Tag Archives: ecommerce

Pune’s FirstCry – Baby Products eCommerce Company – to have 100 offline stores

VCCircle has an interesting interview with Supam Maheshwari, CEO of Pune-based baby-products ecommerce company, FirstCry, where he says that they will have 100 offline stores in India by the end of this year

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

You raised $15 million funding from Vertex to take the total external funding to $33 million. How are you using the fresh capital?

The capital is being used mainly to enhance our technology, product and operations. A portion of the money is also being used to open more offline stores in cities across the country. We currently run 70 stores across 58 cities and continue to add four-five stores a month. We will now look to open more stores in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Delhi, among others.

By the end of this year, we will have 100 offline stores across the country to beat lifestyle apparels and fashion e-tailer Myntra.com to have the most number of stores from an e-com player in India. By the end of 2017, we aim to have 400 stores across 250 cities.

And:

Are you looking at global markets?

Currently, we are focusing on India. There are millions of babies born every day in India, and their parents plan what products to be bought for their kids even before they are born. This is where we are seeing huge opportunities. Additionally, India is a very complex world, with different states, taxes and varied tastes. Once we become even more sizeable, we will look at overseas markets.

and:

Large e-com players like Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal are innovating on last-mile delivery to acquire more businesses. How are you positioned on that front?

In fact, we do next-day delivery in 10-12 cities free of cost while Amazon and Snapdeal charge a fee for the same. This service is available in certain cities like Mumbai, Pune, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. We will pan to expand next-day delivery to 12 cities.

Read the full article. Try this Google search for other PuneTech coverage of FirstCry.

Baby products e-commerce retailer, Pune’s FirstCry.com raises Rs. 82cr funding

Pune’s FirstCry.com, a baby-products online retail store, has just raised Rs. 82 cr from Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, and existing investors IDG Ventures, and Saif Partners, reports the Economic Times. This is FirstCry’s third round of funding. Previously FirstCry had raised $4 million in 2011, and $14 million in 2012.

Excerpts:

FirstCry, which has tied up with 500 brands, offers over 70,000 products including diapers, toys, toiletries, strollers, apparel and footwear as well as books and toys for children up to the age of 15 years. It also has 50 branded franchisee stores across 45 cities and expects to grow this network to 100 stores. It gets 20% of its revenue from mobile-based transactions.

First Cry was founded by Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha in December 2010. Before that, Supam was one of the founders of Pune based e-learning company Brainvisa Technologies, which was acquired by Indecomm Global Services for about $25 million in 2007. Amitava was a senior vice president at BrainVisa and had been there since 2003.

Pune’s @TastyKhana get’s $5 million strategic investment from @DeliveryHeroCom

Pune’s TastyKhana, an online food ordering service, has just received $5 million in strategic investment from global online food ordering and take-out service DeliveryHero.

TastyKhana, which started in Pune as an online table booking service and then pivoted to food delivery, and is now mainly a food ordering service (the delivery is mostly handled by the restaurants themselves), expanded to Bombay in 2012, and is now is 7 different cities, serving 3000 restaurants.

Some interesting points:

  • DeliveryHero had earlier made a small investment in TastyKhana in 2012. Since then TastyKhana has grown 400%
  • Trak.in estimates that TastyKhana is currently valued at $16-18million
  • TastyKhana is the only Indian food ordering service with apps on 3 platforms – Android, iPhone and Blackberry
  • Last month, TastyKhana hit over 1000 restaurants in Mumbai alone

For more details you can read the news on TastyKhana’s blog, or a more detailed article on trak.in.

Pune’s Ayojak (Online Ticketing & Event Management) raises funding

Online Ticketing and Event Management startup, http://Ayojak.com has just secured funding from HBS Alumni Angels, Blume Ventures, and Srijan Capital. The majority of the investment will be used to launch new products to serve segments such as training & educational institutions, seminars, workshops, lifestyle activities, last minute tickets, adventurous trips and social activities. Also, part of the investment will go towards providing solutions for last-mile services such as entry management and Box-Office.

Here is Ayojak’s description from their press release:

Ayojak.com offers a cloud hosted online suite of event solutions platform offering four pillars of services such as event ticketing/registration software (for ticketing, conference, RSVP, charity), payment processing (online, retail, cash-on-delivery), event marketing and logistics. Since 2009, Ayojak.com has been powering 1000s of events pan India including large scale events such as Live in Concerts, World Series Hockey, Patna Marathon, Joy Run, India Resort Fashion Week and many more.

And about the events being hosted by Ayojak, founder Santosh Panda says:

“We are having significant growth with 425+ events in Q3 FY 2012 vs 381 events in the entire FY 2010-11; with ‘sports’ being the fastest growing event category while ‘business & education’ topped the chart.”

See also NextBigWhat’s coverage of Ayojak’s funding. Includes an interview with Santosh.

Phanindra Sama, CEO & Co-Founder redBus.in to speak in Pune – 16 Sept

redBus.in is a truly Indian internet commerce success story. Nowhere else can I imagine a website that sells bus tickets being so successful. And, to be frank, when I first heard about redBus, I did not think much of its prospects myself. Hence I think it will be very interesting for the tech as well as the entrepreneur community in Pune to listen to the co-founder and CEO of redBus.in on 16th September when he talks about his story so far, as part of TiE Pune’s excellent “My Story” series of talks.

A similar session, My Story by Carwale.com’s Mohit Dubey is one of my favorite tech events in Pune this year, and I loved the advice he gave. That is why I have high hopes from this event.

Here is TiE Pune’s description of this event:

“From a single idea to India’s largest bus ticketing company, redBus is an entrepreneurial success story with resonance around the world. It remains compelling proof that a young visionary with a strong engineering background can use technology and insight to create a competitive business and transform an industry.”

Founded in Aug. 2006, redBus today has operations across 15 states and offers services for 15,000+ routes and has built relationship with about 850+ bus operators.

redBus is amongst Forbes top 5 startups to watch in 2010. redBus is ranked no#1 – with a growth rate of 4823% between 2007-’09 – amongst the fastest growing companies in India in a survey done by All World Network. And is also awarded India’s best internet startup, 2010 by IMAI.

Phani is ranked no# 3 amongst India’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs by Business World. He was awarded Entrepreneur of the year award under IT, ITES category by ET NOW and the BITSAA 30 under 30 award. He is also selected as Endeavor Entrepreneur (www.endeavor.org) and TiE Entrepreneur (www.tie.org).

He was a State ranker in Intermediate examination, Andhra Pradesh Sr. Secondary Board, graduated with distinction from BITS-Pilani, and worked with Texas Instruments, Bangalore before he co-founded redBus.

About TiE Pune My Story Sessions!

“My Story – Inspiring Journey of an Entrepreneur”

This program is created to celebrate entrepreneurship and bring stories from successful entrepreneurs in their own words. The invited speakers will share their entrepreneurial journeys and talk about lessons learned, mistakes they wish they avoided, and key decisions that helped make their venture successful.

Fees and Registration

The event is from 6pm to 8pm on 16 September at the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Event Report: CarWale.com CEO Mohit Dubey

(This is a live-blog of the TiE Pune talk by Mohit Dubey, Founder and CEO of CarWale.com. This is essentially an unorganized collection of interesting/insightful statements made by Mohit during his talk.)

  • “Carwale.com, the story so far: Started in 2005, seed funding in 2006, hit break-even point in 2007, series A funding in 2008, got acquired in 2010. So far, the website has served 3,12,68,180 people.”
  • “Nobody gave me a job. So I had to start my own company”
  • “I was never really good at coding. But I was good at jugaad, and co-ordination. I did an ecommerce course, but at the end I wasn’t good enough to create an ecommerce website. I convinced my teacher that she should do the website, and she would get a certificate of having worked on an industry project, which will help you in your career.”
  • “I am not a genius. I took a two-year drop but did not get into IIT. None of my colleagues in CarWale.com are geniuses. We’re all ordinary people. Who stayed together for a long time. Ordinary people + Years of effort together = Success.”
  • “If you have a purpose, it’s easier to find soulmates.”
  • “For two years, we kept trying to do tele-medicine. But that never really took off. In the meantime, we kept doing software work for anybody we could. Everything we did failed. Co-founders never complained, because we had a relationship.”
  • “Commitment is more important than competence. Sticking together is more important.”
  • “‘We’ll pay you whatever we can pay, whenever you can pay’ was the salary offered to Gaurav.”
  • “In 2005, I went to Bombay to figure out what to do. I told my team to give me 2 months to figure something out. Otherwise we’ll close down the company. I got a Rs. 10000 contract to build a website for a used car dealership. I spent 3 months understanding the business. My team wondered why I was spending 3 months for a Rs. 10000 contract. But the software that we built for the used-car dealership, we started selling to other used-car dealerships. At this point, I was given the advice that I was trying too many things, and wanted to do everything. I should focus. So I decided that I would focus only on automobiles. And thus CarWale.com was born. My team (8 people) disagreed with me, but I decided that they were wrong.”
  • “I sold the software to 30 dealerships. And after a while realized that none of them were using the software to sell cars. We decided that something was wrong. And changed the model within 10 days. We decided to take it to the customers directly ourselves.”
  • “Done is better than perfect. If you launch a product and it is bug-free, you waited too long to release it.”
  • “The purpose is fundamental. The purpose helps you get the right time. Cash? Go to spouse, parents, relatives, friends. If you can’t get money from them, how will you get it from strangers? Also HNIs and Angels. Everybody who was rich in Bhopal, I approached them for money. You need to be able to do that.”
  • “For funding purposes, we made a 60-page business plan. But with the strategy changing every 2 weeks, it was difficult to keep the 60 pager updated. So we went down to 5 pages, and even that was a problem. So we brought it down to 2 pages. What worked? 5 line email which resulted in a reference; and the reference really did it.”
  • “Everything takes longer. 2x or 3x. So stay optimistic about building a valuable company, not about the launch, or hiring, or a big client, or funding, or anything specific.”
  • “Things can change quickly. When that happens, we don’t wait for a weekly meeting, or a monthly meeting, or a big company meeting to decide. We have a quick huddle, and take a decision”
  • “These are the four core values of our company: 1. Treat Others Well. 2. Be Responsible. 3. Be Agile. 4. Company Before Self. These should be qualities you already have before we hire you. These are more important than ‘standard’ things like customer satisfaction.”
  • “By 2020, one of the world’s top 3 online auto companies is going to be from India.”
  • “We had no cash in the bank. I remember going to a dealership one day with no money, and I was thinking that I must make a sale today, and ask them to pay some money in cash upfront. That sort of a situation really helps focus your efforts.”
  • “To share equity in the company, I had a very simple method. Early in the company, you have no clue which co-founder is going to be most important. And the guy with the idea does not deserve more equity – the idea is not important, at all. The best answer is distribute equity equally. You’ll get better commitment that way. For early employees, the people who join the company within the first 6 months, I allocate 7.5%. A total of about 20% to be allocated to all your employees.”
  • “Today if someone wants to create an online store, there is no need to do a website. Just create a facebook page.”
  • “When writing content, focus on the user. Do SEO and SEM, but write content for the user, not for Google.”
  • “There are very, very few tech companies that need to operate in stealth mode. Everybody else should stop being secretive and talk about their idea in full detail with VCs etc. Your execution, your company culture, your method of hiring, cannot be copied. Startups have a DNA which allows them to move very fast and take decisions quickly. Big companies cannot do that.”

TiE Pune My Story session with Mohit Dubey CEO/Founder of CarWale – 3 June

TiE Pune presents a “My Story” session with Mohit Dubey, CEO and Founder of CarWale on 3 June, 6pm to 8pm, at MCCIA Trade Towers, Pune. Carwale is one of the few dotcom and “ecommerce” success stories by and Indian company for Indian customers – and hence should be a must for anyone in India interested in web technologies.

CarWale is a platform where car buyers and owners can research, buy, sell and come together to discuss and talk about their cars. CarWale was founded in 2005, and by 2010 it had become India’s single largest source of car sales.

After completion of his MBA and spending the first three years of his career in a start-up, Mohit took the entrepreneurial plunge with an initiative aimed at building the concept of telemedicine in remote villages. Post that, he ventured into delivering customized software. In 2005, while creating software for a car dealership, Mohit saw the frictions in car buying and founded CarWale.com.

Today, CarWale is South Asia’s leading car portal and acknowledged as the market leader in its space. Backed by India’s leading early stage venture capital firm Seedfund and top tier US venture fund Sierra Ventures, and with over 2.4 million visits a month, the portal is way ahead of its nearest rival launched by Times of India. It has influenced approximately $3 billion of car transactions in India and has won many prestigious awards including the Red Herring Asia Top 100, BusinessWeek’s Top 25 young entrepreneurs in Asia and PCWorld Web Award for best automotive website.

Carwale.com offers a complete consumer-focused service that includes content and tools for exhaustive research, pricing and marketplace information. As consumers research and make purchase decisions, the portal connects them with automotive manufacturers, finance and insurance companies, allowing them to make the best decisions for their automotive purchases. CarWale also offers more than 400,000 pages of car research, tips-advices, road-tests etc.

It has also what could be India’s first used car and new car price guide. It provides the on-road price of almost all cars being sold in 300+ Indian cities. It also serves 8,000 used car value checks every day. The ‘Recommend Me A Car’ feature is used by more than one thousand new car buyers every day. From 500 used car listings in Oct’ 05, the portal today has around 15,000 listings. CarWale offers more than 400,000 pages of car research, tips-advices, road-tests etc.

About TiE Pune My Story Sessions!

“My Story – Inspiring Journey of an Entrepreneur”

This program is created to celebrate entrepreneurship and bring stories from successful entrepreneurs in their own words. The invited speakers will share their entrepreneurial journeys and talk about lessons learned, mistakes they wish they avoided, and key decisions that helped make their venture successful.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

FirstCry Pune-based Online Store for Baby Products gets $4 million funding

FirstCry, an online portal for baby products and toys, founded by Pune’s Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha has just raised $4 million from private equity company SAIF Partners. FirstCry works with 100+ vendors internationally to make available 4000+ items for online sales, and with free shipping. As their website says:

Over time, we hope to ‘Change’ the way, Indian parents buy, so that they can be at home to spend more quality time with their ‘Little ones’ and family.

Economic times reports:

FirstCry.com receives 10,000 daily visitors and has over 15400 fans on Facebook. It has initiated various contests for parents on Facebook. The firm, which delivers to 25,000 cities and towns in India, expects to do 1000 transactions per day in next three months.

Supam Maheshwari had earlier co-founded Brainvisa in Pune, which was sold to Indecomm Global Services in 2007. Amitava Saha was a Senior Vice President at Brainvisa and had been with the company from 2003.