Yappily Predicts Social Aided Commerce Business to be a $100 Billion Market in the Next 5 years

BWDisrupt interacted with Team Yappily for an exclusive interview, to know more about the interactive social site and their business model.

3 Founders: Rohit Kumar, Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar and Rashmi Ranjan Padhy. Rohit handles tech, Aayush handles sales & marketing, Rashmi handles product.

Aayush is an alumnus of prestigious IMT Ghaziabad and has handled strategy, marketing, category & product across startups like FreeCharge and established companies like Airtel and Aircel.

Rohit is an alumnus of IIT, Kharagpur and has been the CTO at MyParichay and one of the first few employees at TooStep.

Rashmi is an alumnus of CET, Bhubaneswar and has been doing startups for past 5 years. He has started ShoppersOn & TechChamp in the past.

How was Yappily incepted?
Founded at Bangalore in 2016, Yappily is India’s first social aided commerce startup and we speak of ourselves as the “The Online Flea Market App” while describing to the consumer. People come to Yappily to discover great products, which is otherwise difficult to find or know about. E.g.- a beautiful hand-painted bottle, or exquisite handcrafted fashion jewelry, etc

How is it diff. from existing ones?
First of all Yappily is not just ecommerce, it is India’s first Social Aided Commerce Startup. As we said earlier, Yappily is The Online Flea Market App and there is absolutely no one doing what we are doing.

We essentially do 5 major things:
A) help in discovery and curation of products which are otherwise very difficult to discover
B) help bridge the trust gap between the buyer and seller across the country
C) provide the platform for both new unique products and used pre-loved products
D) build a social network of good people, buyers and sellers
E) building for both offline and online communities

What kind future plans are in your mind?
Become world’s largest social aided commerce app, starting with India.
Our vision is very global. We want to become world’s largest Social Aided Commerce app, starting with India – We, as Indians, love shopping and we love socializing. We have done it offline for millennia, we have been doing it online for some years now, so we believe Yappily is a new, better, more amazing way to do both the things we love in a way not dreamt before.

This, India, is our home and we wish to build a world class company for the world from right here, solving our problems in India here first – with global breadth and local depth.

How was it started?
There have been many e-commerce companies which have existed in the world in various countries but Aayush, Rashmi and Rohit found out that various informal social groups formed to solve the problem of buy, sell, exchange of both new interesting goods and used pre-loved goods in places as far away and different as New York, Dubai, Chile, London, Berlin during their education and work life. They also saw the same back in India Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi and Hyderabad.

Since we saw and realized that the same problem of discovery and trust existed and was being solved informally in various social groups in different cities across various continents, the problem must be important enough, large enough and big enough for us to solve.

Unique key feature/services
It is India’s first social aided ecommerce platform, for both new unique products as well as pre-loved used products, which is available both offline and online.

There is absolutely no one else doing exactly what we are doing. You can start selling in less than 10 seconds and chatting to buy in less than 5 seconds.

What kind of Monetization model are you working with?
We have found more than 14 ways to monetize our way forward as we grow but we will cautiously try them and experiment with them and more as we go along. We are not in a very big hurry to monetize this right away as we are looking forward to grow the market initially and then go after monetization.

Although it would be interesting for you to know that we have found very unique and interesting mix of monetizing options which can make us one of the only startups in the country to expand profitably across geographies within the country.

Please share with us your recent traction details?
We, started in July 2016, at Bangalore, are currently enable 15,000+ users online on our online app with a 30% growth curve. Apart from that we also touch at least another 15,000+ people through our special offline event called Yappily Flea Market & DeClutter Sale every month, and have cumulatively touched lives of 1 Lakh+ people offline, in various parts of Bangalore. We help 500+ unique sellers online and another 500+ unique sellers offline through our platform, while helps them display 5,00,000+ products for our buyers across the spectrum.

What are your marketing plans?
We are amidst a major revamping effort ourselves and will be coming up soon with marketing campaign with our new line of thought at both brand and product level.

We will also soon go into major metros and towns within India, and then go abroad, simply because we are building an infinitely scalable business which can be operational in any city in the world within a week’s time.

What are the Challenges Yappily faced initially?
The only major challenge we have faced till now was figuring out the right time to push the peddle and expand geographically because we are very cautious about growing profitably with a positive ROI.

We believe that we are fairly sure that we wound expand geographically across the country within the next quarter.

What is the Market size & opportunity you are presently looking at?
The overall market size for what we are doing is going to be about $ 100 billion in less than 5 years just within India. We believe Social Aided Commerce is the largest ever play in this country because it theoretically encompasses the widest assortment of products, sellers and buyers.