Interactions

ShoreTel’s Senior Vice President, Product, Eugenia Corrales

From eight employees to 210 in two years in India: ShoreTel

Sunnyvale-headquartered (California) ShoreTel, a leader in Unified Communications (UC) solutions, has been in India for over two years now and has had exponential growth. ShoreTel’s Senior Vice President, Product, Eugenia Corrales, who was in Bengaluru recently. She spoke on the company’s expansion plans and opportunities in India. Excerpts from the interview:

1. Brief me about the India operations:
ShoreTel started in India in May 2014 with just eight employees and today, we have a team of 210 people. Growth has been rapid and ShoreTel is very committed to the India market. Our India operations is a true microcosm of our global operations. We provide engineering and sales support; product development, testing and sustaining of products. On the support side, we have people supporting customers 24/7, on all product requirements.

2. From eight people to 210 in two years, how did you achieve this growth for ShoreTel in India?
Our global credibility and the exciting work that we do in the Unified Communications and Cloud space attracts talent; from competition and established, well-entrenched players too. Our collaborative culture also helped us secure good talent, resulting in positive word-of-mouth during recruitments from premium colleges.

3. How many offices do you have in India?
We currently have only one office, which is in Bengaluru. However, we work with multiple channel partners in the India market. We will continue to grow significantly and expand our footprint.

4. Tell us more about the partners that you work with?
From a sales perspective, India is still a new market for us; but with a lot of potential. We are building our partner network here. We have a total of nine active partners for ShoreTel in India so far, catering to our customers in the market.

5. Where did the name ‘ShoreTel’ come from?
ShoreTel came from the word ‘Shoreline’, a neighborhood in Silicon Valley, California where the company was first headquartered. It is a combination of Shoreline and telecommunications that evolved into the name ‘ShoreTel’.

6. From the common point of view, what exactly does ShoreTel do? Could give us a brief insight?
We provide business communication solutions, known asUnified Communications (UC). That involves VoIP telephony, audio, video and web collaboration, contact center solutions, mobility and collaboration tools. These are available onsite, from the cloud, or a hybrid combination of the two.  We help companies collaborate effectively and improve interacttions.. We sell our products globally, to over 60 countries across the world. We have sold our services to over 40,000 customers, or more than 4 million end users. In India, we have around 130 customers using our products.
We are very strong in verticals such as local government, education, healthcare and in certain professional services, for example, finance and recruiting firms. . We have a robust offering that improves communications and productivity for companies of all sizes and all verticals.

7. Could you give a brief overview of the global presence and how does India contribute to the growth of ShoreTel?
India contributes in two ways – one as a business market and the second as a part of ShoreTel’s global operations support, both of which are very important. While most of our revenue come from the US, markets in EMEA such as the UK, Spain, Germany, and France are all important markets for us. In Asia, significant markets are India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Globally we have about 1,100 people working at ShoreTel.
From a development perspective, India is far more important to us because approximately one-third of our development team sits here. We have six development sites, namely in Sunnyvale (CA), Austin (TX), Rochester (NY), Manhattan (NY), Sydney (Australia) and India.

8. What are some of the changes you are expecting in the year 2016?
Our reported hosted revenue last quarter (Jan-Mar ’16) was $32.8 million and our product revenue was $33.9 million. Rapid strides that we have made in building our cloud capabilities is a strategic reason for this phenomenal growth. One must understand that moving to the cloud is a huge transition, one that not many companies have made successfully and we are really very proud of that.

9. Are you looking at any headcount increase in Bengaluru?
We are working on our global business plans for the next fiscal year and Bengaluru is strategic to our growth. The growth we will see will also reflect in the Bengaluru investments that we make over time.

10. Recently you added new channel partners in India
Yes, we have added three new channel partners in India in order to accelerate the company’s growth in the region. The new partners join an existing base of partners and system integrators, all focused on increasing ShoreTel’s India footprint and solution deployment capabilities.
Now, ShoreTel solutions will also be offered by 5th Dimension Technologies, Tech 3in IT Solutions, and V4 Technologies. ShoreTel onsite solutions provide companies of all sizes with flexibility and choice to meet their communications needs.
ShoreTel continues to expand its channel partner ecosystem to ensure we are agile-to-market at the speed of business. As business opportunities grow in India, partners play a critical role in enabling us to scale our operations and increase our reach to more customers across various industry verticals. Partners also play a key role in keeping us informed of changing requirements that inspire us to keep researching and developing better solutions.


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Interaction with Subex Limited Managing Director and CEO Surjeet Singh

1. Can you please give us a brief on the company’s performance?
Subex is one of the few companies that have successfully managed to equitize the FCCBs (foreign currency convertible bonds). This means two things. Firstly, we have been able to stabilize core operations. We have been able to motivate our bond holders to equitize which means that they also believe in the long-term prospects of the company. Secondly, when I took over in 2012, we were cash starved. Our operating margin was at nine per cent.

Our focus has been on EBITDA and for the last years, we have consistently achieved 25 per cent EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation). We have also successfully transitioned for a license-based model to a managed services based model. Fifty per cent of our incremental revenues have come from Managed Services. So clearly, our relentless efforts over the course of these last three have paid off.

2. Why this focus towards Managed Services?
Selling technology alone is not a sustainable business. Either customers need to create outcomes or you have to help them create these outcomes. We took a conscious decision to help our customers to manage these outcomes and there are a few key benefits from this approach. One, we can effectively help them sweat their technology assets better. Two, we learn more from continuously working on our own technology and this helps us better our technology solutions.

One can always do innovation in isolation. But this approach helps us understand real issues which is constantly evolving in today’s dynamic marketplace. Three, when you provide services, you have a long term play into the customer domain. While Managed Services has led to slight fiscal decline, this is a conscious decision that we took to make deeper inroads into our customers’ business. There is an operating leverage here because you manage the cost and there is a strategic leverage since you are able to direct efforts and innovation.

3. Where do you see the next phase of growth coming from?
We are growing in all emerging markets. Emerging markets are where all the greenfield operations are. In India, we practically with all the telcos. South East Asia and the Middle East are our biggest markets with a combined contribution of close to 45 per cent in total revenues. In fact, we are witnessing growth in portfolio and in geography. Two years ago, we were just doing Revenue Management and Fraud Management. Today, we do Capex Management. We also launched a platform-based Analytics offering. So we have also expanded our portfolio.

4. Everyone is doing Analytics these days? How do you compete?
The advantage that we have is that we already have a huge customer install base. We already have access to customer data. An IT services or Analytics company will have to start from scratch to reach the position that we already are in. We have domain knowledge and we have established trust. Now that the debt overhang is safely behind us, we are going aggressively invest in these areas.

5. With the debt situation successfully managed, how do you plan to regain investor confidence?
Our net worth has gone three times; from $30 million to $110 million. We have a completely equitized balance sheet now and this helps us make both operating and strategic decisions without being questioned.


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Interaction with Razorpay CEO and co-founder
Harshil Mathur

1. Brief me about the company.
Razorpay is a payments platform for online businesses to accept digital payments. Established in 2014, the company has 5000+ online sellers as merchants. It is the second India focused company to be a part of Silicon Valley’s famed accelerator, Y Combinator, which includes companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit etc as its alumni. Online sellers can integrate Razorpay’s software on their websites, which allows customers to pay for products and services through various online modes including credit/debit cards, net banking and digital wallets like Paytm, Mobikwik, etc.

2. How it started? How was the experience?
Back in 2014, Shashank Kumar and I started working on a side project with the hope that we could create a startup out of it. Things were going fine until we discovered the dismal state of online payments in India. The onboarding process which is a crucial part was a nightmare. The technical integration was painful. None of the providers had a well-crafted RESTful API. We were provided with a 200 line sample code for integration, with a non-existent technical support. Even after going through all these troubles, the end result would have been a substandard payment experience, with high failure rates and payment interfaces that haven’t been updated since ages. Surely, this could be done better.
At one point, we wondered if we had a very bad spate of luck. Our online research showed that almost everyone had similar experiences. Even the bigger E-commerce players were not satisfied with the high error rates. Compared to the US, EU and other western markets, we realized that India was lagging behind in this field.
Since then, we have been focusing on making a payment gateway that gets its technology right.Our aim was to build a product that is simple, robust and effective from onboarding, integration to final success rates. As startups have a lot of pain-points to worry about, we decided that payments shouldn’t be one of them.

3. What are the challenges you faced and how did you tackle it?
We faced a lot of compliance issues in the process of starting up. We were required to send a whole lot of physical documents by post. There were strict requirements for a company to be working out of a proper office space. They needed past operational records and a lot of other formalities. In short, it was just not conducive enough for early-stage businesses. With all the talk of moving away from paper currency and going online, the reality did not even remotely match the expectations.
While we knew our tech very well, navigating the bureaucratic and lethargic finance industry took time. PCI DSS certification, bank security clearances, banking tie-ups etc. are some of the things that are absolutely necessary for a business in our field. This was new to us, but we managed to get all things in place and go public in March 2015.


4. What is meaning of Razorpay? How did you arrive at it?
We thought about the name for a long time and multiple factors played a role in the selection. Initially, we discussed different names and finally Shashank and I decided upon “Razorpay”. The name signifies speed, agility and sharpness which is exactly what we wanted to convey about the brand. Also, the .com domain and social media real estate was available which is an important criteria.

5. From the common man point of view, what exactly you do? How are different from others?
We are a payments platform for companies who want to run their business online. We help them accept online payments via Credit Card, Debit Card, Net banking and Wallets from their end customers.
We are the only payment gateway that does complete online onboarding in less than 2 days. Also, our two line integration codes allow sellers to receive online payments from all modes including wallets, debit and credit cards, net banking, among others. The streamlined payments flow gives our sellers highest payment success rates. Overall, we use technology to ensure the whole process remains as easy and robust as possible.

6. How about competition?
Some of our direct competitors are PayU, Citrus, CCAvenue, among others. Most of these have been in the market for more than 5 years.

7. Till date how much money have you raised and when (please give break up) with investors name? We have raised a total of $11.6M so far. We received $120k as part of Y-Combinator incubation in Jan 2015. Post which, we raised $2.5M seed round from matrix Partners & a marquee list of 33 angel investors including::
·         Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Snapdeal Founders
·         Punit Soni, Ex-Google, Ex-Flipkart CPO
·         Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta & Naveen Tewari, Inmobi founders
·         Kunal Shah & Sandeep Tandon, Freecharge founders
·         Bill Gajda - SVP, Global Head of Innovation, Visa
·         Jeff Huber - SVP, Google X
·         Ram Shriram, Board member and an early investor in Google
·         Justin Kan, Y Combinator partner and Twitch Founder
Followed by a $9M Series A led by Tiger Global & participation from Matrix Partners.

8. What is Y Combinator?
Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator that provides incubation & funding for startups. Started in March 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 100 startups including Airbnb, Dropbox, Heroku, Stripe etc. It is the world’s most prestigious accelerator based in Silicon Valley. It provides 3 months incubation where they guide you through the various issues you face as a startup and does a $120k investment in all incubatees for initial expenses.
We were part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 batch. Both of us were in San Fransisco, USA for a period of 3 months, while our competent team managed the on-ground work here in India. We got Techcrunch-ed in March, right after our public release. The traffic, interest and sales spike is an interesting topic for a blog post in itself! Until April 2015, we were based in Jaipur. In May, we moved to Bangalore to set up a full fledged office and be closer to our customers.

9. How many customer base you have till date? What are your targets?
We have over 5000+ online sellers onboard. We are targeting to have over 20000 clients on-board by end of year. Our payments volumes has been growing almost 100% MoM and we will focus on sustaining that growth till end of year with specific focus on startups and ecommerce companies.

10. In how many cities you have presence in domestic and overseas market and expansion plans?
Our product is a pan India product and we have clients from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities like Agra, Patna, Dehradun, Kochi and Shimla, etc. We have plans for overseas expansion but  first we want to focus on getting a stronger foothold in India.

11. Please highlight your technology strengths.
Razorpay has focused on developing technology to solve the problems around payments for Indian businesses. The biggest one is the failure rate of online transactions, which is as high as 30-40 percent on the web and nearly 50 percent on mobile devices. We are striving hard to reduce this figure as this is direct loss of business opportunity for our merchants. We have focused especially on mobile success rates where our patented technology allows transactions to work at 2G speeds, perform auto-OTP reading and reduces the overall checkout time.
India has a two-stage authentication process for online payments as per RBI rule. An auto-OTP reader makes life easier for consumers transacting online.
Plus, we are one of the few payments companies to support multiple wallet aggregation on our platform. Our clients do not need to integrate with wallets separately for accepting payments.

12. What is the market size of payment gateway? What is scope wrt Indian market?
The increasing smartphone penetration and the ever evolving e-commerce ecosystem will be a drive for growth in the Indian Fintech Industry. According to a report by Gartner, global mobile payments are forecasted to be $721 billion by 2017. Indian online payments market is projected to touch $121.9 billion by 2019, states a Ken Research report. Online payments in India are growing at a CAGR of 50% YoY and we are determined to target a major chunk of this growth.


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Interaction with Aegon Life Insurance Chief Distribution Officer Amit Kumar Roy

Amit Kumar Roy

1. You started your journey in 2008. How was the journey?
Our journey has been interesting since the time that we started. We had been a second generation private life insurance company so as to say. We brought in the concept of selling Life Insurance for the core need of protection. In a country like ours insurance used to be sold more as a saving oriented product for a long time-taking a different stand in the market was challenging-but we are happy that we took that path. We had started the concept of selling pure protection Online in India and we are happy to note that many others followed us.
Today, E Commerce is a happening sector across all commodities-we are happy to have done our bit. No doubt it’s a value proposition for the discerning customer-it is good to see that number growing. We are also happy to see the market for protection growing every year-that is a good sign of market maturity. In most of the developed countries the protection market in life insurance is as high as 40-50% -we have a big opportunity lying there.

2. What are the challenges you faced?
Our challenges are very similar to the ones faced by others –however we kept innovation as a guiding path all through. Be it product, distribution or process –the guiding principle is to challenge the status quo and innovation with a capital I. I would say challenges are actually welcome thing for us-you think more and you come out with ways and means of doing things differently.
As long as you are doing things to enhance customer’s value proposition –you must look at things differently. We believe there is enough scope to simplify things in the world of life insurance so in that way we are happy to have faced challenges.

3. What is the awareness level in India with reference to benefits of insurance (life or health) policies among Indians?
I would not say awareness is great in our country around life or health insurance-however it is good to see the growth in that. We often discuss that India is a fatalistic society-where there is great faith in elder’s blessings or spouse’s prayers for our long life. While that is good to have –the average Indian must wake up to the spiralling cost of health care and cost of living. I would also praise media for doing their bit in spreading the awareness –let us all keep trying. This large country needs protection cover much more than what we have now. The insurance companies could also have a common forum for spreading awareness too.

4. What is your advisor strength till date? How much you are planning to hire by the end of this financial year?
We have about 6000 advisors in tied agency across our branches. We train our advisors to help customer buy the right product rather than just selling. Let me explain –we have seen cases where our advisors help the customers buy loan protection first over buying a traditional savings oriented product. The primary need for an average person is to cover liabilities first and then a plain vanilla pure protection product (may be online). It is different orientation for the advisors too-so we take time to get right profile people who would buy into such a value proposition.
Once on board-we make it compulsory to attend a three hours training every Saturday-we teach them take care of customer through various different need. We encourage advisors to be a professional help for the customer across various need like child education, schooling, higher studies abroad ,holiday plan for families to name a few. I would say more than an absolute number we would like to focus more on creating a different experience for our advisors in the coming days. I strongly feel that if they are happy –as a company we are likely to get more and more of happy customers.

5. You are serving over 4 lakh customers. How much you are going to add?
We are happy to share about half of our customers have been acquired Online. They are those discerning people who reposed their faith on us and decided to buy the right product at the right cost. We shall be happy to have more and more customers purchasing from us and they must feel happy too. We shall continue our endeavour towards this and would try a growth of 20-25% in selected markets.


6. As on March 31, 2016, the company has issued nearly xxxx lakh policies with a sum assured of over Rs xxxxx crore. During the same period last year, the company has issued nearly xxxx lakh policies with a sum assured of over Rs xxxxx crore. Total how many products you have? What are your future plans with reference to product portfolio?
As on March 31, 2016, the company has issued nearly 16,988 (Inception To Date - 4,97,273) policies with a sum assured of over 1600 cr (Inception To Date - Rs 83, 877 crore). During the same period last year, the company has issued nearly 16,081 (Inception To Date - 4,40,434) policies with a sum assured of over Rs 1948 cr (Inception To Date - 73,758 crore).
We have a very good basket of product across almost all the areas of Online and Offline. In terms of numbers we have 24 products and 9 riders. However as I said earlier our endeavour to innovate is 24/7 in products too. We shall continue to work for providing simple products (avoiding complex structure) at the right price to the customer. We will like to focus on protection and simplicity as a guiding plan for that.

Here are a few statistics for reference:
·         The total no.of advisors as of May 2016 is 6397
·         The total no.of customers as of May 2016 is 4,39,014

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Interaction with GrabOnRent CEO Shubham Jain

Brief me about the company.

Shubham Jain

GrabOnRent is a product rental marketplace that lets its customers rent a variety of products and gets them delivered to their doorstep. The company aggregates individuals & distributed suppliers and provide a variety of selection to its customers to rent from. We are a group of enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds who share a common vision to contribute towards disrupting sharing economy in India and make any product available to anyone by introducing alternate consumption method other than buying.

GrabOnRent is driven by a very simple principle of providing accessibility to products to everyone. We cherish collecting memories through our journeys and the only way is to experience those. We make experiences more delightful by offering a variety of products on rent for any duration so that you do not miss out on even a single memory.

For the neo Indian professionals who have to frequently change cities, deal with skyrocketing real-estate prices and carry a truckload of baggage every single time while relocating, renting objects makes more than just economic sense. It does away with most of the burdens associated with ownership, both financial and psychological. Consider this, by choosing to rent instead of buying, one does not have to invest time, money and space to maintain and preserve the object, or, worry about having to spend a fortune to enjoy using it. In addition to this, one does not have to fear the object becoming obsolete and the investment being wasted.

The target audience includes:

• Floating/Migrating Crowd – people who are not sure of how long will they be staying in a specific city or are sure for a short duration stay – Home Appliances and Furniture
• Aspiration people find it difficult to afford a product but want Luxurious products for use Eg – Mercedes A Class or Harley Davidson
• People who wish to try before buying – Eg – try Xbox and Ps3 to decide what suits better
• People who possess short term usage for the product – Eg- Adventure Gear for a hiking trip

Things are kept simple at GrabOnRent. All you have to do is browse through the extensive range of products; select the item and make the payment for rent and security deposit online and tada! - the item gets delivered to your doorstep. Each item passes through a stringent quality check before dispatch to ensure the best of services. After use, the item gets picked up, again from your doorstep. Security deposit is then returned online after verification and quality check of the item.

What all you give for rent and how much you charge? How about advance?

We are live with 9 categories today -

1. Home Appliances (Refrigerator, Washing Machine, Microwave, LED TV, etc.)
2. Furniture (Beds, Mattresses, Sofa Set, Dining Table, Wardrobes, etc.)
3. Event Supplies (Lighting Equipment, Sound Equipment, Projectors, etc)
4. Gaming (PS4, PS3, Xbox, Kinect, etc.)
5. Adventure Gear (Tents, Sleeping Bags, Rucksacks, etc.)
6. Party Equipment (Hookah, Barbecue, etc.)
7. Cameras & Lenses
8. Bicycles
9. Cool Gadgets (Hoverboard, Pebble Smartwatch, Go Pro, etc.)

They are live at www.grabonrent.com and on Play Store.

We have seen customers renting Furniture and Home Appliances for longer duration, 4 months or more and other categories on a daily basis. One can rent products for as low as Rs. 200 per day. For example –

• Single Door Refrigerator – Rs. /Month
• 3+1+1 Sofa Set – Rs. 1500 /Month
• Double Bed + Mattress – Rs. 1500 /Month
• 4 Persons Tent – Rs. 180 /Day

All the products carry a security deposit which is refunded to the customers at the end of the rental duration. This varies from 5% to 10% of the product cost.

Have you tied up with small businesses? Which are these companies and what are the products you source from them?

We have tied up with more than 150 merchants across Bangalore who supply the products to us. As a marketplace, we ensure a seamless service between these merchants and the customers looking to rent products. The merchants see a lot of merit in renting out items (via-a-vis selling & buying) as it ensures a fixed monthly income. GrabOnRent assists merchants with working capital to increase their ability to continuously supply the items.

We rent every product from our merchant network and thus making it available to its customers.

How it started? How was the experience?

“Businesses have spent centuries making buying really easy. We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy.”

It was during one of our own crisis moments that the idea for GrabOnRent struck us. We wanted a barbecue for party later in the evening and had a hard time finding whom to rent it from. We even went as far as resorting to buying one but, thankfully, saner heads prevailed that day. It was after this experience that we became acutely aware of the hassles people have to face while renting stuff.

When the idea started taking shape and we were sketching out plan of action, we had our own reservations – what will be the best Target Group, should we make a fully functional product or launch a hacky one, which categories should we start off with, we go app only or app-website model and a lot more. And then we concluded that ideas will keep flowing, but getting them executed is so much more important. With this in mind, we decided to go ahead and launch the product with two preliminary categories in a single society with around 1100+ apartment. Now to reach out to people, we started distributing pamphlets and were able to get a decent number of orders in first week. The flow of orders coupled with feedback from the customers and guidance from industry leaders in various fields, we chalked out our long term plans.

Right from the start, setting the pace was very important. This approach made sure that the basic website was up in less than a week. We, today, have a very robust product in form of a website and mobile application which supports all the traffic.  To keep in compliance with government rules, a proprietorship licence was obtained in the same time interval. We later shifted to a private limited label.

What are the challenges you faced and how did you tackle it?

The rental space is very new, not just in India but everywhere in the world. But the good news - Used Goods market in India is at $19.5 Billion as of 2015, growing at a rate of 22% YoY. In a similar way, the product rental market in the US stands at $38.5 Billion as of 2015, growing at a rate of 14% YoY.

The main challenge has always been to get the average Indian customer to get to trust in the system and address his issues of convenience, availability and quality. This proves that there is a large untapped market shouting for attention. We, being one of the first movers in this space, faced the challenge of developing the supply and demand side for renting.

While solving for establishing trust among customers, we observed that a new service attracts a handsome number of eyeballs but a fewer early adopters. With Rental-as-a-service, it was hard for people to trust refurbished products’ quality and hence trust the brand in the first place. This has changed over time as people tried smaller value goods in the beginning and thereafter, opted for larger ticket-sized products too.

Key Learnings:

Having the experience of establishing a company prior to GrabOnRent helped us significantly in taking care of the necessary steps - for government regulations and accounts.

The key take away for us, as a founding team, were numerous. Some of them which stand out exceptionally will include:

1. Marketing is important, good service is critical - it helps in the spreading the vital word of mouth publicity
2. Build your own tools quickly, but if they are going to take longer - just integrate existing third party tools
3. Keeps the government related compliances and accounts up to date, else they will bite you later.
4. Execute fast and build a team of rockstars, one cannot carry burdens in a fast growing company.

How did you arrive at your company name GrabOnRent?

There is no story behind this to be honest, we were pretty straight-forward. We tried many combinations keeping in mind that we maintain a direct keyword in the name of the business.

How about competition?

There are a couple of other worthy rental players, but none of them follows an inventory light model like us. We have ensured that 100% of the inventory rented out is via us a pure MarketPlace play. This helps us in 2 ways:

• Zero Spend on Inventory and no capital blocking
• Quick expansion into new cities.

We have built a strong back end solution that helps us automate a lot of processes with minimal human involvement. This in-turn helps us scale us rapidly without keeping the business human intensive. Understanding that marketplaces need to have sticky factors, we have built them into our systems to enable repeat transactions from customer’s end and more confidence amongst our vendors.

• Quality Assurance in used products – Stringent quality assurance process to live up to the ‘emotional connect’ customers hold with products. This helps us improve the ‘sticky-ness’ towards the service and gain loyalty of the vendors who witness repeat customers due to improved quality.
• Trust Engine – Vendor and Customer verification via various means (Social Profiles + ID Proof + Address Proof + UDID verification in future) to mitigate uncertainties in establishing trust between both sides

Till date how much money have you raised and when (please give break up) with investors name? Anything in the pipeline?

We closed our Pre-Series A round of $450K in July, 2016 from Ivycap Ventures and Unicron Ventures.

How many customer base you have till date? What are your targets? By when you are going to achieve it.

Though the registered user base is nearly 15,000, we currently have 4000 active customers thus far and plan to on-board 4000 every month from March 2017 onwards.

In how many cities you have presence in domestic and overseas market and expansion plans?

We currently operate only in Bangalore and plan to launch in two other cities by the end of this year. Our prime focus will always remain to create a business that makes sharing as easy as ordering online for its customers. This primarily involves driving people towards a behavioural change - From caring about ownership to thinking of accessibility to products as and when required.

Please highlight your technology strengths.

We understand that there must be a strong backing any business and we must carry a unique backend tech.

We are currently serving upon 2 platforms, web (www.grabonrent.com) and Play Store (play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grabonrent.grabonrent)

Here is a glimpse of what have we been doing the right way.

• Trust Engine - Building a person’s score via the information we capture throughout his lifetime.
• Product Health Tracking - If a product gets a number of customer complaints due to poor performance, we can remove the product from listing.
• Product Location Tracking – Supplier and GoR can track where the product is currently present.
• Price Recommendation Engine – Algorithm to help a supplier decide the price at which the product should be priced for renting.

What is the market size of this industry? What is scope wrt Indian market?

$12.5 Billion (Source - http://assocham.org/newsdetail.php?id=4351)

There is a tremendous influx of millenial population into metros and major cities, a large chunk of them want to be light on their assets. Our target audience is formed by 50% of Bangalore’s population, 40% of Delhi and similar numbers for other cities who have moved in for a job or a higher education. They are the ones who like to live comfortably without spending too much. A trend is catching up for furniture, white goods, bikes, apparels and we see this expanding into other categories as well.

This is a huge opportunity waiting to be explored. The rental market in India is largely unorganised and vastly scattered which makes it difficult to find the right thing at the right time. We plan to bring everything under a single online platform with focus on customer convenience.

Interesting Customer Stories

I believe for any organization, its early customers play a crucial role in shaping its services. We have been lucky to receive critical and heart-warming feedback stories from our customers which always keep us pumped up. Here are two such cases that are worthy of a mention.

Poonam Gupta (name changed in the interest of privacy)

Persona – Female, aged 25-27, lives in a rented flat with 2 of her colleagues, unmarried, shifted to Bangalore on securing a new job offer, earns somewhere around INR 40,000 per month.

Order Placed – Wooden Bed & Spring Mattress, Refrigerator and Washing Machine for a 6 Months period

Story – When we inquired why she chose to rent instead of buying these products, she mentioned critical aspects that define our business. In her words, “Had I bought these products from Olx or Quikr, I would have travelled all the way to the seller’s location and ship the products to my place. I being new to Bangalore did not know much about the city and its people and hence did not want to travel to unknown places all alone. And at the time of leaving Bangalore, I would have to welcome strangers to my place to see the product I am selling and by the time I plan to, it becomes third-hand. The salvage value would not justify the efforts required.” This made total sense to us. She added, “Once I purchase a second-hand product from a seller, the responsibility of its repair comes to me, whereas GrabOnRent offers no-cost maintenance and free logistics. It was a no-brainer for me.”

Siva Ramakrishan(name changed in the interest of privacy)

Persona – Male, aged 27-28, lives in a 1BHK rented flat, married, shifted to Bangalore on securing a new job offer with his wife, earns somewhere around INR 55,000 per month.

Order Placed – Wooden Bed & Spring Mattress, 4 Seater Dining Table, Side Table, Refrigerator and Washing Machine for a 4 Months period

Story – When we inquired the reason behind renting it from GrabOnRent, he told, “The prices at GrabOnRent were better than any of the other sites that offered similar products. The quality of the products was something I had to take a bet on, but their team surpassed my expectations of receiving refurbished products. I would highly recommend their services to my friends.” Next, we asked if had a second thought against renting and opting to buy the products directly, to which he said, “I did not want to buy everything so early as I had just moved to the city. Investment upfront was a little too high. All through my search I was looking for fully-furnished flats but the prices in Indiranagar and Domlur soared too high. That is the time I came across GrabOnRent’s advertisement, I compared the prices of “semi-furnished house +renting” vsFully furnished house and former won hands down.”

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