What took Flipkart about six years to do, Snapdeal’s founder Kunal Bahl did in just four years.
Snapdeal, an online marketplace, is the next billion-dollar company; according to the valuations, the company got post its latest round of funding.
eBay along with other investors have pumped in $133 million into the company.
The 27-year-old entrepreneur, who started Snpadeal in 2010 as a deals site, is said to be quite agile when it comes to understanding the pulse of consumers and changes in the market trends.
In an interview with Business Line in September last year, he said the company has grown six times in just three years and touched a turnover of ₹2,000 crore. This, Bahl said, was possible because the company not only transformed itself from a deals site to marketplace but was the first to increase product categories and assortments.
“We did a lot of things to localise ourselves and that is what has worked for us. While many players started doing consumer-to-consumer model on their site, we said we want to be a business-to-consumer player at the right time as we felt that consumers selling directly to consumers didn’t click due to the lack of trust factor. Also, we were the first to focus on personalisation and created lot of filters,” Bahl had mentioned.
Bahl, who believes that transformation and evolution is an ongoing process, started Snapdeal with just ₹40 lakh of personal savings and angel fund, was in fact the first one to realise that “deals only” was not a sustainable model moving forward.
Anand Lunia, founder of venture capital firm India Quotient, feels Bahl is a smart entrepreneur with the ability to modify his business model keeping in view consumer preferences.
Popular website According to Lunia, Bahl had made e-commerce popular even at a time when people were not aware about this mode of retail. “The only thing that was popular back in 2010 was online ticketing and Kunal was the only one who had the guts to go and advertise on television then.” Lunia, who regrets not getting a chance to invest in Snapdeal in the early stages, said that Bahl has unconventional way of doing business. He said Snapdeal went for a few acquisitions just to change its business model.
A business graduate from Wharton School and post-graduate from Kellogg Management Institute, Bahl had not had it all easy. He had once said that his proposal on starting a “deals only” site got rejected as investors were not convinced. His first revenues were in fact from a restaurant chain in the first month itself.
Hiring thru LinkedIn A regular on Twitter and LinkedIn, Bahl does everything different. At a time when everyone else is going to tap talent from the IITs and IIMs, Bahl connects with them over LinkedIn. “Come to us, we hire directly” was his status on the professional networking site. “I know him very well personally. He is a great story teller, a friendly entrepreneur and a fiercely focused executive,” says Mukund Mohan, head Microsoft Ventures.