​

Refer to the project brief and the additional resources before you begin this project!
(Go through them at least 3 times or till the time you don’t have a mind map in your brain)

Let’s begin

​

Elevator Pitch

India is on Ecommerce 3.0 - with Quick Commerce(QC) channels like Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart becoming a major channels for sellers.

We have more than 3000 sellers actively selling on QC. While this new channels are exciting and growing for the sellers, the lack of data analysis is making it difficult to manage and scale.

In the past few weeks, we did customer discovery with 300+ sellers and decided to launch SaaS platform to solve 4 core challenges - Availability, Visibility, Pricing & Discounts and Competition Tracking, specifically to QC channels.

Challenge No. 1 - How do you check the availability of your product on various Quick Commerce platforms across 1200+ pin codes every day?

This is a core operation challenge to check the metrics every day, hence we decided to launch solution that will monitor availability for different quick-commerce platforms like Zepto, Instamart, and Blinkit across all cities.

<Rest of the core challenges identified is not considered as part of this project>

Understand your Product

Fundamental Challenge:

As of today, quick commerce platforms are a blackbox. There's exactly one report and a very minimal dashboard that is shared with the brands on QC channels which has very minimal data. From our conversations we have realized that brands want visibility into their stock status, stock movement, loss of revenue, various other metrics at a hyper local level/ at a pin code level. Existing challenge is that this is completely unmet by the Quick Commerce platforms.

Our platform currently solves this exact problem with the following features -

Features & Functionalities:

Features:

Function No. 1 Availability - Tracks stock status of products at a QC platform, city, pin code level

2. Visibility - Monitors organic and paid visibility, meaning where does the brand appear for various search terms/ keywords across QC channels, city and pin code level

3. Assortment - Shows availability of the total catalogue/ listings of a brand at a pin code level

4. Pricing and Discounts - Enables the brands to audit their selling price (SP) and discounts across their catalogue.

Other Functionalities:

Detailed reporting - A master report which contains all the data points such as SKU ID, plaform ID, stock status, SP, Discount % etc

Competition Intelligence - Along with one's own brand, customers can discover/monitor competitior's performance metrics such as who are the top competitors at a city level that have better pricing and products for a specific search term, or, what competitor products are Out of stock (OOS) that can be used as a leverage.

Alerts - Get notifications on email, slack and whatsapp when a product goes OOS, or when a listing is not available in a certain pin code or when the organic position drops of the brand etc.

Existing Workaround:

Today, brands are monitoring this data manually using man power which is totally inefficient that cannot be scaled and a total waste of human intelligence.

Core Benefit: Availability tracking
Basic Product: Stock status reports in CSV
Expected Product: Executive Dashboard with summary, historical data and granular reporting
Augmented Product: Revenue Loss, Availability, Visibility, Pricing and Discounts, Assortment Monitoring with reports and alerts.
Potential product: Competition Intelligence that estimates market share, revenue share, assortment gaps, market intelligence, consumer analytics

Understanding Core Value Proposition

(Build your core value proposition by exact what your product does and what problem are you solving)

Brands want to scale their business on the quick commerce channels as it is the fastest growing space in India today. The power of promoting a brand lies in the hands of a Category Manager of the QC platform. It is completely upto the category manager to register a brand, decide what products to enlist, where to show the product, for what keywords, when the ads get placed, where the ads get placed, what discounts to run etc. There is no transparency in this process today. The only way to get this info is to track this manually.

With our product we automate fetching all the data points and metrics that enable brands to have informed discussions with the category managers and influence them to favor their brand in the future.

Understanding the Users

Decision maker - Co-founder of a D2C Brand / Brand Owner
The influencer - Head of eCommerce/ Category Director/ Strategy & Ops Director
Blocker - CFO/Technology Team
The end user - Key account manager / Marketing Manager / Business Ops​

Understanding your ICP

(There are separate tables for both B2C and B2B products, put down your your ICP’s in a Table Format, use this as a reference.
This table makes it super clear for anyone to understand who your users are and what differentiates them)​

B2B Table:

​
(use this ICP prioritization table)

Understand Market

(begin by doing a basic competitor analysis)

(then try to understand the market at a macro level and evaluate the trends and tailwinds/headwinds.)

Now it’s time for some math, calculate the size of your market.

TAM = Total no. of potential customers x Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPU)
SAM = TAM x Target Market Segment (percentage of the total market)
SOM = SAM x Market Penetration/Share

Annual Subscription Amount - Rs 20 Lakhs, initially to start with the MRR might be Rs 40K to start with, but with expansion this need to become Rs 1.6L per month.

TAM - 3000 brands x Rs 20 Lakhs = Rs 600 Crores

SAM - 80% = Rs 540 Crores

SOM - 30% of TAM = Rs 180 Crores ($25 Million) ARR

Designing Acquisition Channel

(keep in mind the stage of your company before choosing your channels for acquisition.)

​

Focussing on 2 channels as of now since we are in the early scaling phase - Outbound emails and social reach out - with both these channels, we should be able to establish the connection and speak to the decision makers at the 3000+ brands selling on the QC channels.

Detailing your Acquisition Channel

1. With our initial research we found 90% of the potential brands are available on Apollo directory, so we will be able to extract their contact details and reach out to them both via email, phone call.
2. Our secondary channel will be to reach out to the same company decision maker via social channels.

Example Social post - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7229331532916645888/

Organic Channel

Organic might not work at this point of time since the QC channels itself is new.

After searching on Google Keyword Planner, Moz and SemRush - the only keywords are

Quick commerce analytics

Quick commerce trends - these are not relevant.

Having said that for education and maket creation - we are doing educational series with our partners

For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT-RQsmXJyc

<all the above will not lead to immediate conversion>

Content Loop

​

Step 1 → Nail down your content creator, content distributor and your channel of distribution
Step 2 → Decide which type of loop you want to build out.
Step 3 → Create a simple flow diagram to represent the content loop.

​

Our ICP customers are sellers on Quick commerce channels - they're looking to consume content related to Ecommerce, Scaling, Business Management, and Operations.

Being b2b professionals, we found them consuming good amount of content on Social Media especially Linkedin - we did an experiment last week on creating reports which are both actionable and analytical in nature.

Example content - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7229331532916645888/

The post has gathered more than 3500 organic views so far.

By tagging the relavant brands, and Sr members of the company, it creates an organic content loop of encouraging them to share and reach to their immediate circle of influence.

Example

1. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Im191uEK8Ux09XldscE2nvitOEcUmLpC/view?usp=sharing

Paid Ads

(Understand what is already being done, what is working out well and what needs to be stopped)

​

We found the Google searches on the relevant ICP is nil so this section is not relevant.

​

​

Product Integration

(Understand, where does organic intent for your product begin?)

​

Integrate with other complementary solutions:

1. WareIQ - warehousing solution used by sellers
2. Vinculum - Order management platform by omni channel sellers

Both the above platforms are used by sellers for other operations.

By including our monitoring and analytics Quick Commerce in their platforms.

​

WareIQ Dashboard -> Quick Commerce -> Analytics

​

​

Referral Program/Partner Program

(For B2B companies, if referral does not make sense you'll take a crack at a partner program for your product)​

Our technical integration is more like a partner engagement. Other companies targeting the same customer segment but offering different solution.

Companies like WareIQ(warehousing solution) or Vinculum(Order management solution) can refer potential customers for us.

We recently had a joint webinar with WareIQ(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT-RQsmXJyc) and received potenital 4 referrals.

• Seller raises replenishment request to Blinkit FC - On successful response,
• (Referral screen) Show popup show Enable SellerApp QC Solution to monitor your stock outs

(the customer feels accomplished after the raising the replenishment request and successfully submitted - where we ask for referring to our QC monitoring solution).

Thanks!

​we hope this helped you break the cold start problem!

Reminder: This is not the only format to follow, feel free to edit it as you wish!