click your ads, this concept is called Pay per click (PPC).
Facebook Ads – It’s a service by Facebook that lets us advertise on Facebook which can be seen in your newsfeeds and right sidebar.
LinkedIn ads – There are quite performance oriented as LinkedIn is for professionals. This service is effective when you wish to target professionals on the basis of work profile. However this service is expensive when compared with Google and Facebook ads.
All these above mentioned services allows the users to target their audience as per their needs, in our case also, targeting is based on the gender, age, location, device and interests. So I would prefer to setup the online store and go for ads for my cosmetic product store.
- The next step is engaging with audience. Now always remember not all people coming on to your site have the intention of buying but your conversations with every single customer matters. Don’t be always about selling, try to give value to your customers, like giving tips, market updates, etc. It’s also very important be act responsibly when you reply to your customer queries, reviews, comments and feedbacks. A new customer tends to go through reviews, comments and feedbacks so your replies matter a great deal to the existing customers. These things do have an impact on your new and existing customers. Remember conversions are based on how you engage with your customers.
- Conversions in the form of Leads/Sales is the final objective of digital marketing. There are two types of conversions micro and macro i.e. when a customers does a small activity like visiting your site, downloading your freebies it is a micro activity. Macro on the other hand are bigger steps like buying a product or requesting a call back, filling forms, etc. When you go for ad campaigns, it’s very important to run relevant and specific ad campaigns so only the niche audience is targeted and interested people click on the ads. Based on the clicks on these ads, the price per click, is calculated. When people with irrelevant or no interest in your offering click on your ads it is a bigger harm done to you, how? Well when people click on your ad you have to pay the publisher, when they land on your site and don’t do any activity they increase your bounce rate of the site which affects your SEO.
- Measurement – This helps you to measure and understand your traffic and its nature for you to run ads more effectively, you can use a number of analysing tools, most popular one being Google analytics which is followed by Adobe, IBM. When it comes to Ad Campaigns, lets assume I have a ₹100 budget for a day which I distribute ₹50 for Google Ads, ₹30 on Facebook ads, ₹20 on others that is emails, SMS, etc. If we make some sales at the end of the day, by using the analytic tool we can measure the effectiveness of advertising platform used. Suppose our analytics say that our Facebook ads are generating better conversions then Google then digital marketing lets optimise these campaigns by simply reducing Google budget from₹50 to say ₹30 and increase Facebook ads by ₹20 spending ₹50 on Facebook.
- Retention of customers is also important to keep our sales ticking, when I say retention of customers it applies to new and existing customers. We can classify the retentions in 2 types Vertical & Horizontal. Say, when a customer’s wants to buy a facewash, but along with the facewash she also ends up buying a cream this is vertical retention. When a customer buys a face wash and returns to buy the same product again it is horizontal retention.
Conclusion
By taking the digital route, it’s easier and much more effective approach to grow your business as it increases your reach to a larger, specific audience at a cost effective price.
Read about how to setup an Ecommerce website for your company.
- Published in Blog, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Marketing & Brand Management
Guide to setup an Ecommerce Business in India.
In this blog I have tried to compile the things that you need to go online in India. Before we start you need to know there are multiple online marketplace which lets you have a seller account example flipkart, snapdeal, and amazon where you can simply register and list your products on these sites and start selling, however these site will charge a certain percentage on sales. Here in this blog I will be talking about how to setup your own market place.
Domain name
Whenever we start some business we always ensure it to give it a name so that it is easy for the people to find it, similarly when we go online we have to book a domain name for your business. Example, www.amazon.in, this is a domain, amazon is the domain name and .in is the domain extension.
There are various domain extensions based on the industry, country, etc. for example industry specific, .biz – small business, .edu-educational institutes, .org – non-profits groups or trade associations, .info – resource website., .in – India, .uk – United Kingdom, .us – USA, .com is a universal extension.
For our website, I would suggest a .com or an .in extension and try to keep the domain name less than 3 words. You can buy the domains on BigRock and GoDaddy.
Web hosting space
You’ll need a space to host the data of your site on the web server, hence we need to buy host spacing. The best hosting space in the market is Hostgator, however there are many more service provider like godaddy, bigrock, etc. This hosting space is linked to your domain through the name servers in the domain console. The Name servers are provided by the service provider.
Based on your requirements i.e. you have a single or multiple domains choose a suitable plan. On hostgator, there are 2 popular plan
- Hatchling Plan – lets you host single domain and gives u unlimited hosting space. It costs around ₹ 375/-month for a year.
- Baby Plan – lets you host multiple domain on the same hosting space and gives u unlimited hosting space. It costs around ₹ 455/-month for a year.
Here is a trick to save some money hunt for coupons on google you will get up to 30% off. On special occasions like Independence Day, republic day you do get 50% off but that’s on your luck!
For a people planning to build their sites on WordPress, I would advise buy a Linux hosting.
Content and conceptualizing your site
Plan your content in detail, your content will be the key to earn customers, you need to clearly define whether you are selling or just displaying information of your business. Another important step is to Conceptualize, that is the look and feel of the website, the content on the homepage, the process of buying. Plan your site in detail, avoid a hooch pooch content on your homepage. Think like a customer!
Development of your site
Also remember there are 2 ways of doing things, one is you learn and do it yourself or get it outsourced. Getting your website built on WordPress is always a good option as development & updating the site is easy. Remember WordPress is just a platform to build and edit a site. The theme is the thing that makes it visible to the customers when they log on to your site. These themes are available for free and paid, free theme are restricted when it comes to customisation. Paid theme lets to customise the site to a greater extent.
U can buy themes on Theme Forest, usually most of the developers buy themes from this portal and simply integrate it on WordPress and charge you a bomb. If the developer develops the site using HTML coding then it is like building the site from scratch.
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is a medium which enables u to do transactions online. You need to subscribe for these services which is a third party vendor and customers coming to your site will make payments to these sites and the payments are redirected to you into your subscribed bank account. Some of the payment gateway providers are – CCAvenue, PayU, PayPal, AirPay, CitrusPayments, etc.
I would advise you to a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. What is SSL certificate? A SSL certificate verifies the authenticity and identity of a website owner, it uses https protocol and displays a padlock in the browser to indicate that it is trusted. This is issued by authorities like VeriSign and Thwate. This is a method to keep the data safe, the server passes encrypted data to the web browser, which is reconstructed by the browser.This certificate is provided by your Hosting space service provider which is provided by subscription costs around ₹1,350 – ₹ 2,760 based on the warranty levels on Hostgator.
Ecommerce Platforms
If you don’t want to get into the hassle of booking a domain and development and all the above mentioned steps you can simply go to platforms like Shopify, zepo, etc. These platforms take care of all these hassles and you simply start listing your products n start selling! However these companies charge quite a bomb, but based on your product and sales you can decide.
I would recommendWooCommerce, it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, and also covers Payment Gateways and shipments.
Shipment
You can subscribe from a number of shipment providers like Fedex, DTDC, Bluedart, Gati to name a few. Usually these service provide offer a wide range of services for ecommerce and prices vary based on weight and distance of the shipment. You also need to keep in mind whether the service provider offer u to have Cash on Delivery option along with the delivery. In order to track shipments you can simply subscribe to Aftership, ShipRocket and Mypacco.
Taxation
It’s not required to set up a company to do ecommerce, in India, but I would recommend you to register as a sole proprietor. However some payment gateways asks for Business ownership documentation, so it’s better to just register an LLP. I have been a partner in LLP and its very easy to setup. You can also consult a CA or a Lawyer for better details or check out MyOnlineCA.
- Published in Blog, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Marketing & Brand Management
Inside Snapdeal, the Dil ki Deal.
Snapdeal is an online marketplace for mobiles, clothes, consumer electronics and other accessories. Snapdeal was founded in 2007. It has raised $1.5B in 9 rounds. The latest round was in 2015. Some of Snapdeal’s investors include Alibaba Group, Foxconn and SoftBank Corp. Some of Snapdeal’s latest acquisitions include Reduce Data, Inc., LetsGoMo, etc
The Journey
In 2010, an offline couponing business named MoneySaver was established by two young budding entrepreneurs Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal. It was inspired by groupon.com and MoneySaver went on to sell a whopping 15,000 coupons over a span of just 90 days! The twist in the plot came in November 2011 when the founders were inspired by the success of Alibaba.com and decided to create an online marketplace on the similar lines. Kunal and Rohit decided to shut down the coupon business and a result of this Snapdeal was born. With the core value – Innovation, Change, Openness, Honesty and Ownership the company has gone to become a $4.8 Billion as of today.
Funding
Snapdeal has raised about $1.5 billion so far from 34 investors altogether.
Date | Funding | Investors |
January 2011 | $12 million | Indo-US Venture Partners and Nexus Venture Partners. |
July 2011 | $45 million | Bessemer Venture Partners along with existing investors. |
April 2013 | $50 million | eBay along with existing investors. |
August 2013 | $75 million | Softbank Capital. |
February 2014 | $133 million | eBay along with Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Saama Capital. |
May 2014 | $105 million | Blackrock, Temasek Holdings, Premji Invest and others. |
August 2014 | undisclosed | Ratan Tata. |
October 2014 | $647 million | SoftBank. |
August 2015 | $500 million | Alibaba, Foxconn Technology Group and SoftBank. |
Acquisition
Date | Amount | Company | Details of the Company |
June 2011 | Undisclosed | Grabbon.com | group buying site |
April 2012 | Undisclosed | esportsbuy.com | an online sports goods retailer |
May 2013 | Undisclosed | Shopo.in | online marketplace for Indian handicraft products |
April 2014 | Undisclosed | Doozton.com | fashion products discovery site |
December 2014 | Undisclosed | Wishpicker.com | gifting recommendation site |
January 2015 | Undisclosed | Smartprix.com (Stake) | product comparison website |
February 2015 | Undisclosed | Exclusively.in | luxury fashion products discovery site |
March 2015 | Undisclosed | Gojavas.com (20% stake) | time-bound logistics and supply chain service provider |
March 2015 | Undisclosed | Unicommerce.com | ecommerce management software and fulfilment solution provider |
March 2015 | Undisclosed | Rupee Power | financial services marketplace |
April 2015 | Undisclosed | FreeCharge.com | mobile-payments company |
September 2015 | Undisclosed | Reduce Data | a programmatic display advertising platform |
Marketing Strategy
- Get your first deal free – Got a huge response from the customers.
- Referral Program – The Company paid a fixed amount to its user when they got a friend to sign up.
- Affiliate marketing – The Company paid started paying ₹30 on every lead generated to the affiliates however, it did not yield the desired results as it was found that the competitors were paying a better amount then Snapdeal. However, Snapdeal was quick with it response and increased the price by to ₹50-100 on per lead generated.
- Aggressive Email Campaign – Snapdeal has been doing quite an aggressive campaign to convert the leads into potential sales.
- Social Media – Snapdeal has tremendous followers on Flipkart & Twitter with a high level of engagement. The Twitter account has seen a 21,300 followers while the Facebook page has over 3,674,243 fans. The responses to the queries and complaints stand to max 5 mins from the time of post.
- Trolling Flipkart – Snapdeal has been taking its competitors head-on be it 2014 when Flipkart had its Big Billion Day Sale or in June 2015 when Flipkart had launched #achhakiya campaign.
- TV Commercials – Snapdeal has successfully utilized the television platform to drive in organic traffic. Many well-known Bollywood celebs like Pulkit Samrat, Alok Nath and Krishna Abhishek have endorsed the branding the past. Recently Snapdeal has hired Aamir Khan for the “Dil Ki Deal” campaign and it was been winning hearts of millions.
- TV-Shop – Snapdeal has its own TV channel, TV-Shop. The channel keeps running product offers 24*7, where the users can order products through a phone call, this is something very similar to tele brands ads but own an exclusive TV channel.
Future Plans
With Snapdeal sharing the second largest market share at 22% in India (Flipkart leading the market share by 44% and Amazon at 14%), Snapdeal plans to increase its market share and has also started gearing up for an IPO (Initial Public Offering). The IPO is expected in 2016-2017, this will help Snapdeal raise more capital for themselves & existing Investors.
- Published in Blog, Case Studies, Company Insights, Entrepreneurship
Inside Ola Cabs.
It all started when 2 IITians sat down for a brainstorming session and came up with OLA!
The brain behind Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati decided to get started with the idea on 3rd December 2010 in Mumbai which went to become the largest cab provider across the country, spread across 86 cities and with more than 40,000+ cabs registered under them currently. The key to success was the car options they provided their customers namely the Mini, Sedan and Prime, letting the customers pay through various modes for their rides.
The Journey:
It all started when Bhavish was thrown out of a taxi while travelling to his destination when refused to pay extra money that was demanded by the driver. That’s when the idea of Ola was born and Bhavish started to develop a platform to address this problem that was faced by almost everyone on a daily basis. He sat down with his classmate Ankit Bhati and started ANI Technologies Private Limited, which later went on to be OLA. Bangalore and Mumbai are the major revenue contributors for the company.
The Funding:
Ola has raised about $901.8 million so far from 21 investors all together.
- In April 2011, Ola went in for a seed funding of $330k from Kunal Bahl (Co-Founder, CEO – Snapdeal), Anupam Mittal (Founder, CEO – Shadi.com), Rehan yar Khan (Founder, CEO – Remindo).
- After a year in April 2012, Ola went in for a Series A funding and raised about $5 million by Tiger Global Management.
- In November 2013, a Series B funding of $20 million from Matrix Partners and Tiger Global Management.
- 8 months later, Ola raised $41.5 million in a Series C funding from Matrix Partners India, Tiger Global Management, in which Sequoia Capital and Steadview Capital took the lead.
- A major breakthrough came in when Japan’s SoftBank Capital invested a whopping $210 million in a Series D funding in October 2014.
- In April 2015, Ola went in for another rounding of funding Series E and raised $400 million from a bunch of 9 investors ABG Capital, Accel, Falcon Edge Capital, GIC, Mauritius Investments, SoftBank, Steadview Capital, and Tiger Global Management, in which DST Global took the lead.
- 7 days back on Sept 14, 2015 Ola raised another $225 million in Series F funding from 9 investors in which Falcon Edge Capital took the lead followed by ABG Capital, JS Capital, Softbank Telecom Corp, Dan Neary, FII LTR Focus Fund, Steadview Capital, Parkwood Bespin and Tiger Global Management.
Network & Revenue Model:
The following analysis of Ola comes down from my personal observation and numerous interactions with the cab driver on a regular basis.
Network:
- Drivers with valid permits by transport authorities can sign up with OLA, while they do own a bunch of their own fleet of cabs, but major number of cabs are from individual or cab operator owners.
- A couple of drivers, said that Ola had provided them with the smartphone which was worth ₹8,000 on registering with Ola. The driver has to login in to the app and based on the location of the driver, the nearest customer is connected however once the driver logs out, he won’t get pings of his next ride. Ola provides flexibility on the login and logout timings of the drivers.
- Incentivises for the driver in Bangalore range from ₹500 to ₹750 on 12 and 14+ rides in a day, respectively.
- When a driver rejects a ride, and if the customer complaints to the support team then driver won’t get the incentive for that day.
- If a customer complaints regarding route taken by the driver or misbehaviour the driver is apparently barred for a day.
Revenue:
Raghunandan G and Aprameya Radhakrishna founders of Taxi for Sure, a company in the same domain said, that due to the heavy losses they had incurred over the years they were forced to sell-out the company and apparently they were bought by Ola for $200 million in cash and stock. So the question here is Ola making profits? Well I will let you think over it!
However
- Ola charges the drivers ₹4,000/- every month as registration charges.
- Every driver is liable to the company 20% of their fare charges on every ride.
- The discount coupons and the free rides provided by Ola are compensated with the commission money with the driver.
- Ola Money, a product that was launched by the company which enables customers to have wallet and lets people pay to multiple domains.
- Ola Grocery & Cafe is another segment in which Ola has ventured into which lets customers buy grocery & order food online which is later dropped at the residence of the customers.
Marketing Plan:
I believe the marketing plan of Ola revolves around “Today’s Luxury, tomorrow’s necessity”, And Ola has actually lived up to this motto very well.
- Ola stickers: The major advertising push comes in from the cabs with the Ola stickers which boost up brand visibility.
- Word of mouth: The major trigger was the word of mouth in the metros when people started suggesting the website, app and call centre numbers to their friends and family, as they were charging cheaper than the rickshaw and the taxis.
- Ola Air Prank: On 1st April 2015, social media was stormed by a video of Ola making air transport feasible for common man, however later the company announced it was a prank but the social media audience loved this prank and got people talking about the company and was also trending for almost 2 days on the social media.
- TV commercials with #Chaloniklo campaign did boost up brand visibility and the user base.
- Social Media: On Facebook Olacabs has 295,662 likes and with a 35k followers on twitter.
- Social Mentions: Ola has more often topped the list of social mentions at almost 90,000+ when compared to its competitors Uber, Meru Cabs, Easy Taxi, etc.
- Referrals and Free Rides: have been playing a very prominent role in the promotion of the company and also increased a loyal customer base.
Future:
As the online cab market has been estimated $6 Billion with a growth of 25-30% every year, it has indeed become a hot spot of investment among the investors. I feel Ola will go on to be the biggest cab provider of the country with an estimated growth of 20% every year. They plan to have a deeper penetration into the 2 tier cities and also increase their cab density in each city through the referral programs for drivers. They also plan venture into the luxury car segment.
- Published in Blog, Case Studies, Company Insights, Entrepreneurship
Inside the Housing.com
Housing.com, a company that has been making quite some headlines ever since the CEO of Housing.com Rahul Yadav and Shailendra Singh, Sequoia India MD got involved in a conflict, well the issue was raised when Rahul alleged that he was poaching Housing.com staff or be it recent controversial decision by the board of directors of firing their CEO Rahul Yadav after the board meeting. He later made a graceful exit by giving all his shares to his company employees, when asked the reason behind this he simply said “I’m just 26 and it’s too early in life to get serious about money, etc.”
Housing.com was started by 12 IITians with a vision to severe housing shortage, currently there are 8 founders are serving the company. The main key to the success of housing.com was the in innovation and used map-based portal for house hunting, subsequently redefining the standards. Initial in 2012, when the firm was born they were using “Housing.co.in” domain but with the intentions to target international users, the team decided to buy the domain name “Housing.com” and 03-333-333-333, a national number for a whopping $1 million.
In December 2014, Japan’s Soft Bank invested $90 million into Housing.com, which valued the portal at a whopping $250 million.
The Journey
A group of 12 young boys from IIT Bombay started searching their house, apparently it turned out to an impossible affair, it took them apparently a month and later they ended up finding a house near IITB campus. The IIT connection played a major role and they started to help IIT friends and a bunch of potential clients, in reaching them accommodation, which interestingly made them 1-2 lac per month from brokerage within a short period of time. Later they aspired to bring themselves on national arena and started Housing.co.in June 2012.
This Mumbai based real estate search portal Housing.com allowed customers to search for housing based on various filters, with a network of 6,000 brokers the company has been serving 40 cities in India.
But when it came for expansion, they realized they lacked extensive local and geographic knowledge of different cities and states and that gave birth to a well-planned online map-based portal, “housing.co.in”.
Funding and Expansion
Housing.com has raised a series of rounds of funding since 2012.
- In June 2013, they altogether raised $5.5 million in a four series from Nexus Venture Partners. These funds were used create Data Science Lab and to expand across various cities like Chennai, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad, Faridabad, Delhi and Noida, and also was used for staffing of 700 employees and create 1, 00,000 unique users per day.
- In March 2013, Housing.co.in raised two round of which one being ₹5 crores from Haresh Chawla (former CEO, Network18) and the other one being ₹50 Lakhs from Zishaan Hayath (co-founder of Chaupati Bazaar).
- In November 2013, Housing.com added child friendliness index (CFI) to its platform which enabled users to measure neighbourhoods in three different criteria’s – Number of schools, hospitals & parks and Proximity of these facilities. Later in December 2013, search for paying guest rentals on introduced on the portal based on the advice Data Science Lab (DSL).
- In June 2014, Housing.com raised $19 million collectively from Helion ($8 million), Nexus ($7 million) and Qualcomm ($4 million).
Revenue model:
- The revenue model of Housing.com is subscription based where landlords, developers, agents, land owners buy display on the site.
- Data collectors of Housing.com physically verify the property, clicks pictures before putting them up on the portal. They charge ₹5,000 for its 6 months subscription and ₹8,000 for an annual subscription.
- Further details of revenues have not been revealed as their investor have confidentially clauses but however reports suggests that the portal broke even their operational cost recently for Mumbai market in span of nine months.
Marketing Strategies:
Housing.com utilized the traditional & Digital ways to expand their brand reach. Housing.com been seen & heard billboards, hoardings, TV, Radio and the Internet. The principle of Housing.com on the digital platforms is to stay focused and ROI driven and most importantly critic friendly, which eventually led drive back high traffic and also made lead generation a cakewalk. Housing has been focusing on the building more supply, which urges more people come on the site.
- Print Media: Housing.com has a budget of $40 million on advertising and marketing in 2015, its “Look Up” campaign which was started in March, was designed by Moving Brands was indeed the first marketing initiative showing how the basic need for a home is a critical part of an individual’s journey.
- Social Media: Housing.com com has been maintaining a uniform appearance across all social platforms makes it easier for followers and users to identify and engage with the brand with ease. The content development and business targets is an effortless affair on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
- Instagram: Housing.com has efficiently banked upon the core principle of Instagram by curate some amazing photos, and connecting with people who share the same interests. The company has incorporate real images and illustrations in its Instagram account.
- Content: the Housing.com portal is a very informative and invigorating portal. Having effectively analysed needs of the visitors and devising a strong content plan has went on to help the portal to generate these visitors into quality leads.
Data science lab (DSL)
Housing’s Data Science Lab (DSL) was established with a vision of enabling the portal with an effective algorithm, which it did by generated a “Heat Map” algorithm. It also went to deliver various other parameters like demand flux maps based on these filters, and also show price variations in properties across the various city.
Future plans:
The mission of Housing.com being help millions of people struggling for months trying to find real estate that meets their requirements, over the years they have built over 8,00,000 verified listings across 50 cities and over the next few months they aim, to expand to 300 cities and map 40 million houses.
- Published in Blog, Company Insights, Entrepreneurship
T2B
In this post I am sharing a talk that i gave sometime back at a event in november 2013. So let me start up with a brief introduction of what I will talking through this session, so far we have been familiar with terms like B2B, B2C & C2C i.e. nothing but Business to Business, Business to Client and Client to Client. But now the Internet storm has hit these traditional ways and has introduced a whole new dimension called E-Commerce. I call this “T2B” i.e. Technology to Business. The effect of this whole new sector has taken competition, efficiency, transparency, to a whole new level. Gone are those days when, if I had to buy a phone I would have to go around the marketing hunting for the best price, though the product & the manufacturer remained the same the prices always varied sharply. Today all you need to do is one simple click and everything is just before you! This has benefited the buyers in a great way but also has negatively hit the retail sector. During this session I would like to take you through this new ways of business.
To start up with, how many of you are familiar with this company called Alma meter..? This company was started by 2 young boys, Varun Aggarwal & Rohn Malhotra it was a simple idea to make merchandise of schools & college, No big deal but things took a big turn when they thought of having an E-Commerce website in place which helped people to order merchandise from different parts of the country valuation after the first year ₹5 crores. You can read the book – “How I braved Anu aunty and co-founded a million dollar company”, a book written by Varun Aggarwal to know his entrepreneurial journey more closely.
One thing that you guys need to know is that when chose to put up a shop on the internet their shop was accessible not to a certain locality or a city but to a country which is densely populated, so the audience was not 100 but 100 crore! That’s the magic what Internet can do to the business. Sites like Google, Facebook, twitter, YouTube have become a part of everybody’s life and these websites offer some very reasonable price to promote your website.
Do you know that flipkart was started in 2007 and the initial idea was to sell only books? The founders, Sachin & Binny Bansal had invested ₹4 lacs into it and today it is valued to almost ₹1 lac crores, making a revenue of ₹5,000 crores as off date.
Phanindra Sama a alumni of BITS Pilani started this website called Redbus in 2006, just because he couldn’t get back home for Diwali and then he started red bus fhir saare bus booking agents ki lagadi and this he ended the story of redbus by selling it off for ₹800 crores at a point when their market was getting diluted. And guess what it was bought by Ibibo group which happens to a property of an Indian called Ashish Kashyap, it was basically a joint venture of Nasper’s & Tencent.
I won’t be wrong if i say that the valuation of these companies grew exponential only they used right platform and the right marketing medium.
In the first case of alma mater they never promoted themselves in that way like flipkart and redbus did. Alma mater restricted itself to merchandise, the marketing strategy was to get into minds of the people so one of the founder came up with this book called “How I braved anu aunty and co-founded a million dollar company”, the book did expectantly well and also did the marketing of Alma mater. One idea to market your company and get paid for it!
In the second second case i.e. the Flipkart they expanded into other commodities and started throwing ads across the internet using Google Adds. Just try this go on to Flipkart.com just select a product look at its details and close the website, after that
whichever websites you login to most them will carry adds by flipkart projecting the same product that u looked into!
Redbus altogether did the regular online marketing but they also came on with television ads, which was later followed by almost all these online portals.
Chumbak happens to another such merchandise website which presents Indian culture in a funky way they used Google ads to go big. It was an online hit and eventually they got into Retail sector by putting up shops in the Malls across the metro cities.
Now I would like to take you inside these sector and try to show what it takes to create one successful E-commerce portal.
To start all it takes is a one simple idea which you need to trust, the onlineprasad.com one such portal where in u can get prasads from trupathi, kashi, shirdi, etc. so in this particular b-plan it was the idea.
Let us say we will build a website to ship kunda & kardata which are world famous sweet that origin from Belgaum. Firstly we need to find vendors who make the best kunda in town say a shop A does it. The second aspect would be the building the website & the online transaction i.e payment gateway, do not keep the option for payment on delivery. The third and most important aspect is the packing & shipment of the product.
Kunda is available in 3 types packing, one is the fresh which is wrapped in the plastic and put in a box, second is the retort pack (preservative food packs likes Knorr soups packets, tomato ketchup) which lasts for 6 months, third is the canned packs which again lasts 6 months. Canned packs has a advantage and a disadvantage, advantage is you can ship it abroad and its disadvantage the can adds to weight of the package i.e 500gm kunda, 400gm can near comes upto 1kg, this adds to the shipment costs.
What we can do is we can ship the retort packs within the country & canned packs for aboard. A 500gm retort pack of kunda costs you ₹180 and the canned kunda costs around ₹250. So before you buy the kunda from your vendors remember the 10% rule of business i.e. 10% of every product you buy from your vendors is your commission. So the cost your kinda will be brought down to ₹162 & ₹225 respectively. If u you can sell the retort packs online for ₹250 & the canned kunda for say ₹350 and simply add a sentence further saying shipment extra, you make some good money. You can also mention we take Gift pack orders in which you pack it nicely with a cover which talks about the city, I expect this particular strategy would do wonders on the international market then the domestic.
For marketing you can picks what flipkart or chumbak did for their promotions, i.e Google Adds and other online marketing ways. Have targets for yourselves, as in you have to sell in x numbers of packets every month. Don’t just stick in promoting it only online try and penetrate into the Market, go to the metros, tie up with the sweet shops sell your products & the website give them the option of placing the order online. You can make a living out of the whole thing.
So what’s the moral of the story?? The moral is to earn money you don’t have to know how to make kunda, or have a shop just have a good website and you are good to go.
Over my past few years as a Digital Marketing & Business Development consultant has thought me a lot of things, let me try and take you inside this sector as per my understanding.
First lets me give you some brief idea of the website.
The first and the most important aspect of any website is the domain name and space to host it. I suggest you sastadomains.com & sastaservers.com the reason for this is sasta domains offers u free e-mail id when you buy it from them none of the others do that like the bigrock & godaddy guys. So when you book the domain u can print your business cards with the email id and start your work you don’t have to wait to buy the space for hosting. A .com domain costs around ₹650 and an .in costs around ₹250 for a year.
Second aspect after having a domain is the space. To run a basic ecommerce website without it crashing it’s advised to pick up the professional hosting which usually costs 2500 for year this will also come with a lot of add ons.
Third and the most important aspect of the website is the construction of the website. Since I am not a too technical person I will give you the basic idea, the website needs to be a dynamic website which can be built on any platform like the wordpress, custom php, magento, etc
Another important aspect of this part is the having Payment Gateway onto your website, this can be done by whoever is building the website or you can it up with help of the website called www.ccavenue.com. Normally a free user of a payment gateway has to pay 5.5% of ever transaction whereas a premium user pays 3.3%. To be a premium user you need to pay round around ₹30,000.
Second aspect is the marketing.
For marketing you get yourself connected to Google adds that’s the best means that can be suggested. The costing is quite reasonable and this is based on what all you pick like the target audience of for a particular xyz city, number of reaches, etc.
It’s also necessary to show your strength and presence on the social media, like facebook, twitter, instagram youtube, based on the products. Have a page on facebook it is quite necessary, first promote it among your fixed client base then opt for the adds which range from ₹320 – ₹1500 per day see your budget be clear with which city audience you are targeting and that would be good.
Have a good and a concrete plan for marketing because that’s the mean soul of an e-commerce website.
Third aspect is handling your finances and you’re Staff.
When you start up a company please make it a point to consult a CA before you start. Understand the Taxation structures & the types of taxes you need to pay to run the whole show. Gone are those days when I thought do doing a business and sat down with a friend made a logo and visiting cards and go on doing monkey business. Times have changed and time has tightened up all the rules and regulations. You overlook this point and trust me you will reach up a point when you will be screwed up the Tax dept. in such a way that whatever u have earned is gone plus you have to take loans to clear your dues!
For an e-commerce website you just need to have a good technical team to keep a track of your website & online marketing, you would need a set of people to do miscellaneous works this should be good enough for a start-up company. As and how you grow you can hire people based on the requirements. Always remember a good team can take you on top and the bad team can just throw you down in a second, so always choose your staff after evaluating them in and out and hire them only if they are required.
Like Radhakrishnan Pillai puts it across, starting up your own business and running it is no easy task, especially when you have no previous business experience. But that’s how an entrepreneurs are born. They start with an idea and dream to success. Most of them do not know the path they need to take, but the confidence they have taken them through all the ups & downs till the final destination where their idea is finally converted to financial success.
The most critical period in an entrepreneur’s life is when he has already experimented with his idea a little, and struggled the most, but money has not filled his pockets. Now, he sits down & wondered what went wrong. All his near and dear ones are taking every opportunity to prove that he was wrong to have taken this path.
Your final big financial leap in business maybe just around the corner. But getting frustrated after such a long period of failure, it is natural for one to wonders if fate and luck has really been on one’s side. That is the time when you start consulting fortune tellers, you will start depending on your zodiac, your sun stars and what not!
Always Remember Wealth alone is star of wealth. You have already put in a lot of efforts, time & money into the “idea” you truly believe in. Just continue doing this.
Capable men will finally convert the whole idea into an “amazing balance sheet”. The final Leap may come in any manner – big order, a turnaround client or a big investor, but one needs to keep undergoing these trails a hundred times.
Like my school teacher Father Mathew says Aim the Sky..! So that you land on the coconut tree. There will be your set of disappointments, Frustrations, Unfairness that you will have to face in various parts of life, and also you will be given with the options to flow into depression or to fight back, the choices will be made by you so choose wisely.
- Published in Blog, Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship