There are about 40 million small and medium businesses in India which deals with approximately 11 billion invoices in a year but the common problem amongst all of them is that they are drowning under the paper trail for tracking their finances. As per the research and experience the biggest problem for SMEs is working capital mismanagement, which arises due to lack of on the go information into one’s own business and its transactions with customers and vendors.
Entrepreneurs need to keep a tab on everyday deals, they require a management information system report to track all transactions, and even need to keep track of all business related conversations for updates and follow-ups. Most of that is currently done manually.
Spending a lot of time and energy over making invoices, manually uploading them on the company system and following up on payments & deals is a massive waste of time, but since small businesses don’t have a lot of money to throw at there is no other option to solve this problem.
This leads to the inception of
SpiderG which streamlines external and internal communication, helps better track and manage receivable and payables.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts with Ashwani Rathore, CEO & Co-Founder, SpiderG and Spoke to Him
Excerpts:
Business Model, Idea generation and Functioning Every Startup gets formed by seeing the problems faced by Society or businesses. The parent company Gladiris Technology started in December 2013 and was selling open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to Small and Medium Businesses to help the businesses. However, after implementation ERP in over a dozen companies, it was identified that there are certain problems that are still left unaddressed.
Me and my co-founder realized that key issues faced by SMEs cannot be solved only through ERP software alone and after deep research of 6 months; SpiderG was incepted in early 2015 to solve the problems faced by SMEs about working capital mismanagement & crunch, which arises due to mismanaged accounts (not -keeping proper financial records) and difficult access to easy and fast finance. Many banks and current financial institutions overlook SMEs requirement of collateral free loans.
SpiderG is a platform to connect SMEs to financial institutions like NBFCs and Banks for funding based on the transaction data generated by SMEs on SpiderG platform. SpiderG is a visibility solution tailor made for working capital management in small and medium enterprises. It acts as an easy book-keeping tool and provides SMEs real time visibility of all the current transactions with their customers and vendors.
USP of the CompanyAs far as USP of our company is concerned currently we are one of the first data driven financing platform for SMEs in the world. We are building a data bridge between SMEs and financial institutions so that exchange of information is fast, and transparent so that funding cycles are enhanced.
Apart from that below are the main USPs of our product:Our aim is to provide SMEs with a seamless network to help them in improving cash visibility and management. Our product is unique and user friendly, integrating the technology used with existing systems like Tally.
Keeping in mind the sensitivity of the issues faced in monitoring accounts, the app brings to its users a transparent medium of managing their transactions and allocating resources accordingly.
Funding & MonetizationWe have raised seed capital from top industry veterans –
Rahul Kirloskar, executive chairman, Kirloskar Pneumatic Co Ltd,
Pravin Dongre, MD and CEO Glencore Grain India Pvt.Ltd
Fusion Tech Venture ( of Promod Chawdhary of Praj Industry )
Adi Sarvanan, founder and president, Allsec Technologies.
Ashish Nanda
Bhavna Holdings Pvt Ltd (Mahendra Doshi )
Majority of the features offered by our application is free for now as the focus is on building more traction and getting businesses used to using the technology.
We are adding premium features
We are expecting to break even in the last quarter of the third year, post which profitability will start kicking in. In the longer run, once we are able to create a network, monetization through various revenue streams will done.
Challenges FacedIn initial days every moment seems to be challenging which threatens our existence. And in build phase we payed extra attention to product stability, security and compliance aspects. So from product point of view we are pretty much safeguarded. Initial set of customers have been demanding and we go extra mile to understand their requirement and incorporate chances which made sense but also brave enough to save no when required. There have been instances when we ran out of cash but we were fortunate enough thanks to our ecosystem we sailed through worst time. There might be challenges in future also but we believe we are equipped enough to deal with them.
Also we two founders had a major disagreement in deciding how to position SpiderG. We were not very sure on how we would want our customers to perceive this product as. Since this is a novel concept and SME customers haven’t used anything like SpiderG so how to establish a bond between product and its customer. Indian SMEs market is perceived as laggard in tech adoption so how would we make them adopt SpiderG. We both have different background; exposure and experience and thus each of us were having our own biases so we were not able to develop consensus. We decided to take the problem head-on and entire team discussed out the issues for 5 continuous days with facts and figures.
My personal style of addressing the challenge is never duck it, face the problem head on, never sleep over with an issue unresolved and keep making multiple attempt to solve it even if your fail each time.
Customer Feedback
Response to our product has been excellent so far. SMEs are liking our concept and product and we are seeing good results in SME industry. We always wanted to help Indian SMEs from capital mismanagement as I see that is the only problem which is pushing Indian SMEs to compete at par with Global companies. With the inception of SpiderG we are seeing how things have been moving in SMEs sector and very soon we will reach out to SMEs across the country.
Traction Details
We currently serve around 1000 businesses from across India and the plan is to take this number to 50,000 in a year.
We are targeting revenues of Rs 20 crore because we will have a whole bunch of revenue streams.
Expansion Plans
We are extremely positive about the expansion as e-invoicing is the need of future and loans needs of Indian SMEs are ever increasing. Digital finance market is exploding in India due to huge demand and under supply.
As far as SpiderG is concerned I see there is a tremendous opportunity and scope for expansion.
Market Size & Opportunity
I don’t want to put a number to this opportunity because that would be speculations but if I have to, I would say this is at least $100 billion dollar opportunity.
