These ex-directors of Flipkart show sellers how to crack ecommerce

Until last year, Venkat Potluri and Ganesamurthi G were directors at Flipkart. They were in charge of the supply chain and marketplace operations for the Indian ecommerce leader. Their KRAs (key result areas) or targets were to bring quality sellers to the platform, help them stabilize, and ensure they were profitable.

Then in February and March last year, Venkat and Ganesamurthi quit one after another. They had decided to launch their own startup, with an idea of solving the challenges the two founders faced in executing the goals assigned to them at Flipkart.

“We noticed that while ecommerce was seeing extraordinary growth, the capability of sellers to understand what it takes to become successful on these online marketplaces was very limited. More than 80 percent of sellers did not see an increase in orders after the first four weeks, and they would consequently drop out,” recalls Venkat.

Sketchy product catalogs, outdated lists, weak backend systems, delayed deliveries, poor pricing strategy – a host of factors were affecting the sellers and their customers. The unsatisfactory customer experience also reflected badly on the marketplace as a whole.

The genesis of an idea

Venkat and Ganesamurthi decided to get involved at a micro level with some of the vendors to see how they could help them do better. This eventually led to their quitting Flipkart and launching a startup to focus on solving the problem for online sellers across the country, whichever ecommerce platform they used. With an estimated 12 to 15 million SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in India, the scale of the opportunity is massive. But it all began with one seller.

“One of the sellers with whom we were working at Flipkart saw his business flourish,” recalls Venkat. “Orders grew from tens to hundreds and the business expanded. The vendor moved to a bigger warehouse and employed more people. All this happened in just six months. We were struck by the growth ecommerce provided to this vendor and the positive impact this had on the lives of all his employees and their families. That’s when we decided to try and recreate this across millions of businesses in India.”

The idea was to use a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model to simplify ecommerce for a large swathe of sellers across the length and breadth of the country, including the thousands of small towns where producers are technically ill-equipped to make the best use of ecommerce channels. Instead of trying to build the tech tools for this themselves, the merchants could use SaaS to improve the discovery of their products and drive sales. “The SaaS products would impact the levers that drive sales, such as one-touch market access, optimized product information, intelligent pricing, and so on,” explains Venkat.

For a seller, the complexity of navigating the ecommerce marketplace comes from the large number of marketplaces out there, ranging from diversified ones like Flipkart, Amazon, or Paytm, to the vertical niche players like furniture etailer UrbanLadder, engineering goods portal Tolexo, or eyewear specialist Lenskart. There are more than 60 marketplaces with significant traction that a seller can target, depending on the nature of his products. The trouble is each of those marketplaces has a different operating model, onboarding process, inventory management, payment procedure, and so on. This makes it very complicated for a seller to manage his online business on multiple channels, without adequate tech tools.

Final piece of the puzzle

The final piece of the puzzle was to get a tech wiz to help them turn this vision into reality with simple, robust, scalable products on the cloud for sellers. This fell into place when the Flipkart directors met Chandramouli K.

Coming out of stealth with $2M funding