“The chat interface is becoming an integral part of this modern conversing society and will be the next big thing after mobile apps,” says Deepak Ravindran, Founder & CEO, Lookup. In conversation with Rashi Varshney…
Edited Excerpts:
You have played a role in the development of several start-ups. Tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur?
The first start-up that I launched was Innoz. In 2005, when I was a student at the Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Engineering, in Kasaragod, Kerala, I teamed up with three of my classmates and we founded Innoz, which is more popularly known as SMSGyan. This is basically an offline search engine, which allows about 120 million users to text any question and get answers immediately. You don’t even need Internet connected smartphones to use the system. The success that we had with Innoz, inspired me to found Quest, which combines its question-and-answer platform with automatic geotagging to help users find nearby people who can answer questions on the best restaurants to dine, places to see around, and so on. My third venture is Lookup.
What kind of services are you providing through Lookup?
Lookup is a free app for connecting consumers with the local businesses through chat. With Lookup, buyers and sellers have access to do real-time transactions on more than 800+ million products/services available in their local ecosystem, but not listed online. You can get these products delivered to your doorstep, book appointments, find prices, product/service or make reservations at restaurants and many more with a message. You can even chat with the police. Lookup aims to bring all offline businesses online. One can claim his/her business on Lookup and start engaging with their customer. Lookup provides easy-to-understand analytics and customer experience that allows business owners to take away insights about how their shop is performing and KPIs that help them outperform the competitors.
How do you see the state of mobile commerce in India?
Despite several years of rapid growth, e-commerce still constitutes well under 2% of the retail market. The remaining 99% of retail is still offline and mostly local, which represents a large business opportunity according to a report. India has 40 million small urban businesses with less than 10 employees each. It includes everything from coffee shops and groceries to small restaurants. Traditional organised retail shops never really got big in India, because more than 95% of these SMBs don’t have a good digital presence. Our bet is that mobile commerce will leapfrog it and work with mom-n-pops.
In your view what are the key challenges that the mobile commerce industry in India faces?
It’s a two-sided problem. Shopkeepers will be happy if they have more customers. Customers will be happy if there are more shops. From day one, we were very clear that we would focus on consumer first and using customer support as a major source of responding to their queries. When a customer chats with us, we call the store, find out the information and reply to the customer in real time. Also, we then try to on-board the merchant we are calling. Lookup would constantly place orders on behalf of customers to shops, and these shops noticing these trends would enquire and come on Lookup.
Mobile apps have become very popular these days. How do you see the mobile apps business evolving in the future?
Chat platforms are not just a medium through which people can interact with others, but also a platform for accomplishing various day to day tasks. One single platform is being explored by startups such as Justdial, Askme, Google, Facebook, Snapdeal and many others, to build their businesses. The thought of connecting the producers to the consumers was very appealing for they could solve the ever existing problems of miscommunication, time lag and several other redundancies through chat. The reason is it’s simplicity. That’s the impact that chat platform has granted to the world. I strongly believe that the chat platform is the way forward to answer people’s queries, albeit with a personal touch. The chat interface is becoming an integral part of this modern conversing society and will be the next big thing after mobile apps.
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