Ecommerce Evangelist

How Shopmatic, a Singapore-headquartered ecommerce enabler, is riding India’s entrepreneurship wave

- Rajiv Singh

The mood in the Indian camp was exuberant, understandably so. Ecommerce enabler Shopmatic, which was incorporated in Singapore in December 2014, and spent the formative few months in the island city-state building which had its tech backend, was set to launch its India operations in January 2016, six months after conducting an extensive recce.

India-born Anurag Avula, along with co-founders and former colleagues at PayPal—Yen Ti Lim and Kris Chen—criss-crossed over 25 smaller towns and cities, trying to decipher the mood of small and medium enterprises, and their needs. Feedback from scores of puny entrepreneurs, street vendors and mom-n-pop store owners from Mysuru to Kanpur assured the 10-member Indian team about the massive opportunity that the country offered: An overwhelming majority of the estimated 50 million small and medium businesses were largely offline.

Avula, who has over two decades of work experience, was convinced about cracking the market. “Within a few minutes, we should be ready to onboard consumers,” he recalls the allpervasive thought on Day 1. The team was waiting to celebrate with a bang. Exuberance, however, turned into embarrassment. It took Shopmatic 27 days to onboard its first consumer. The inexplicable delay drilled home the message propagated by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” There was learning for Avula. “One can get better. We’ve done a lot of iterations from where we started to where we are now,” he says. Every year for us, he adds, is a beta year.