DesiDime plans to enter tier II, tier III cities soon

A desi dime for a dozen shopping online

Mumbai based Jimish Jobanputra (32 years) and Mehul Jobanputra (35 years), the brains behind DesiDime have left successful corporate careers to embark on their entrepreneurial journey. A Masters in Business Management from University of Strathclyde, Mehul was engaged in defining corporate strategy, M&A, Diversification strategy and Business development for Universal Consulting India. Jimish, a Masters in Computer Science from University of Illinois worked at Enova Financial in Chicago to help them launch Payday and Installment Loans.

In a tete e tete with Baishali Mukherjee, Mehul speaks about  his decision to take up entrepreneurship:

The genesis

DesiDime is an online shopping community. Here people collaborate to discover and share the latest deals, discounts, offers and coupons with each other. However, it is not just a deals and coupons website. Here people also interact with each other to give and receive more shopping-related information.

The information includes product/ store reviews, what to buy, where to buy, when to buy, tips and tricks to get better bargains et al. Basically it is a one-stop destination, where you can get all your shopping queries answered.

A Dime is a low value coin in the US. It is something you are advised to be careful about spending in order to be able to save more money. That’s where the idea came from. Since it is a shopping community for Indians, we added the prefix- Desi. It also has a nice alliteration effect to it.

The entrepreneurial journey

It was Jimish, who first thought of DesiDime, while working in the US. He was inspired by the American shopping community, Slickdeals.net, and was a regular user of Slickdeals. Building the first version of DesiDime.com forums in July 2010, in a Chicago Starbucks café in three straight days, Jimish launched the product over a long weekend, and shared it with his friends and family including me (Mehul).

I was the 20th user to sign up on DesiDime. The concept of a shopping community driven by user-generated content sounded quite unique and exciting to us.

Since we complemented each other well, we decided to be co-founders. While Jimish built the product, I started looking at the SEO, affiliate marketing and digital marketing for DesiDime.

All this while, we both were working part time on DesiDime. Finally, Jimish quit his job in 2011 and I in December 2011 to concentrate fully on developing the community. Today DesiDime is seven years old and India’s largest shopping community with over nine lakh registered active members. We invested around Rs four lakh out of our own savings to launch DesiDime.

Funding

Our first angel investor was Mark Friedgan. He was Jimish’s CTO, in his former company. He gave us $30,000 because he believed in India, in us and in the concept of DesiDime. Though, we didn’t use the fund for first three years because we were already running in profit at that time. We only used it when we launched our third product, Zingoy.

Growth plan

The Jobanputras

Our vision is to be a global social shopping community. We aspire to make this platform the final go-to destination before a shopper makes a purchase. After the merger with Pepper.com, world’s largest shopping community, in 2015, as a group we currently have 65 to 70 mn visits a month globally. We are looking at 500mn visits per month.

We plan to position our product in a way that it can also be used on platforms like Amazon, Alexa, Google Home. The necessary product development is happening, where we can feed information into things like Google Home or Amazon Echo.

Your success milestones

After running and successfully managing DesiDime.com we have managed to launch three of our business offshoots consecutively namely Cuelinks, Zingoy, and Pelando.sg(in Singapore).

At Group level, in 2012, PCPL (Parity Cube Pvt. Ltd.) made its foray into the affiliate marketing space with the launch of Cuelinks.com. It enables bloggers, deal and coupons websites, publishers monetize content in the most effective way. Cuelinks, today, has more than 10,000+ publishers on board and ranks amongst the top 4,000 websites in India.

In 2013, after winning over the Indian market, Cuelinks extended its operation in Brazil and Russia.

The third website, Zingoy.com was launched in 2015. The cashback site not only rewards users on their own purchases but also provides cashback to users on their friend’s purchases. It is now the fastest growing cashback site in India with almost Rs 1 crore cashback rendered so far.

In 2017, PCPL ventured into the Singapore market through Pelando.sg. Pelando is Singapore’s first-of-its-kind online shopping community for deals and coupons available for public consumption with active participation from its users. With the current venture in Singapore, we plan to enter in other South-east Asian markets if we are successful.

Operations

We have one office in Mumbai. We started out with just five employees and today PCPL has grown in strength to 60-70 employees.

As a bootstrapped company, initially we hired a lot of freshers and juniors because we could not afford expensive resources. However, we made sure these people had enough talent and enthusiasm to work for the product as if it were their own. Now when we have grown enough, we are hiring senior positions, who build up their own team.

Business challenges and how you tackled it?

Last year the overall e-commerce industry witnessed a slowdown, which impacted the affiliate market. To overcome this, we realigned our focus to product-driven growth rather than marketing-driven growth. Hence, our overall marketing expense came down by 80 per cent, but our user based growth continued to be at 15 per cent.

Future plans

In the next few years we would be focusing on tier 2 and 3 cities. With mobile phones and internet connection, smaller towns are catching up on the online shopping. Saving money, first-hand guidance and advice about e-commerce stores and products will be important for these shoppers. We see great potential for growth and success in these places.

With the proliferation of a number of e-commerce shopping-related sites in India, do you think DesiDime is headed for a sustainable business? Do share your views.