Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

1)      How did you come up with the idea of one-stop online solution for TopTomato?

In an era where time and money have become mutually convertible commodities, we are passionate about creating a solution for the regular shopping chores of the people of Bangalore. Grocery shopping at conventional stores is often related to long queues at billing desks, tiring exercise of carrying the grocery bags back home, fighting for parking space and many more endless hassles over procurement of daily necessities.

The team did a study of the existing retail scenario of India and realized that an average Indian spends 58% of his monthly retail spend on food and personal care segment alone. Hence, the idea of integrating convenience into the experience of household shopping has the potential of touching every household in India.

2)      What is the USP of TopTomato?

Toptomato team aims to redefine the shopping experience of every household by introducing the following unique concepts:

1. Concept of household subscription – for the first time in India. You need to order your regular needs just once and relax, while TopTomato Team takes care of your household needs
2. Nothing sells at MRP – you get discounts on all products
3. Customised home delivery solutions – delivery from 7 am to 11 pm
4. Shopping Lists and customised packages for all segments of the population

3)      Whom do you compete with directly in the e-commerce market?

There are a couple of companies in Bangalore which are in the grocery ecommerce market, including Bigbasket and Zopnow. However, Toptomato is the first in the market to have the concept of subscription for daily essentials.

4)      One of the major issues in e-tailing is the customer churn. How is TopTomato ensuring customer loyalty?

We strong believe in creating an unparalleled customer experience by offering our customers services like delivery within 24 hours, late night delivery slots and no-questions asked return policy at point of delivery. Also, the concept of subscription has been designed in such a manner that high level of flexibility and priority is assigned to such customers, which makes them high on loyalty. Also, we have seen that customers who opt for subscription with us also tend to club their one time requirements along with their subscriptions.

5)      Recently focus has been on mobile internet based e-tailing. Is TopTomato planning to expand in mobile/telephone based order subscription?

TopTomato is planning to launch its mobile application – a pocket supermarket – very soon. The application is currently under development and focus is on creating a user friendly and simple UI for the customers. This will further expand the reach of TopTomato and enable people to place and edit an order from any place at any time.

6)      Is there any plan to expand into perishable food items segment or adding any additional product line?

We are already working on adding fruits and vegetables into our product line very soon. Apart from perishables, we plan to start our own brand of staples in the market very soon.

7)      What are the expansion plans within next 12 months for TopTomato?

Currently the focus is on stabilizing operations and then expanding our operations in entire Bangalore. We have had several requests from people living in areas where we do not cater currently to expand our services there, and our first priority is to reach all these people and cover entire Bangalore within the next 6 months. After that we would be expanding to other metros in India. We plan to have our operations in atleast 3 other metros within the next 12 months.

-Abhishek, vcBytes.com

Indian online matrimonial space has been burdened with a service fee based matrimony site model over the years. A fresh breather in this segment is the latest matrimonial site Aneklog. It helps you find Your Ek among Anek and doesn’t ask for any service fee. Afterall, marriages are made on heaven, why pay on earth?

Aneklog is an online service from Scrappy Ventures Private Limited.Scrappy Ventures is an Internet product company based in Pune, India.Scrappy, also known as Jugaad in Hindi is the ability to achieve ambitious goals by utilizing disproportionately low quantity of resources. It is named so because they believe in achieving amazing outcomes with lean teams.They believe their strength lies in addressing untapped and underserved stakeholders in large markets by leveraging Internet as a store-front with complimentary Brick-Mortar services.

AnekLog is a 100% FREE matrimonial website that is the first of its kind to cater to the broader stakeholders of the matrimonial space which include small and medium Marriage Bureaus and Community Organisations (SamaajikSansthas).

Their vision is to do something very similar to the matrimonial space as what Sabeer Bhatia did to the personal email. Their website offers all the premium features of online matrimony to users at 100% free of cost while our efficient Business Development team partners with Marriage Bureaus and Community Organisations to include the matrimonial profiles of their clients/members on Aneklog website. This helps AnekLog.com have an eclectic userbase which comprises of tech savvy self-serve users as well as matrimonial profiles which are traditionally offline and not found on other websites.

AnekLog helps offers this service at FREE of cost to Community Organisations as part of  CSR while they charge a small set-up fee to Commercial Bureaus for offering the same service. They let these Marriage Bureaus find their clients a match from our large user database and also generate leads by directing users interested in their clients to the Marriage Bureaus.

They claim to be  merely a marketing channel for Marriage Bureaus and hence don’t even ask for their client’s contact information. Very soon, they hope to be the e-Bay of the Matrimonial Space.

About the founders:

AshishAgrawal (Founder, CEO):Ashish is the Founder, Janitor and everything in between at Scrappy Ventures. He has previously worked with Google where he managed teams ranging from sales, operations, engineering and research. Ashish received his MBA from Carnegie Mellon, a MS in Computer Sciences fromUniversity ofNew Mexico and a BE in Mechanical Engineering from theUniversity ofPune.

DivyaAgrawal (Director):Divya brings to Scrappy Ventures, her rich experience which includes teaching Political Science, working with the Indian Army’s research division, volunteering with the American Red Cross, leading marketing and business development for start-ups in the education sector, and raising funds for charitable organizations.

AnekLog is different from other matrimonial sites in 3-major ways which are:

• 100% FREE: AnekLog.com offers completely FREE ‘premium matrimonial services’ to end-users unlike other websites who charge a recurring fee for features like sending/responding to messages and searching other profiles.
• Inclusion of Community Organisations: AnekLog.com lets Community Organisations (Samaajs) upload biodatas of their community’s members for finding a match among our registered users.
• Inclusion of Marriage Bureaus: AnekLog.com allows Marriage Bureaus to upload biodatas of their clients to AnekLog.com so that they can find new clients who match their existing clients.

AnekLog, as a gesture of appreciation, also creates a free website for these Community Organisations and Marriage Bureaus so that they can use it to market their organisation& services.

Established competitors in this segment:  Shaadi, Jeevansathi, BharatMatrimony

Let us know if you found your ‘Ek’ from Aneklog.

-Abhishek, vcBytes.com

Mettl, an online assessment portal based out of Gurgaon has raised $4M led by IndoUS Venture Partners.  Existing investors also participated in this series A round. Mettl had raised angel funding from Blume Ventures, Sasha Mirchandani, Naveen Tiwari of Inmobi and others.  Vani Kola, Managing Partner of IndoUS will take a board seat at Mettl.

Mettl was founded in 2010 by Ketan Kapoor, an IIT Rourkee and Tonmoy Shingal, an IIT Kanpur alum.  Mettl is an online assessment and testing platform to measure, analyze and improve people skills. It is ideal for companies who want to run multi-competency assessments for their prospective hires or existing employees.

Mettl has been primarily focusing on B2B market and have clients like Cleartrip.com, Monster.com, InMobi, Comviva, The Times Group, Myntra.com and iXiGO. Mettl provides platform to companies where in they can customize the assessment test as per their will and judge the candidate merit. Mettl can also open its platform for B2C segment and can offer tests like BrainBench.

Online assessment space is getting global attention, InterviewStreet, another Indian startup is also in this space but primarily targeting US based companies. As per Vani Kola, “Mettl is scalable and applicable for global companies. It is poised to become a global player and continue to expand the use cases of their strong proprietary technology to multiple business applications,”.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Classle is creating a social learning network, with the focus of Learning. Classle connects not only individuals but also private learning environments. Classle offers free service to students pursuing higher education to enhance their academic and professional level.

Classle is founded by Vaidya Nathan, He had previously worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions where he held many portfolios including Head-Global Innovation Office, Global Head – Learning and Research, Chief Architect, etc.

Classle provides fast, easy and free access to a wide variety of organized contents. Classle help learners find highly valued, targeted, appropriate and closely related information quickly. Classle’s technology-powered online platform, which integrates social technologies together, takes a learner beyond the narrow confines of their Institution.  Freeing the learner from the limitations of their present Knowledge Group, it puts them in a virtual learning group of educators, professionals and peers of their own choosing.

Classle allows you to create and access posts, pages, edit and clone learning based content, join and participate in groups and discussions and network with others to seek and give help. Classle has a simple and intuitive user interface. This way both technical and non-technical learners can easily search, create, manage, and track their preferred contents.

Recently Classle has introduced new feature “Classle Events” targeting at educational institutes, its a service to make organizing events like seminars, symposium, paper contest, Business Plan contest, etc., enjoyable and easy.

Organizing academic events is a very important part of a College experience. This is a crucial vehicle to not only broaden the scope of learning beyond what is offered in curriculum and increase scope of interaction outside the class and institute boundary, but also give students experience in creativity, managerial and leadership experience.  Classle Events takes all those drudgery out and lets you increase the experience and success of the event itself.

The partnership benefit comes along with Campus Classle©, Classle’s unique cloud campus platform and PlacementNet©.

-Hitesh