“In India the legal process for registration and mentoring to guide entrepreneurs in their early stage has its shortcomings. To be honest, we have no idea what to do when our business is ready to go to the next level of maturity.”
He completed his post graduate studies in 2016 and immediately went into creating
Go Web, an ecommerce portal targeting the small time kiranas, dukans and boutique keepers.
“My team and I are engineers so developing the platform was easy. What’s hard was everything else,” says Santosh. “When you step out into the real world, you don’t know where to start – where do I first go to register my company, where do I get funding, what legal documents do I need? We were absolutely lost.”
Since then Santosh has found mentors and advisors who worked at Intel and Samsung. And these advisors have helped with funding and Santosh hope to raise some seed funding soon.
Why did you decide to found this venture? Internet usage and online shoppers are growing at breakneck speed in India, and that means sales at small dukans and medium scale shops around your neighbourhood is dropping day by day.
In India, 95 percent of the retail sector is still unorganised and we thought a business like Go Web would help the small and medium scale seller compete in a digitalized world.
All a seller has to do is go to
GoWeb.com, sign up for their digital shop to reach out customers in their locality.
What’s special about Go Web (after all even Amazon and eBay does the same thing?)Go Web is one of the only companies, working on IoT and Lo Ra technology for the betterment of retailers.
How did you manage to fund this idea?We gathered funds from family and friends and most of it was spent on building the basic infrastructure. Since October 2016, we have been bootstrapping and use the remaining funds sparingly to manage daily expenses.
What are/what will be your monetization paths?Currently our portal is free to use to attract more and more sellers. Once we get enough sellers on board we will implement our revenue generation strategy.
Tell us how the business has grown so far We have acquired over 50 sellers in Bangalore and over 120 across India. We launched for business recently like I was saying and have over 500 daily visitors on our website.
What marketing strategies and plans are in place to grow the business?Our main strategy is to reach out to the retailers losing business because they running their businesses in old and conventional ways. We are planning to reach out to sellers in the rural India not just metropolitan India.
Share with us some best and worst memories while running the businessThe best part of this journey was support from friends, family and professors who helped at each stage through their money or moral support.
Not having prior marketing or business experience was the worst part during this. We had to learn each and everything from scratch. We made lots of mistake in the beginning. But we learned a lot from our mistakes at the end.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
