Mydala, a merchant marketing platform that aims at supporting businesses reach out to the target audience by way of mobile apps and the web, first stepped into the scene in 2009. Eight years later, the platform has evolved to become the largest online deals and coupon provider in India. The CEO and founder of Mydala, Anisha Singh, who spent 12 years in the USA lending help to women entrepreneurs raise funding, talks all things Mydala...
Mydala is actually my second company. My first company, Kinis Software, does digital content and has a joint venture with one of the largest real estate marketing firms in the US. When Kinis was doing well and was quite self-sufficient, I started thinking of doing something more “cutting edge”. I was looking for ideas and came across the Chinese getting together and getting a discount. The same model seemed to be evolving in the US as well. It made perfect sense to try it in the Indian market, where the only idea that had taken off was the experience of hybrid e-commerce in travel, wherein you buy online but have your experience offline. However, in the first six months, it also became clear to us that the main need was on the merchant or the small business side where they had limited options to market themselves.
Over time, we developed Mydala into a marketing platform that helps all businesses, especially local businesses, to market themselves via social media, mobile and our website. We help businesses build brand awareness and drive conversions to them. We help local businesses as well as online companies reach their right target user group leveraging Mydala’s various platforms.
We started in 2009, sharing our first office with a dental clinic to now, when we are present in 209 cities with 38 million registered users.
Building a business in India takes time, patience and real work at the ground level. The cost of customer acquisition is daunting in India and our focus was to build a great product, and scale with a clear path to profitability. Over time, we have understood the market, the needs of our merchants/users and have built a solid product and innovated constantly. Now that we are sitting on a great product, we are scaling up rapidly.
Since our users are both merchant and general consumers, we have to wear both hats and make the user aware that we cater to both groups effectively. From day one, we believed that the word of mouth marketing would take us a long way and help create a sustainable base of users that will be our biggest champions. Today, even with millions of subscribers, our customers who joined us at a viral level, remain our most involved and vocal users. With so many companies mushrooming up in the space, it is truly the word of mouth, which will drive online sales. From day one, it has been about delivering great value-for-money deals to our consumers.
Being an entrepreneur the second time around, I know that any business will have its share of highs and lows.
Getting people and convincing them to use a new service was a challenge. With so many companies mushrooming up in the space, it is truly the word of mouth, which will drive online sales. We don’t believe in going in for heavy advertising, but have been driven by delivering good value-for-money deals to our consumers. This is something that merchants have understood over time and we have worked with the best of brands as well as innumerable local merchants. To add, we have worked with over 1,50,000 merchants across 209 cities at Mydala. Everyone from a small to a big brand, such as VLCC, Café Coffee Day, Domino’s Pizza, Cleartrip, PVR Cinemas, YLG and Naturals Salons to an Aura Thai Spa etc. I think businesses that are consumer focused and realise that the consumer finally has a voice as in with social media will do well. Businesses that care about customers and realise that they need to be accessible to customers from all modes-online, mobile, offline will do well.
“The cost of customer acquisition is daunting in India and our focus was to build a great product, and scale with a clear path to profitability. Over time, we have understood the market, the needs of our merchants/users and have built a solid product and innovated constantly”
My philosophy is-“Either do or do not, there is no try”: Not quitting is half the battle won. There should be no such thing as Plan B. I want to clarify, I am not talking about innovating or pivoting but you definitely can’t be thinking if this doesn’t work then I’ll go start to work with my dad or my chacha. If you’re doing this it better be your best shot. Most importantly, idea mai dum hona chaiye. (The idea should be power packed.) If you’re building a product that’s redundant, then is there a problem.
When we started, we had 52 competitors (including seven, more heavily funded than us). We started with angel funding of $0.2 million from family and friends. InfoEdge was our first investor. In total, Mydala has received 20 million funding. Today, the number of competitors is reduced to less than a handful. As the market leader, Mydala is present in 209 cities and we have 38 million registered users. We have 6.6 million transactions per month-85 per cent of which comes from mobile. Every day, 1,50,000 vouchers are downloaded from Mydala by mobile users. We have launched in Dubai last year and are now looking at alliances and acquisitions to grow in other countries as well.
Building an offline to online business isn’t easy in any country but in a country like India, it’s exceptionally hard because the infrastructure is grossly underdeveloped. To crack that, and get to the masses, especially outside the major metropolitan cities is hard. We were fortunate to have understood mobile and ridden the mobile wave when no one had thought of it, plus we had morphed into a local merchant marketing platform.
I think our competitors found it hard to scale or maybe didn’t understand that an Indian model worked better than a Groupon model. There are only a handful left and they operate out of a handful of cities that we are in. Groupon recently exited—they sold their business to Sequoia, who relabelled it ‘Nearbuy’. There are a couple of other smaller ones in smaller pockets. There are different online cash back sites, but nobody is really trying to understand the user in their entirety. For us, it is about understanding and personalising everything for the user.
We’re the only company that showcases local deals in over 150 cities in India and more than 75% of our business comes from mobile now. We have spent considerable time and research on understanding the pain points that the merchants had in terms of marketing themselves. We built out a complete merchant marketing platform that allows the merchants to come and pick the way they want to market themselves and track the response that they get.
We aggressively focus on mobile-it has been the largest revenue and page traffic driver for us. We have exclusive partnerships with most of the telecom partners and OEMs in the country.
To be honest, there have been days when I’ve felt that this is not working out. In 2011, Mydala’s obituary was written but me and my co-founders refused to hang up our boots and call it a day unlike most of the internet based companies. With limited funding and virtually no support from the industry, we started to look at ways of going pan India with a services marketing platform for local business as there was none, especially outside the six metropolitan cities. But I have never thought about giving up.
I live and breathe Mydala and my family. So I don’t know what I would have done. I do know that these have been the most fun years of my life. Everybody looks back to their teens or 20s and say, “Oh! wow those were fun years. But these have been my most fun years.” It’s been very exciting ever since I started this company. So I don’t know what I would have done if Mydala had failed-I would probably be moping somewhere I guess.
With a presence in 209 cities, Mydala’s reach is pretty vast. Besides the metros, we get a lot of traffic from the tier-II and tier-III cities.
Bollywood is a vertical that we have relied upon since very early. We were one of the first online marketing platforms that tied up with major production houses for their launch promotions, leveraging the power of our marketing channels and telco associations. We have worked with all the big names and big stars like Shahrukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra have vouched for Mydala!
Firstly, we tailgated on the most popular categories. And I always say that in India, the one thing that sells is the ABC-Astrology, Bollywood and Cricket. At any given point in time, you will see in Mydala’s history, these are the three verticals we have leveraged heavily-tying up with Bollywood, doing tickets for crick et matches and of course astrology, which is an evergreen vertical on Mydala.
Secondly, we relied heavily on virality-giving/ rewarding our power users that have helped us in the initial years of growth by inviting their friends. There is a stat at Mydala, that one person invites 17 other people to it. Third, which I think has been the most important- we started out aggressively on mobile in 2011 when not a lot of companies were leveraging the platform heavily. We also advertised on mobile-of course at that point the ad rates were less! But all this, along with our strategic alliances, have created the user base that we have today.
We women are born with the wonderful quality of empathy but we tend to take it a step further by trying to not offend anyone. There will never be a perfect time or scenario to start your own business. If you wait for all your stars to align, it will never happen”
It’s an odd name and my marketing team doesn’t fail to remind me how easy it would have been if we would have just gone with something that explained what we did. Mydala in Sanskrit means ‘my group’ and in Bengali ‘my basket’-I like it, plus we wanted something that could go international and mean everything and nothing at the same time.
While there are differences, there are parallels also that can be drawn in both cases-women in general tend to second guess themselves all the time and across the globe! I guess it’s inherent in our nature. The glass ceiling exists in the US just as much as it does here, but it’s just that women in the US become independent a lot earlier as opposed to India where we have structural support. But I’ve heard more guts and glory stories there than here in India.
I’m going to quote Gandhi here, “We should be the change we want to see”. If more of us don’t actively make an effort to join the workforce or start a business, then this change where women are the norm and not the exception will never happen. Over the last seven years, I’ve talked to several women who tend to second guess themselves. We women are born with the wonderful quality of empathy but we tend to take it a step further by trying to not offend anyone. There will never be a perfect time or scenario to start your own business. If you wait for all your stars to align, it will never happen. It’s best to just make a go and adjust your sails along the way. If there is a perfect time for women to start their own business, it is now. My advice to anyone who is starting a business is-do what you enjoy doing. If you start a business with the idea where the basis of everything is to raise funding, it’s sure to fail. Start something you love and ensure that it is solving a need or is disrupting something like time or convenience. Focus on building a sound business and the rest will happen. Make a dent in the universe however, big or small.
By Namrata Gulati Sapra
