Mypoolin is a social payment app that enables users transfer funds with friends in the smartest and fastest manner possible. The startup’s primary and only goal - to make sure that whenever you are collecting or settling money as a group (be it before an activity/event or after it), the process remains convenient and simple both on the web and the mobile.
Mypoolin also enables its users to make seamless merchant and peer to peer payments on the UPI platform. It was founded by Rohit Taneja (IIT Delhi) and Ankit Singh (FMS Delhi) in January 2015.
In an interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, Mypoolin’s Founders shares details about their venture.
Idea Generation Ankit and Rohit met each other at an event at Harvard University in 2012. Both clicked instantly with each other as they discussed and compared the incline and outlook of Harvard students towards startups with peers back home at IIT Delhi and Delhi College of Engineering. One of the things that both agreed upon during the course of interactions was that startup founders need to build solutions for problems that they face themselves, ones that they can relate to.
One of the problems they encountered quite often in college was settling money among friends. There was no easy way of settling money and all the good experiences often ended with uncomfortable “You owe me” situations. Maintaining large spreadsheets, dropping constant reminders, carrying out bank transfer with painful account number, IFSC codes to standing in long queues outside ATMs to withdraw cash to pay a friend was highly painful.
Then they decided to create a solution to solve this problem for them. They initially shared it with their friends and used it themselves for settling money for dining, movies, gifting, travel and almost everything.
The idea evolved into Mypoolin and soon after launching it widely, they started growing at a great pace without spending any money on marketing. This led them to launch mobile apps and since then they have launched various applications on different platforms to solve all payment hassles among friends.
Current business plan/ industry opportunity Mypoolin helps a group of friends collect and settle money among themselves. They make money via commission from merchants on whom users spend the money collected on Mypoolin. The company aims to make social payments among friends for a bunch of social use cases such as dining, movies, events, gifting, travel and more seamless like never before.
Online transactions have grown at a rapid pace in India as Indian consumers have adopted smartphones and internet very well. In 2015, the internet user-base in India recorded an impressive 40% growth over the past year and the smartphone shipments in India is estimated to grow by 29% in 2016.
IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) transactions are growing at a staggering pace at over 100% every year. In May 2016 alone, USD 3.4 Billion were transferred on it and going forward, mobile payments are going to constitute majority of online transactions.
In terms of volume, a BCG-Google report recently estimated that approximately 30 billion payment transactions happen in India every month across different use-cases. Of these, Person to merchant transactions or P2M contribute about 16 billion transactions. We are going after the remaining 14 billion transactions.
With the launch of UPI (Unified Payment Interface), the peer to peer transfers are set to be further simplified. Indian consumers can now transfer money, any bank to any bank in few taps with just a virtual address. There will be no need of account number, IFSC code or MMID to carry out a transfer which is set to boost its adoption with newfound convenience.
We believe that high frequency, small sized peer to peer transactions will be for us what high frequency, small sized mobile recharges were for mobile wallets 4 years back, a great use case where users will clearly see the benefits and adopt instantly. We are making peer to peer payments a great experience and are building more value on top of it.
We further provide users a seamless end to end experience to select a movie, event, gift, outdoor activity from our list of recommendations share it with friends and chat within the app. They then pay their individual shares using any mode of payment. Once the total amount is collected, the order is placed.
Key features / servicesMypoolin turns payments into fun social experiences where payments is just a part of the equation. It helps users settle money for anything among friends and also collect money for any anything. They provide recommendations across movies, events, travel, dining, activities, gifts and more for users to choose from. These recommendations are provided in association with their merchant partners and aggregators.
Users can chat with their friends within the app while planning and collecting money for any plan.
Users can poke/ remind their friends to pay them back apart from automatic reminders that the app sends to users helping one avoid uncomfortable “You owe me” situations. Users can see their friends’ activity on the app in a news feed.
Differentiation We are the only social payments app in the country. We have kept the product simple and social right from the get go. While we have seen many apps introduce mobile recharges to DTH recharge and more features, many times unrelated to core product to drive incentivised engagement, we believe this should come from features or use cases strictly related to core product use case.
We focus exclusively on social payments and our product stands out by enabling them seamlessly like nobody else.
Funding/ Financial support Mypoolin raised a seed round in April 2015 from reputed angel investors like Rajan Anandan (MD - India & South East Asia - Google), Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT), Sunil Kalra, Amit Ranjan (Founded Slideshare that got acquired by LinkedIN), Rohan and Arjun Malhotra (Investopad), Gautam Gandhi, Steven Sule and Gagan Dugal.
In August 2015, they won the QPrize 2015 and received USD 250,000 convertible note from Accel Partners and Qualcomm Ventures.
Growth Prospects and trajectory The digital payments customer base is set to increase from 60-80 million users currently to 300 million by 2020 and digital payments users will comprise 50 percent of all internet users by 2020 which comes to out be approximately 325 million users.
India currently ranks 2 in the world with over 1 billion mobile subscriptions. Of this, approximately 240 million consumers use smartphones and this base is projected to increase to over 520 million by 2020.
So, the growth potential for mobile payments is massive.
Mypoolin has witnessed more than 100% quarterly organic growth and with UPI (Unified Payment Interface), it aims to make social payments as easy as possible to capture the market. The company foresees that it will grow three fold in next 6 months and transactions on its platform will grow 10X in next 3 months.
MonetisationWe earn commission from our merchant partners where users spend the money collected on our platform. We do not charge users anything.
Challenges facedIt’s always difficult to build consumer trust as a young consumer payments company. We found it challenging earlier on but have learnt to gain user trust and credibility very early in the consumer’s journey and interaction with our app. We learnt along the way how to improve our response to their queries and address any concern promptly to win their trust again and again.
