Name of the Startup: Pep Up World
Name of the entrepreneur: Pradeep Sharma
After working for a couple of years in the IT industry, Pradeep, a hard core techie
noticed the lack of time among Gurgaon families to carry out their regular shopping.
Hence, he started out to establish a platform, orderchotu, in 2014, to connect buyers
with the local Kirana shops. They spent time and effort onboarding stores who were
only too happy to have a digital presence. But, the moment of truth came in when
they were asked to pay a commission on sales. Most were uninclined to pay any amount
to the platform. The residents too did not evince great enthusiasm after the initial
interest. Added to this was the unsatisfactory service rendered by the small-time
stores to the platform users. The net result, it was time for the founders to change
tack.
The team noticed that after the initial enthusiasm, the shoppers on the platform
were active largely on weekends and the items they bought were mostly party items.
Quickly, the team decided to create a service, pepupworld.com, that helped platform
users to exchange party invites. And, if the users needed help, orderchotu was available
to deliver party needs. While this brought in activity on the platform, the team
noticed that they were busy only over the weekends. This was not enough.
Thus, to this, they brought in the feature of outdoor partying. Partnering with
restaurants, pubs, farmhouse owners, pools, etc., the team sought to leverage the
culture of partying outside. Extending this further, they built the capability to
filter venues based on user parameters. The team hoped to engage with the users’
decision making and take on large contracts. However, what they realised was that
the decision making for large parties is neither logical or rational. At many times,
it was largely emotional and driven mostly by someone who was not really part of
the decision making.
Hence, the team decided to focus on small-sized groups such as couples, by offering
them experiences. The demand turned out to be seasonal and it was also becoming
difficult to generate experience outings. To improve the utilisation, the team started
pub crawls, themed dates, etc. These did not offer high revenues or margins. The
skill set needed was becoming demanding and not easily available. Despite living
within their revenues, the team relaized that the time for this model of business
was up and they are now working on concentrating on their strength, which is a technology
focused operation.
The team’s learnings
1. Focus on your strength; work on what you can do well. Here, entertainment operations was not their forte..
2. Assumptions are killers. .
3. Impact deliveries, even if they are small, are good. Delivering a newsletter of curated quality events would have been good. They tried this with a subscription model, which did not work, though.
4. A customer’s decision making is not always rational.
Pradeep’s suggestion to startups
• Play only to your strength. Periodically check if you are deviating.
• Stay disciplined.
• Do not rely on assumptions. Always test your hypothesis.
• Manage your time.
• Before you look to manage your team, learn to manage yourself, for, in most cases, you will be doing many tasks for which you may be neither skilled nor equipped.
- Reported by
Rameshwar ,healthyjio.in
rameshwar at healthyjio dot in