Founded in January 2012 by Ashish Tulsian and Sakshi Bhasin Tulsian, Delhi-based
POSist is a pioneer cloud-based point of sale (POS) software to provide comprehensive suite of restaurant billing and management solutions. Unlike traditional POS, the startup’s POS software is made to address problems related to different areas of restaurant operations, which range from order taking, table booking, stock and inventory, menu and recipes, customers, restaurant staff, preparation, dispatch and delivery, payments and many more.
Team BWDisrupt Interacts With Sakshi Bhasin Tulsian, Co-founder, POSist And Spoke To HerHow did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?POSist was born out of our own needs. It was never started as a business idea. My husband Ashish and I invested in a restaurant out of enthusiasm. We were running our tech companies separately that time. I was running a web development startup and Ashish was running his telecom VAS company.
Restaurant turned out to be rewarding financially but extremely demanding with respect to operations. It was tough to handle vendors, staff, payments, pilferages, on counter theft from staff remotely. We being tech people, thought to ourselves – ‘why not get some software to keep a watch on our restaurant numbers and permissions remotely’?
Just then started the search for our ideal POS application which to our surprise we couldn’t find.
So we ended up building this product for our own restaurant. We started solving our problems with this product. We built a comprehensive fronted billing, then extended it to store, then kitchen, built a strong CRM for customer retention and later a mobile analytics tool.
It eventually caught the eye of other restaurant owners and we started getting enquiries from them to have the same product at their restaurant. We said no to a lot of them initially as we thought this is not our business but something we have built only for our use but over the course of 4 months the enquiries kept increasing and then came the ‘aha! Moment When we said yes to our first customer.
We signed up our first 50 customers on word of mouth and recess and that’s when it hit us that we are solving a big problem not only for our restaurant but for the entire industry. That’s when we exited the restaurant business and took this up full time, incorporating POSist in Jan 2012.
Vision and Key ServicesOur vision is to fix technology for the restaurant industry. We are venturing into multiple products which will help a restaurant owner make better decisions in saving costs and maximizing profits.
In foreseeable future you will see us do some exciting things in ‘Big data and Analytics’. We are really excited about possibilities of data helping SMBs make decisions instead of gut. Can we provide a small restaurant owner with tools and insights which brands like Dominos & Mcdonalds use to run their business? This is the question that keeps us awake at night.
B2B eCommerce is also an exciting area which we see has a tremendous potential in India and will grow massively in coming years.
DifferentiationWe are selling India’s First Cloud based software to Indian SMB based on SaaS model. Now a lot of companies are marketing their application as cloud based while in reality they are still installation based applications which send data at the end of the day to a server from which the client can access his reports remotely. But their applications still remain old technology based and require heavier hardware to support, running the hardware costs up for their clients unnecessarily.
Earlier all legacy POS providers were oblivious of our success in market and thought that cloud based application would not sell in restaurants. But as soon as they realized its working, they started marketing themselves as cloud based. Any genuine cloud based app will not require heavy & expensive hardware to run on.
FundingThe company is backed by LetsVentures, Morpheus Group, and a bunch of individual investors.
Challenges Faced by the Venture Challenges are steep and numerous:
Educating the market - biggest challenge as they inherently don’t understand how a software which is not installed on their computer function.
Data on Cloud - Insecurities with keeping their data online and that too on someone else’s server.
SaaS model - SMBs are not in the habit of paying for software even once and here you are asking them to pay you every month/year.
Local presence - SMBs are in the habit of buying everything from local vendors, a Bangalore restaurant does not want to buy from a Delhi company over the phone. You need to create local presence.
Language - The buyer of the application maybe the restaurant owner but actual user is a cashier, he may or may not know English or Hindi in some parts of India.
Traction DetailsThe company has seen quite a good amount of growth and acceptability in the market. It has grown from 10 restaurant customer in 2012 to 2000 restaurants till now, with implementations in all types of restaurant formats- from a highway dhaba to 5 star restaurants to kiosks to QSRs etc.
POSist aims to reach a number of 10,000 restaurants by the end of 2016 and bloom into a full service technology platform for restaurant industry offering a complete bouquet of technology products needed by a restaurant under its umbrella.
Market Size & OpportunityRestaurants offering Point of Sales (POS) solutions simplify the payment option for consumers. According to industry research the global mobile application markets is expected to reach $ 54.89 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 16.2% from 2014 to 2020.
Call me biased, but the future for POS industry looks extremely bright as adoption of technology is percolating from large enterprises to small retailers to mom-pop shops. Building as well as delivering technology solutions is cheaper and costs get reduced further down.
I see POS at the heart of all transactions taking place. It will be the glue which will hold order taking, billing, loyalty program, payment gateways, CRM etc together. That’s the reason we call POSist a Platform and not just a POS anymore.
