4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about that project – the one where we met.

Kashyap Deorah: I was always inspired by the power of the internet to democratize disaggregated markets. One of the problems I saw was that not all the market participants get the same opportunity. Internet was not mainstream at that time. The idea was to create an eBay over the phone where buyers and sellers could call a number and talk to a person who would have an assisted commerce layer.

The largest local search of India at that time was JustDial. We became the phone-based commerce for India. A lot of retailers and bigger brands that had websites were not taking off because internet penetration was low. We were serving the phone commerce channel for them and doing more business for them than their website. They acquired us and we became FutureBazaar. I ran that for a few years.

Sramana Mitra: What was the duration of this project?

Kashyap Deorah: This gig was a five-year journey.

Sramana Mitra: 2005 to 2010?

Kashyap Deorah: 2007 to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes, Anand Rajaraman was the lead investor then. We raised a total of two crores. It was less than half a million dollars at that time.

Sramana Mitra: What scale of the acquisition were you able to achieve with that?

Kashyap Deorah: It was in the lower tens of millions.

Sramana Mitra: Good return.

Kashyap Deorah: It was definitely a celebration. It was the first windfall of my life.

Sramana Mitra: In that journey, what did you learn about customer acquisition?

Kashyap Deorah: The thing that was stark for me was my foundational years of entrepreneurship was in Silicon Valley. That made me far more tech-oriented. I used to mock all the offline ways to acquire customers for a digital business. When Indian brands would have TV ads for websites, how does that make sense? It felt like vanity to me. In India, it’s very effective. When you’re shifting a bulk of the population from offline to online, you’ve got to meet them where they are.

Sramana Mitra: Your consumer acquisition was in this format and merchant acquisition was pure B2B.

Kashyap Deorah: That’s right. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on ads. Those who were running newspaper ads, we would insert ourselves as the phone store for those.

Sramana Mitra: You piggybacked on their advertising dollars. They were already advertising and your number just came on as just an additional channel.

Kashyap Deorah: Imagine you have a deal on a microwave. Typically, you’d see the store name. We would become the phone store. We got so many customers on the consumer side. Then we started buying our own newspaper space as well when we realized the ROI was super high. On our eBay, we would curate our own deals and put it in newspaper ads.

Sramana Mitra: Was that Bombay-specific?

Kashyap Deorah: It was pan-India.

Sramana Mitra: How many merchants were on the platform at that point?

Kashyap Deorah: We had a freemium model where you could just list without buying a plan. You could get leads for free before we sell you a plan to get more leads. Over time, we realized that converting the leads was also a pain for them. Becoming a commission retailer is more interesting as a business model than leads. I would say tens of thousands in total.

Sramana Mitra: So there was a big SME business and not just the Big Bazaar stuff.

Kashyap Deorah: That’s right.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack
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