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Archive for the ‘ZopNow’ Category

June 7th, 2012 by bkbirla

Jugad waali startup

Some 2 guys who land up in my office all of a sudden – “Mukesh sir! We have come to remove sun film from your car”

Who the hell are you? And I am not Mukesh. But how did you figure out that I want to get rid of my sun film.

These are not the guys who have MBA degrees and use complex business intelligence tools to figure out customer intentions. Usual blokes with good common sense.

More conversation and I did not try to clarify that I am not Mukesh. That is what the security guard on ground floor told. With the amount of driving I do I am sure I will pass as Mukesh’s driver. They asked for Rs 600 to remove the sun film. I bargained and got them to 500. So these guys figured out an opportunity created by our dearest Supreme Court. They are going around in HSR Layout area and seeing cars parked on the road side which have sun film. They approach the office and check if they can remove it and they are all set with their sun film removal kit.

So in 45 mins I had my car back without the sun film. Bright and shining glasses with 100% transparency. The guys were experts in the job of removing the sun film. I was so happy with the service that I gave them Rs 600 instead of Rs 500 I bargained for. They thanked and also told me that they are into wood work business and they can also paint houses or offices.

So here is what I learn from them in such a short time span

- Timing is important. I mean there was no point in doing this sun film business a month back or may be even after a month.

- George Bush once said – If we can’t bring them to justice, we will take the justice to them. Same holds true in business. Either get your customer to your business or get your business to customers.

- Grab the initiative. Lot of us are so hesitant to talk about our business. If we have a value proposition, open your mouth. Bole to bindaas ho ke.

- Cross sell your products. Only in movies girls fall for guys or vice versa because of just one thing. Same holds true in business also. Try to sell diverse things to your customers after figuring out co-relations between products.

OK, enough gyan for the day. Get back to work folks.

Posted in Technology, ZopNow | 2 Comments »

February 12th, 2012 by bkbirla

36-24-36

Cross posted from my company blog – http://blog.zopnow.com/2012/02/10/36-24-36/

Now we have enough juice to share some yummy details about customer behavior. If your eyes pop out, don’t blame us.

- The average Gross Merchandise Value of a single order is 4-5 times of offline retail and this is when we are yet to launch the million features we have in mind to increase it.

- If you thought only Cinderella had an issue when clock stuck 12, think again. The time slot 12-1 is the most popular time slot for our customers to buy. Did I forget to add one minor detail, I am talking about afternoon here.

- We have enough customers who buy SKUs in tripple digits ( > 99 ) in one order

- 3 out of 4 customers come back within a month with a bigger order. As Schwarzenegger said – I am back.

- Gross Margins in double digits is not a dream but reality once you get your category mix right

- Edible Oil and Home Care are top 2 categories. People spend twice on edible oil compared to Personal Care.

- Tea is twice as popular as coffee in Bangalore. Now that is a surprise for us also.

- Juice consumption is almost thrice of soft drinks. Who said Bangalore is not health conscious?

- We are sending a SWAT team to analyze that why is there a strong co-relation between people who buy orange juice also buy Harpic Plus Orange toilet cleaner.

- Over 15% orders are “Sho Shweet”. I mean they have atleast 1 kg of sugar.

- Bangalore hates to take care of it’s shoes. This category reminds me of my rank in my class at IIT Kanpur.

- Expenses on diapers is 10 times of what it is on infant food. How do you explain that input/output balance Bangalore?

- Amount of Aata sold is thrice of rice. Now that sounds like a poem.

- Our customers like laziness.. almost 30% ordered maggi

- People spend twice as much on cleaning toilet over teeth. Get your priorties clear guys.

- Our customer ‘like’ turmeric thrice as compared to chilli powder. Yellow yellow, lazy fellow.

- Based on our deep research, we have come to conclusion that per Kg of toor daal you need to spend 22.346 grams of Turmeric powder to make a perfect daal

- Sorry Imran .. as per us Akshay Kumar is doing better. Thums up Sales are twice as good as Coke

- We are planning to hire PhDs to figure out why 27% of our customer buy organic food and “Act II Butter popcorn” in the same order. If you have a clue, write to us. I promise you Rasam Rice lunch with our team.

- And last but not the least, our sincere apologies to all the customers who searched for “dark fantasy” on google and ended up seeing the “Sunfeast Dark Fantasy biscuit” at ZopNow. This is as close as we can get to help you.

Posted in ZopNow | No Comments »

January 3rd, 2012 by bkbirla

Me a sinner

Dear Customer

I have sinned. Not once but many times. This was during my Avatar as a restaurant guy. My sin is similar to what lot of people do in that domain but it still is a sin. Haven’t you ever ordered food from a restaurant and waited for food at home. You get hungry and angry at the same time when food does not arrive on time. You call up the restaurant guy and he promptly tells you that it will be delivered in 5 mins. The proverbial indian 5 mins which can last for any duration. I have done the same with so many customers when I was running Potluck.

I knew it was wrong but I still did it. I had no ways of predicting and figuring out where my staff was. Tough for me to figure out the location of my staff as well as my customers. Now we decided to change things in ZopNow. We do know that great logistics is a key piece to solve the eCommerce puzzle and we are hell bent on solving that. We are enabling GPS tracking on all deliveries and also enabling our customers to see where the delivery is in real time on a map.

Hope you enjoy this new feature.

Keep Zopping

Birla

Posted in Potluck, ZopNow | 4 Comments »

November 23rd, 2011 by bkbirla

There comes a time in every entrepreneur’s life when Excel hits the road

I have been lucky enough to see that happen multiple times. And it happened yet another time. It is a funny game. You spend sleepless nights imagining your first sale, first customer, first launch. How the curves on your sales graphs will look like? You rehearse the words you will say to your first customer. I know now it is sounding almost like an arranged marriage.

But then the moment arrives and you realize that your assumptions and projections need to get aligned with reality or the other way round. And you have to bend all of them to make them converge. I know the toughest one to bend is reality but who told you entrepreneurship is easy anyway. This is the moment you wait for and prepare for all the time.

Our “Aha” moment at ZopNow happened happened last week. We launched our service for entire south Bangalore. Next few hours went in just seeing Real Time stats on Analytics and watching our logs. Few issues here and there but no major issues came up. We also did a marketing event on Sunday and tried to sell our services to home makers. We got good response and some of them also converted to buying customers. Overall a satisfying weekend to see all parts of our business kicking in.

I know it is early days and we have a long way to go but then memories of first few steps are always special. For a software professional, the moment of truth is when you can create a product so usable and simple that even a kid can figure out things. My moment of truth came when my 9 year old daughter completed the shopping without any problems. She just overheard me telling my wife that we launched. She just logged on and finished the shopping. I asked her how she did it and she did it in approx 3 min again despite the cartoons coming on TV. I got a chance to record that you can see for yourself how easy we are trying to make things for you.

Keep Zopping folks….

Posted in ZopNow | 2 Comments »

September 2nd, 2011 by bkbirla

Changing my relegion

I know it worked if you have come here. Learnt this trick from a friend. A catchy subject line ensures that you do read rest of the stuff. Anyway I never had a religion so no chances of changing it. I lost my religion long time back when I went through religious texts of almost all religions. Anyway that is not the topic here. I did adopt few more relegions and some of them are changing.

I became a restauranter on 1st Jul, 2006. That was the date when I decided that I will get into building a restaurant. I had no idea at that point what it takes. I was edgy, nervous and lost. But then we did make it live on 10th Mar, 2007. We went through opening 3 restaurants although we had to close few of them due to various problems faced. It has been a very interesting journey although I can not call it very successful from a financial perspective. But the experience has been so enriching.

Another journey I started was Asklaila in Oct, 2006. Over the years we build a great business on Internet as well as mobile. Building a brand in consumer Internet space has been a very rewarding experience. Indian Internet space has grown by leaps and bounds and it was a constant challenge to keep up the pace.

These two journeys come to an end for me as I move on to do more things in life. I am closing my last restaurant in BTM and also moving on from Asklaila in terms of active responsibilities. I will still be open to cooking teaching assignments and also continue to be adviser to Asklaila.

Now few things about the new venture. The first task I did was to find a partner who is 10 times smarter and can work 100 times harder compared to me. I found a very capable company in Mukri. We worked together in Amazon and he was certainly great inspiration as well as source of knowledge for me. OK Mukri dude, now remove that Bihari gun from my head. This is the most I can bullshit about you.

Let us talk more about our new venture. The name is ZopNow. If you didn’t click on the link, let me tell you we are building a startup in grocery ecommerce space. We realized that this is a space where customers are willing but businesses have not been able to get their act right. And obviously we do feel that we are the right set of guys to get the act right.

Big business is built on a customer pain point and somebody’s ability to solve it with an interesting and innovative solution.

Get back to building stuff dude…..

Posted in Asklaila, Potluck, ZopNow | 7 Comments »