LafaLafa: Making Saving a Happy Habit
LafaLafa is on a mission to make every penny count for Indian consumers with extra cashback savings from 5% to 25% on all their shopping across 500+ ecommerce stores as well as customer education on making better financial decisions. LafaLafa has been chosen for 500 Startups Accelerator programme in Mountain View and are also one of the Indian mobile startups chosen for Facebook’s Global FB Start programme. It recently received seed funding from Hong Kong’s Vectr Ventures. Yosha Gupta, founder of LafaLafa shares her story with BW Disrupt.
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?
I come from a family of entrepreneurs – I’m proud of the fact that my father has reinvented himself and started a new business at the age of 60 which is doing really well now. My brother runs his own startup, so does my sister in law – so there’s always been inspiration around me to do something of my own. Plus I joined a startup very early on in India almost 9 years ago before startups were the buzzword so that further fuelled the fire to startup on my own. After having worked across Asia in Hong Kong, Indonesia, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam- it was finally time to take the plunge!
What were the challenges before you while setting up Lafalafa?
Setting up a world class team is the biggest challenge- to find team members who have the same DNA and fire in their belly has been the most important task but I am very proud of the team we have and what we have accomplished in just 10 months of launching our app.
What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?
After having worked in Hong Kong and across Asia for the last 6 years I do find the infrastructure challenges in India very hard to deal with. Especially for a tech focussed business like ours – being able to get reliable internet connectivity, wifi are all prerequisites but it’s still not the case (while of course in Hong Kong internet is super-fast so it’s been quite a challenge). Then of course just setting up a company and getting all approvals is a time consuming process in India- so are things like opening a bank account or remittances. Our hope is that with the ‘Startup India Stand up India’ programme a lot of these issues can be addressed.
Experts like Mohandas Pai are predicting the startup bubble in India to burst. Do you agree? Why?
While the startup ecosystem is still very young in India but yet I think there is a lot of depth and huge focus in most of the biggest startups to scale profitably especially in ecommerce companies even though they’re the ones who get all the flak – Paytm is already targeting to be profitable by 2017 so I am not worried about any bubble bursting. There will be consolidation and focus on unit metrics but that is a good thing and bound to happen as any startup ecosystem matures.
How is your business model different from the existing ones?
Competition in the cashback segment is high which is a good thing as there’s huge scope for affiliate marketing in India with the growth of ecommerce – in developed economies affiliate marketing drives more than 20-30% of overall business for ecommerce stores which is still a small percentage in India so, the more the merrier- as it also leads to more customer education about the segment. Other cashback businesses are only focussed on web while our sole focus is on mobile – we are the only ones who have launched a mobile app and we are getting huge learnings with app to app tracking, driving engagement using notifications, personalising content and offers- all of this is much easier on mobile which is why it’s our preferred channel and helps to drive more and more customers towards us. We have also introduced a personal deal assistant in our app where our users can find the best deals simply by chatting with us and users are loving the simplicity of conversational commerce.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?
Our clients are ecommerce websites/mobile apps – you will find 500+ websites working with us ranging from the top 10 like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Paytm, Jabong to a number of smaller businesses in the long tail of ecommerce startups and we are always seeking partnerships with more ecommerce websites to drive value for both our customers as well as our partner stores.
Going ahead, how do you plan to take our business ahead to make Lafalafa a unicorn?
Lots of plans around that with scaling up on marketing and customer acquisition both organically and inorganically – the good thing is that the unit metrics in our business are great so we are confident of expanding aggressively. We are building out the business to be focused not just on India but the rest of Asia as well so will be launching Hong Kong and Indonesia soon too.
The best experience while building Lafalafa…
There’s no better feeling than seeing your product in the hands of users and that it makes a difference in their lives – our mission is to make savings a ‘happy’ habit and working towards fulfilling that mission is what makes the experience worthwhile.
Your advice for young startups?
To focus on users and building a great product and team and the rest will take care of itself.
How did the name ‘Lafalafa’ happen?
We wanted a fun name, in keeping with our mission to make savings a ‘happy habit’ so we decided to not go for a functional name but in fact went with a catchy name like LafaLafa which is a play on the word ‘Laugh’ as our tagline is ‘laugh your way to maximum savings’. Most users always have a smile on their faces when they say the name so that makes it even easier to remember!
