CIE brings to our Deeptech community,
Fire Up Founder Insights series 4th edition, hosted by our COO, Mr. Ramesh Loganathan. The series is brought to you as a part of Startup Gyan Blog series by CIE-IIITH where we feature our founders and talk about their Startup status and the journey so far through conversation on specific topics useful for other Deeptech startups and the community at large.
In Conversation with Chinmay and Raja, founders Clap One:
Launched in April 2013, by the duo, Clap one offered a celebrity fashion recommendation engine catering to 25K customers with inclination towards adopting what their favourite stars are wearing on screen. The Startup pivoted in 2015 to private labelled fashion e-commerce through which it introduced fashion licensing to the film industry and licensed more than 25+ films across Bollywood, Tollywood & Kollywood.
“People get inspired by their favourite star and try to reflect their personality through adopting fashion”
With this success, the team scaled to 30 in 2019 and upgraded their product to full blown micro service based e-commerce platform from recommendation engine. The team built highly scalable E-Commerce platform, order management systems, inventory management & supply chain systems.
With over 75k orders, 13 million unique users and 13 lakh app downloads, Clap one was acqui-hired for technology by Bengaluru based grocery chain, Simpli Namdharis and worked with them through the tech transition for 9 months before starting up Gridworks, their next Startup.
The process from launching to traction
- Lot of feedback turned into a business
- Experiment with consumers to enhance value proposition
- Boost your consumer base to convince the stakeholders and gain traction
- Involved stakeholders from users, production houses to actors in the game
- Stakeholders need to see some value in your solution or product
Key points to Pivot in Consumer space:
- Let people discover what you’ve built through samples
- Fetch feedback (from websites, media) and recommendations(preferred by people) to feed to your algorithm
- Launch newer segments and offers based on consumer behaviour and availability & scope of the inventory
- A “Sold Out or Out of Stock” often gives a bad experience to your customers instead of further engaging them
- Recognise when it’s time to scrap the product line and start from scratch for new segment, and do it fast
- Supply chain is a pain point for an e-commerce business and should not be overlooked
“Pivots keep happening every now and then, doesn’t have to be product improvement”
The Growth Hack tip:
Start early, scale fast, fail fast, learn fast and Unlearn fast
Go in the depth of the words, the meaning not just the vibe! 😀
Keep watching this space for more under Fire Up Series.
Stay safe and sound!
– Sunita Kumari, Team CIE
