Finding Founders thru Twitter, Failing to Scale and 3rd Time Lucky
When payments online were unheard of, Instamojo decided to make online payments simpler. The story of discovering online payments problem is unique. Even unique is the fact that he met his co-founders on Twitter. Akash Gehani talks about finding the payment problem, how they addressed it and finally scaled to on-boarding a million merchants. Listen to Akash of Instamojo talk about scaling to a million merchants and much more.
Akash is a focussed entrepreneur. In this episode, he gets candid about building the company, the co-founder dynamics and about the sinusoid, high and lows, of starting up.
Here some unique perspectives from the interview:
01:23
And if I go back to about 2011, or 2010, you know, when the germination was happening, internet was coming in, technology is going to be like a tsunami, for businesses out there? How can we help them adopt technology and grow their business? And it was within this framework? How can we help small businesses is the way we got thinking, and we tried a few things.
3:49
The different ways to look at impact. I always look at the anecdotal pieces that we keep getting on a day to day basis. But yeah, just to give you a sheer sense of, what scale are we at? Right? And I don’t think we had a great scale. I mean, like the road is way too long, there is a lot more to do. But today, we have half a million merchants on Insta Mojo. Right?
17:40
It happened because we actually felt that as a problem ourselves. So during the course of this journey and even prior to this Sampad used to take you to do video interview is like we have a podcast today. He used to video interviews with few folks and one day we were discussing it right, can you monetize this, and we figured no we can’t. I would love for someone to pay for it to be able to watch this video, but how do we do that? How will I collect payments for it? And we said actually there is no option for this.
Earlier Days Of Instamojo
28:07
It took a long time. I think in the earlier days, I didn’t, at least for the first couple of years, while things kept growing, it just wasn’t exciting enough. The bigger numbers wasn’t born that great, or in the pure terms of percentage growth, it just wasn’t exciting enough, like we kept looking at by why its not working, why it’s just not working. Right. Maybe it’s an assumption, right? We figured if we do this, and there’s always this dilemma, right, when you’re building a product, let’s add these one or two features that will help us with a lot of traction. And you know what, you go back you build those things and its not working out. And it’s always that cycle, right? Yeah, maybe the market needs these things. Let’s build that.
29:31
We actually seen this journey in matter of few years. It’s been really exciting when we look at powering some of these businesses right especially when you see them going from like I said, from a caterpillar to full-fledged butterfly today.
Akash Is Surprised
01:01
I think the fact we are still here is a surprise, but actually speak, you know, five years from now and will still be there. It won’t be a surprise then because I think it’s not that we figured out something we always figure things out. We’re always learning from our own experiences and from others.
While highs and lows are a part of the entrepreneurial journey, Akash believes in constantly learning from experience to scale more.
Show Notes
Heres what the word cloud from the episode looks like:
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