Startup Arena: A Valuable Aid for Every Startup
Conducting business in this era of stiff competition, teamed up with rapid developments in the practices, has become similar to that of walking on a tightrope. One can never determine the rise and fall of even the most successful organization and hence need to keep their choicest cards up, i.e. making an ally of the already emerging developments to grab hold of the momentum. This key finding is especially crucial for entrepreneurs emerging through a teething period of launching their own organization.
Start ups all around require a greater insight into budget allocation, as one needs to create a mountain out of the molehill of a finance it comes with. Hence the importance of getting a value for money deal is of uttermost eminence. Yet there is a common discord between vendors and entrepreneurs, with start ups often getting caught in a web of missteps thinking that they have received a prime deal. Here, Startup Arena comes to the rescue. Startup Arena provides a platform for both the startups and vendors to mutually benefit from a successful deal.
How was it started?
It is a fact that successful start-ups require finest services at best prices, yet the same often fails to get through amongst vendors. While starting on their own, founders Shantanu Singh Chauhan, Sunita Maheshwari and Deepak Maheshwari realized that every start-up had to negotiate a clear way out of the maze of vendors which made lofty yet unfounded claims of offering best services at best prices. This created a sense of dismay and disillusionment amongst startups creating a negative industry overview. The need to create a space for listing all such vendors who are known to provide high-quality services in one place can come of aid to all start-ups and small businesses.
The creation of Startup Arena as a marketplace kills two birds with one stone- helping entrepreneurs to discover services and products they need and also aiding the service providers to help grow their business by bringing customers.
How is it different from existing ones?
For businesses that are looking for services & products, the organization provides an easy way to discover, filter, select and connect with services provider. They create a space for differentiation from other aggregator listing by providing transparency in pricing, discount, and service delivery to end customer.
Since customer select, view and understand Service Providers’ service offerings, for service provider it becomes a high-quality customer on-boarding experience. The customer connecting with them have already understood their offering, pricing, and discounts. Above it, the team verify and take feedback from end users. With the Advance customer life-cycle management tool and lead execution support, service providers get the highest leads to conversion ratio. Since all the leads are uniquely generated for each business, it improves overall value of an account.
Funding status
StartupArena is currently self-funded and is actively seeking funding to take this venture to new markets.
Monetization model
StartupArena has following distinct revenue models:
Traction details
In short duration of just about a year, StartupArena already got 4500 business list, over 6000 product services, and 5000+ deals offered. Currently, they are serving customers in 34 different categories focused on helping entrepreneurs start and scale their own businesses. The organization has 600k monthly business visitors and over 10000+ businesses have already connected using StartupArena.
Future plans
The goal is to keep a steady rate of expansion by solving SME centric problems that relate to discovering, acquiring, managing and delivering services to customers. StartupArena expects to bag 50,000 small and medium businesses in the next 12 months subsequently establishing the organization’s footprint as India’s most preferred way for searching, connecting and managing customers and suppliers for SMEs.
Challenges faced
Simplification of processes and the gap between capital and expansion are the challenges that the organisation has faced.
Marketing plans
StartupArena wants to target and impact entire SME market through its services that providing web presence, customer acquisition leads management and customer lifecycle management solutions.
Market size & opportunity
The Aggregator listing market size stands at $112M. However, if one adds website and web-hosting the opportunity is way above $0.5B. StartupArena currently provides world-class Aggregator listing services, an SEO, Google Friendly, and schema compliant website with extensive support for lead and customer management. With CRM added to above kitty, the total addressable market size is in tune to USD 1.2 Billion which is apt for the organization.
