2 billion non-desk workers are strangers to email. These founders built a Slack for them.

Noticeboard co-founders [from left to right] Vishal Gahlaut, Sarath Chandran, and Vishesh Dahinwal. Photo credit: Noticeboard.

They encountered a curious communication quandary when working at Myntra, India’s leading fashion ecommerce company which is now part of Flipkart.

Vishal Gahlaut, Vishesh Dahinwal, and Sarath Chandran were senior executives at the company. They were highly trained engineers with top management degrees, but found that the toughest part about creating a happy customer hinged on the company ground staff.

Is the delivery boy well behaved; does he answer queries politely; is he in sync with the company’s policies? That depends on how well the company trains and controls its frontline staff, which in turn hinges on communication. And therein lies the problem, Gahlaut, Dahinwal, and Chandran saw.

The biggest advantage we have is our mobile mindset.

Out of Myntra’s total staff of about 6,500, only 1,500 work out of offices, facing computers. The rest – the bulk of the workforce – is the logistics and warehouse staff. They aren’t tech-savvy. Their first brush with tech is most likely through budget smartphones. They aren’t even on email, leave alone Slack. They might be out in areas with poor cell connectivity. They might be on WhatsApp or other instant messengers but any chat group with a hundred or thousand people will get noisy and cluttered in a blink.

How do you communicate clearly, effectively, and constantly with this huge workforce became the burning question that led Gahlaut, Dahinwal, and Chandran to found Noticeboard – a Slack for the net newbie masses.

This isn’t an India-specific problem. Globally, there are over 2 billion non-desk workers who are part of the formal economy but do not even have email accounts – over 300 million in India alone, Gahlaut points out. “Information actually reaches them only when their supervisor talks to them directly – verbal, physical communication. It makes the entire process slow, clunky, and prone to error – like Chinese whispers – while flowing from top management to the bottom rungs.” Noticeboard is for them, he says.

The year-old startup announced its first round of funding today. It has raised US$1.2 million in venture capital, led by Stellaris Venture Partners. A bunch of angels, including Gahlaut’s old bosses from Myntra, Blackbuck founder Rajesh Yabaji, and YuMe co-founder Jayant Kadambi pitched in as well.

Incidentally, Myntra was Slack’s first paid account from India, Gahlaut tells Tech in Asia.

Old problem, new solution

The problem that Noticeboard attempts to solve is as old as industry. Factories, retail chains, hotels, warehouses, and so on always had large fleets of ground staff who needed supervision and management. What has changed in the last few years is the technology intervention made possible by the big drop in smartphone prices and internet data charges.

“The courier guy who comes to your house has a smartphone in his pocket. So now, there is no reason why we can’t include him in the formal communication, and that is what we are trying to do at Noticeboard,” Gahlaut explains.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you are a delivery boy who just joined an ecommerce company that uses Noticeboard. On your first day at work, the HR manager onboarding you will ask you to download the app, probably even give you a basic smartphone with the app on it.

Global competitors

The Indian edge