Dhaval Nagare

SlideShare Story: How a barcamp idea turned into 119 million dollar business

In 2003 Rashmi Sinha a Lecturer at university of Berkeley quit her job to start the entrepreneurial journey. She was later joined by her husband Jonathan Boutelle and brother Amit Ranjan do something together. These are the people who later co-founded presentation sharing platform, SlideShare.

They started a “user experience and usability research tool” called “mind canvas” in 2004. Later they thought of developing it as an online product. Mind Canvas was started from a 240 square feet small office in Delhi, India. After two years of product development the B2B software was launched in 2005. Though the product got good traction, the only problem was scale. Product was such that it could not scale with technology. It required more and more people to scale.

In 2006 mind canvas organized first “barcamp” in Delhi. After barcamp event speakers wanted to share the videos, pictures and presentation with audience. While the problem to share event videos and pictures was taken care by YouTube and Flickr, there was no other option than email to share presentations. This is when Jon, Rashmi and Amit thought about a platform to share presentations.

They started working on the project and after 6 months of development, “Slideshare” was launched in Oct 2006. It was a platform for the professionals to share their presentation online that included PowerPoint & Pdf files. It attracted people the moment it went online. Within first few weeks of launching they could see many people uploading their slides.

People wanted to share their presentation with world and Slideshare provided them with the platform to do so. Many big companies and organizations like IBM, White House also started using the platform to share their presentations online. They kept innovating and upgrading feature like sharing videos, podcasts etc.

With features like commenting, tagging and rating SlideShare turned into rich community of people sharing and discussing presentations. Site soon grew to 30 million monthly visitors and 7.4 million presentations. After 2 years SlideShare got $3 million in first round of funding from Angel investors and Venrock. SlideShare never lost focus and vision to make it an easy to use presentation sharing tool. SlideShare always focused and listened to end user feedback. They engaged with presentation professionals and offered them tools like Analytics, Lead capturing. Though many other products like authorSTREAM, Scribd & DocStoc with more features were introduced, yet SideShare backed by solid engineering team and presentation professionals continued to grow. SlideShare also created a great culture inside the organization. Employees were given stock options and other perks to make them part of SlideShare’s growth story.

When LinkedIn launched their Apps platform, SlideShare was among few companies like Google, WordPress, Amazon to build and integrate their app in LinkedIn. This relationship grew stronger and in 2012 SlideShare was acquired by the biggest professional network LinkedIn for $119 million. Along with founders many employees got rewarded for their hard work and fruitful efforts. Post acquisition, SlideShare is integral part of LinkedIn.

More and more people and companies use LinkedIn Slideshare to get more branding and business leads. As per one study the presentation sharing website generates 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook & Twitter. SlideShare is today part of every marketing or SEO strategy.

Video Credit:NextBigWhat

Dhaval Nagare

Dhaval Nagare is an electrical engineer, a humourist, an impressionist and also likes writing. His writing include all sorts of topics and mostly he writes to inspire and motivate people. You can also catch him on facebook https://www.facebook.com/dhaval.nagare

Snapdeal Story: How a deals website became top eCommerce platform of India

start-up, Tech Story / By Dhaval Nagare

Two best friends having common interest in food and maths from Delhi Public School started an offline coupons business which later turned into one of the biggest eCommerce companies of India. The CEO Kunal Bahl (alumni Wharton School, US) and COO Rohit Bansal (IIT Delhi alumni) joined hands to create Snapdeal.

Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal, *Image Credit: Wikimedia.*

Back in 2007 when Kunak Bahl’s US visa got rejected and was asked to return to India, he along with Rohit Bansal who was working for CapitalOne in India, decided to work together and do something different. Kunal while studying in US did 3 different jobs to make up for his monthly expenditures. It is there where he started using food coupons so that he could get a discount and mitigate his expenses with only two jobs. This is what he along with Rohit planned to start in India.

Moneysaver to Snapdeal
They started their entrepreneurial journey in December 2006 from MoneySaver. The business model had no technology involved and was pretty simple. Snapdeal (then MoneySaver) would get attractive deals from the restaurants, hotels, saloons etc. on the promise of getting them more customers. These coupons were printed in a discount book which they would sell to customers.

It was a simple business model but they had a hard time getting those deals and coupons. It wasn’t easy to convince businesses to offer coupons as well as customers to buy those booklets. Not many people were aware of this coupon model in India.

As soon as a they started this business they were at a stage where they had only 20,000 Indian Rupees ($300) in their company bank account with current liabilities to the tune of 500,000 Rupees ($7000). They had to pay salaries and other dues from their personal savings and ended up only in Rs. 50,000 ($700) in their personal bank accounts in total.

They did many experiments including community coupon mailing where they would get attractive deals from the hotels, restaurants, spas, saloons etc and mail those to the community around. “It was a total waste”, says Kunal Bahl as the mailing infrastructure in India was very bad. Slowly things picked up and Snapdeal went online in 2010 with initial investment from Vani Kola’s venture capital firm.

Pivoting from deals to eCommerce
The company was generating good revenues and was on right track. They acquired Grabbon in 2011. On suggestion of some of the merchants involved in deal business with Snapdeal, Kunal and Rohit checked out Alibaba.com. Inspired by the success of Alibaba, Kunal Bahl took a firm decision to pivot from deals business to eCommerce. This was a tough and risky decision. However, this decision turned out to be so good that today Snapdeal is among top 3 eCommerce websites in India.

They created a marketplace for small merchants and industries so that they could directly connect with the millions of customers online. This eCommerce model was not applied by Flipkart (at that time) as it used its own huge inventory to sell and deliver products. However, later Flipkart too joined the marketplace bandwagon.

To sustain growth and compete with companies like Flipkart they raised further investments of $45 million from Nexus ventures and Bessemer venture partners. They also received a $50 million investment from from E-bay and other existing partners.

E-commerce to M-commerce
Kunal Bahl believes in constant innovation and growth. Looking at the changing user behavior and rapidly increasing mobile and internet penetration, Snapdeal created a mobile application that could work smoothly even on 2g connection. Idea was to get 50% of their orders from the mobile application. Mobile application gave much needed push by increasing the orders, 80% of which coming only from mobile app.

With 30 million products from around 300K sellers with a reach of 6,000 towns and cities across the country, Snapdeal’s YOY growth today stands at 600%. Snapdeal counts Ratan Tata, Alibaba, SoftBank Corp, IndoUS Ventures, Intel Capital, Nexus Ventures, eBay, Kalaari Capital, Temasek Holdings etc. as their investors. Snapdeal also acquired FreeCharge, the online recharge and payment wallet in an equity deal in 2015.

Dhaval Nagare

Rocket Internet: The failed rocket science behind Jabong, Foodpanda and many more startups

India, Story, Tech Story / By Dhaval Nagare

Rocket Internet is a German Internet company that replicates successful online startups in lesser explored markets. Opposite to the name there is no rocket science used by Samwer brothers in their company, the Rocket Internet. The business model is simple, they would build companies which already existed but with a new and hungry work force. They would spend a huge capital to make sure the company grows in the span of two years or so and then sell the company at an alluring price. People say that unoriginal and copied ideas never work for long time. But, against all odds Rocket Internet’s strategy worked for long. Oliver Samwer also made a statement to Financial Times that

“There are three e-commerce companies in the world – Amazon, Alibaba and us”.

The only trick they used was to create products which were successful in USA and China and then launch these so called “new companies or products” in the other European countries. Rocket Internet is pretty good at marketing and business plan.

Replicating and selling eBay’s business model to eBay itself

The start to such an idea was formulated when the three brothers spent their time studying about the emerging startups in the Silicon Valley, while staying in San Francisco in 1998. They observed that many people bought stuff online and also sold stuff online on eBay. The Samwer brothers after returning to Germany implemented eBay’s business model and forged a company in Berlin called “Alando” which was a replica of an online auction company. Alando was aquired by eBay for $43 million within 3 months of its launch.

Rocket Internet

Thre brothers Marc, Oliver, Alexander Samwer continued this strategy and in 2007 founded their company Rocket Internet. Oliver Samwer was the driving force behind the company. The company was mainly into food and groceries, fashion, travel, home and living, general merchandise and new business and investments.

In 2010 Samwer brothers started CityDeals which was acquired by Groupon for $170 million within five months of it’s launch. In 2008 Rocket Internet founded Zalando, an online shopping website inspired from Zappos.com. They even tried to create a copy of Airbnb but couldn’t succeed because of brand name and niche community.

Rocket Internet expanded in other markets including India. Rocket Internet started its Indian journey with the help of three Indians entrepreneurs- Ankur Warikoo, Praveen Sinha and Arun Chandra Mohan. They were to handle the Indian business of Rocket India. These three Indians were the front line of Asasa.com, Rocket Internet’s first business in India. All of the three were invited to a boot camp in Zalando’s warehouse in Berlin to know more about how things work in there since they had to replicate the operations and other procedure in India.

In 2011 the three Indians hired approximately 70 employees after returning from boot camp as they were ready to go live in India. These entrepreneurs were given the post of MD and co-founders and were on a monthly payroll. They were minority share holders of the company. In later years the co-founders started realizing that they were valued very less as compared to the revenues and profits made by these companies. This was one of the reasons for the failure of Rocket Internet in India and also the death of Asasa.com. Later in the years Jabong and Fabfurnish also could not capture the Indian market and failed to fight competitors like Myntra, Flipkart. Rocket Internet ended up in selling them as well.

According to many people the harsh nature of Rocket Internet with employees and founders lead to a failure in India. The co-founders had low equity in the companies and also there was a fear of job insecurity in their minds since more or less they were treated like employees and not founders. Owing to many such issues the Rocket India could not grow any further. Recently Foodpanda was also sold to Delivery Hero. Despite all these failures, HelloFresh, a Rocket Internet company recently raised $88 million. Answer only lies in future as to how far Rocket Internet goes in terms of growth and revenues.

Dhaval Nagare

Quora: A billion dollar question

Product, Story, Tech Story / By Dhaval Nagare

When you have a question or query in mind where you head for? Google, right? And when even Google fails to provide you satisfactory answer, you look for experts whom you can ask your question. While there are many forums and question answer platforms for specific niche like programming, android, Quora is one of the most popular question answer platform where you can ask or answer literary anything. Which other platform offers such liberty, engagement and answers from experts like Mark Zukerberg (Facebook CEO), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), Demi Moore, Marc Andreessen (VC)?

While working for Facebook, Adam D’Angelo felt that Facebook was stable now and he could leave. The co-founders of Quora Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant and had a talk about the knowledge that is not shared on the internet or the knowledge that one has in his brain but is not shared. This problem statement gave rise to the development of “Quora”. Both had a vision in mind that there are lot many questions in our mind which are left unanswered and where many use internet to find answers, Quora could be the best solution to help with answers for these questions. They had a hard time deciding the name. After a lot of research and shortlisting many names which delineated questions and answers finally “Quora” was finalized.

With a prototype code ready to be enhanced and developed they started with the development process in 2009. They had a code ready which they had to further develop. In a year they made the website available for public use. In the beginning they invited their friends to the site, who invited their friends which led to increase in the number of users significantly.

Quora has a community of people which consisted of Mark Zuckerberg, big business tycoons, VC’s, Entrepreneurs, people with excellent knowledge about a particular field, authors and bigwigs like Barrack Obama. This increased the quality of knowledge shared on Quora. Later on they also added credits and gifts feature, wherein if your answer was the best and good quality you would get credits for that. Quora also added a feature of blogging to let people share their knowledge and thoughts without limiting it to question answers format.

Once Mark Zuckerberg asked the Quora community that which company could help Facebook grow, and he ended up in buying “NEXTSTOP” which was a start-up. So this is what made Quora different than other sites. It bridged the gap between Twitter and Facebook. Since then Quora has come a long way where users can Upvote, Downvote and see the number of views. The continuous innovation has kept users engaged and its popularity has grown. Today there are approximately 100 million monthly users who visit the website.

Dhaval Nagare

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