A failed startup and a famous namesake couldn’t stop this Sachin Bansal

QGraph’s team

Sachin Bansal is in high demand. If he sends an email, it usually gets a quick response. He gets his fair share of funding requests in his inbox, and his fellow startup founders on LinkedIn love to send him connection invitations.

There’s just one problem – he isn’t that Sachin Bansal. As in, he isn’t Sachin Bansal, co-founder and former CEO of Flipkart. This Sachin is co-founder of QGraph, a mobile user data analytics and user engagement software-as-a-service (SaaS).

As you can probably guess, sharing a name with the co-founder of one of India’s biggest startup success stories has added an interesting flavor to Sachin’s founder journey. So what’s in a name – a blessing or a curse? Perhaps pros outweigh the cons, Sachin tells Tech in Asia.

“I would politely tell them: ‘You have the wrong Sachin Bansal,’” he says, with the tone of one who’s a good sport (and one who has told this story many times).

QGraph attempts to catch users’ attention by prompting them with push notifications and Facebook ads. On the analytics side, it creates profiles for an app’s users and tracks them from the time they install to the time that they uninstall the app, giving app developers reports they can use to improve their services. The company charges subscription after a month’s free trial and offers a demo on request. Subscriptions are free for apps with less than 100,000 users, and Sachin says that paid subscriptions start at US$100 per month.

Compare that to Gurgaon-based competitor rocQ Analytics, which charges US$0-299 per month or WizRocket’s CleverTap, which charges US$0-9999 per month.

Forty live apps use QGraph currently, including Bangalore-based doctor finding portal Practo, Singporean matchmaking app Paktor, and Spanish deals site Ofertia. To get to this point, though, Sachin had to work through more than just a name mix-up.

Try, try again

Sachin’s previous startup, a travel site called FarInto that he started in 2012, failed. “We realized that the travel industry is hard,” he explains. “One of the reasons is that the usage – the frequency – is low.” He found that his target audience wasn’t really traveling more than once or twice a year, which made it too expensive to try to take in customers. After all, it would be another year, maybe, until they came back – if they came back at all.

“We were trying to work with leveraging – if we could help travelers out there on the public domain,” he says.

Sachin had been involved with analytics, though, since 2005. In 2009, he co-founded Enteleki Solutions, a technology enterprise solutions company that he left in 2012. So, the IIT-Kanpur grad took his ideas back to his roots.

“We figured out that Facebook ads were picking up in India, and we said let’s leverage data for optimizing Facebook advertising,” he recalls. That, as he describes, “struck the right note.” He realized everyone around him was switching their focuses from desktop to mobile.

On second glance