Once a Facebook group, a bartering startup rises in cashless India

Let’s Barter India’s team. Co-founders Pooja Bhayana and Sahil Dhingra are on the left and in the center, respectively. Photo credit: Let’s Barter India.

“Sahil [Dhingra], my co-founder, was closing his business. For really low prices, he wanted to give tablets away. I said: Exchange with one of your friends,” Pooja Bhayana recalls.

That was October last year. At the time, she didn’t know that those would be the words to launch a startup, thousands of barter exchanges on Facebook, and two apps. At the time, it just seemed like a good idea. Five hours into creating a bartering Facebook group, the two had leveraged their networks enough to get it 5,000 members. By December, that number had grown tenfold. Eventually, the group turned into a startup, and Delhi-based Let’s Barter India was born.

She didn’t know that those would be the words to launch a startup.

The business launched apps for Android and iOS in September this year. Its users are concentrated in Delhi but span pan-India.

Through Let’s Barter’s Facebook page and app, customers can offer to trade items like electronics, gaming products, and books, as well as services like accounting, bookkeeping, and cooking.

Other bartering sites include Gurgaon-based BarterDaddy and Jaipur-based Faida. Online flea market Yappily has a similar commerce-between-customers model, bringing more socialization into ecommerce. Customers still exchange money, however.

See: Not your run-of-the mill ecommerce app: meet India’s first online flea market

From hobby to startup

Let’s Barter’s Facebook group – now at over 185,000 members – operates simply: people post things that they’re willing to exchange and work out what they’re willing to take for them in the comments. Pooja and Sahil, former high school classmates, were perfectly happy running a successful Facebook group. Pooja had quit her job in public relations to search for happiness, and Sahil had worked around business administration and run a failed venture of his own.

It wasn’t until they spoke to their mentor, one of their school seniors, when they realized that the permanent gig they’d been searching for could be right in front of them. “He [our mentor] was totally in love with the idea,” Pooja tells Tech in Asia. “He said: give me one reason why you’re not pursuing it as a business.”

The only thing left to do was commit completely and “take the plunge.” “Our mentor is the reason why we completely gave ourselves to this concept,” Pooja says.

That’s one place where India’s demonetization might lend a hand.

That came with some trial and error. Before Let’s Barter decided to develop an app, it launched a website. “That was a major failure on our part because it didn’t work,” Pooja admits.

Let’s Barter’s five-member team, including app designer and CTO Abhishek Biswal, works out of an Innov8 coworking space. The startup secured funding this September, and the company has yet to make revenue.

Making noise