He spun childhood games into a cashback app. Now he wants you in ecommerce

Image via Dangquocbuu.

When Sameer Grover was younger, he would collect the crowns of soda bottles and exchange them for discounts at local restaurants. It was like a game for him and his friends – they’d finish their drinks, twist off the crowns, and explore new items on menus. For restaurants, it meant that customers were spending more money and coming back more often.

Making a game out of discounting worked so well on Sameer that the concept lay dormant in his mind for years. “I watched the Indian market for a long time,” he says. “Couponing is huge in the USA, but it’s not big here. Once you get a discount from a restaurant, you end up getting bad service. It’s not respected.”

He waited and waited, until one day, the ecommerce craze hit India. Suddenly, people wanted to make it easy for Indians to buy things on the internet. As they built up ecommerce sites, though, they all came across the same conundrum: most people were too used to buying things from the country’s many small and medium businesses to move online. And, if customers did move online, all of those small and medium businesses would go bankrupt.

That’s when Sameer realized his childhood game might come in handy. With his co-founder Ashish Munjal, he built out Crown-it.

Sameer describes it as an offline-to-online (O2O) marketing platform that helps local businesses make more money. It sounds complicated, but works simply.

When you buy things at registered stores, you get money back straight into Crown-it’s wallet. The wallet is closed, which means that it can only be used on chosen sites. This includes ecommerce sites Amazon, Flipkart, and Jabong, as well as budget room aggregator OYO Rooms, eBay, and ticket-booker BookMyShow.

The app works in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, and claims to have 800,000 people across 10,000 local markets using it after just 18 months.

“It’s a US$50 billion market across India’s top 25 cities,” he says. “The potential is huge.”

Challenges aplenty

Photo credit: Yohann Legrand.

At first, it was tough for Sameer to get people to sign on because the concept was very new. Most store owners weren’t used to visualizing online discounts and, plus, who would be willing to pay Crown-it’s per-transaction fee?

“Once they started seeing a value add, things changed,” Sameer says. “It wasn’t hard after the first few merchants, and we don’t charge them if they have no transactions on Crown-it.”

The other batch of people that Crown-it had to convince were consumers. This also wasn’t a big deal, explains Sameer.

Oh, the places you’ll go