Hitesh chats about marketing now, marketing before and his journey from e-comm to real estate and back to e-comm. Hitesh also shares words of advice for Direct to Consumer (D2C) brands on how to approach marketing in the early days and launch their brand. Hitesh Malhotra is a management graduate from UC- Berkeley, prior to Nykaa he was at Jabong.com, MakeMyTrip.com, and an agency — MSL.

We may have have misquoted some facts including that about RedBull and Louis Vuitton, feel free to correct us!

Hitesh’s social media handles: Instagram & LinkedIn

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Are there any founder doing amazing things, do send me a message would love to have them on the show you can send me tweet at me @varunvummidi on Twitter .. Don’t forget to leave a 5 star rating on your favourite podcast player and do subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

Show Notes:

8:00 — Hiring for the team

12:00 — Marketing now, Marketing before

14:51 — The Loyalty vs Life Time Value debate

18:45 — Impact to beauty category as a non-essential item

23:03 — Marketing & human behavior post COVID

27:23 — platforms of the the future

30:02 — Direct2 Consumer brands of future & Marketing

35:59 — Marketing & impression and budget

36:58 — Are marketplaces helping small brands?

38:53 — Using an agency vs a team for a d2c brand

43:00 — Developing talent

45:08 — Changing consumer behavior

49:45 — Influencer Marketing

51:53 — Hitesh’s favorite marketing channel

53:25 — Favorite ad-campaign

56:16 — Words for new CMOs

57:30 — Creating IP

Snehil, shares his journey from being college student to being a part of 3 successful stories. His story is that of starting early, and the universe doing the rest.

On this episode we catch up with Snehil Khanor, currently the CEO of TrulyMadly a dating app where he was a part of the founding team. Snehil in the interim went on to do other exciting things including founding FindYahan which was acquired by Zimmber, consulting for other popular internet brands — Printland.in, Freecultr, Kimaya —  and creating an app that currently is used by . Snehil shares his journey right from the beginning, and discusses the dating space.

Show Notes:

2:35 — Child hacker, building a social app and loving technology

18:40 — Sales of LetsBuy and origin of Truly Madly

23:03 —  FindYahaan and building hyperlocal businesses

27:28 —  Being a super user of Urban Clap

32:32 —  Idea from Tourism to Match maker

35:24 —  Working on Umang (GOI)

37:22 —  Wellmo Website : www.wellmo.in

37:50 —  Working with Government

39:52 — Working for Bharat

41:30 —  Learnings from working with government as part of Spice Digital

47:20 —  Returning to TrulyMadly

52:00 —  Matrimony & Dating in the current scenario

56:47 —  Industry & Revenue Making

01:01:16 —  Lockdown & impact on Trulymadly

01:04:35 —  Acquiring users & building a brand

01:07:42 —  Future for TM

Do share the episode with friends and family who too could benefit from hearing from Indian startups, founders and their journey.

Are there any founder doing amazing things, do send me a message would love to have them on the show you can send me tweet at me @varunvummidi on Twitter .. Don’t forget to leave a 5 star rating on your favourite podcast player and do subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

EP04 of Stars & Startups : Krishi has a very candid chat about what it is to run a SaaS business for Indian brick & mortar businesses in the hospitality & retail industries.  

He also discussed the journey of selling to restaurants in India over the 5 years of running HashtagLoyalty, the future for the business and shares what it like being a part of the Upekkha accelerator cohort for SaaS startups.  

Today, Hashtag Loyalty offers an engagement and loyalty marketing tool for over 1500 businesses across the country incl. brands like Smaaash, Naturals Ice Cream, The Belgian Waffle Co, Massive Hospitality etc…  

Krishi also discusses how Hashtag Loyalty came about, being a part of an accelerator, how they supported their customers once lockdown was implemented and starting an initiative called Save Local to support the businesses that are being hit hard by the covid19 pandemic.  

Save Local supports over 200 outlets, with new clients coming onboard to take advantage of pre-sales until things come back to normal. SaveLocal has enabled the sales of over 6 lakhs of gift cards towards the customers favourite neighbourhood stores.  

Website: https://hashtagloyalty.com/ 

Krishi can be found on twitter.com/krishifagwani & linkedin.com/in/krishi-fagwani-b623836b/

Show Notes [ please excuse, the audio when I speak is a bit wonky, else it's a great listen!]: 

3:27 -  The Journey & Building Hashtag Loyalty 

5:37 -   From Tablet to Saas POS 

6:51 -  Distribution & The Market 

9:34 -  Online with Offline 

12:18 -  Value add & monetization 

15:04 -  What Next? 

20:18 -  The genesis of HashtagLoyalty  

24:18 -  Journey & Learnings 

25:06 -  Joining Upekkha 

28:20 - Solving for Growth 

32:30 -  Hashtag Loyalty & The Lockdown  

Hashtag Loyalty is co-founded by Dhruv Dewan, Krishi Fagwani and Karan Chechani. They have raised a Seed round from New York-and Delhi-based investor Ahimsa Capital & had previously raised a pre-seed round from thinQbate.  

Visit app.Wellmo.in to find health insurance options for your small business or team. Prioritize employee wellbeing over anything else! Affordable plans that won't strain your budget.

EP03 of Stars & Startups : Manuj shares the incredible rise of MyUpchar from an obscure platform for health content in 2016 to being at the forefront of startups that prioritized the vernacular web in India.  The story behind monetizing a content service and having offered 1 million FREE consultations offered by the 50,000 doctors who have signed up for no cost.  

"As per our data 80% medical queries can be solved through tele-consultation, of the remaining 15% can be solved through video consultation. There are only 5% queries which need a physical checkup" say Manuj. 

 "We live in a nation where people love to choose Hindi over English on any phone IVR"  -  being a key insight into creating the country's largest online resources for health information in 6 Indian languages ( May, 2020). Dr. Garg has a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and had worked at the BCG in San Francisco prior to starting his first venture.   

Manuj can be found on linkedin.com/in/manujgarg  or on twitter.com/garg_manuj  

Show Notes 

00:11 -  Introduction to MyUpchar 

09:21 - The thesis behind MyUpchar 

11:51 -  Ensuring credible content for real healthcare information 

16:57 -  Drawing audience attention

21:02 -  The focus on small towns & helping native language speakers 

26:08 -  {Ad break} Get affordable health insurance for your team at Wellmo www.wellmo.in 

26:36 -  Building a credible product 

34:46 -  Converting content consumers to paying customers 

45:57 -  Limitations of digital consultations 

51:00 -  Validation of the platform and trust from Doctors 

56:10 -  Selling the story - Investors 

1:00:34 -  COVID19 impact & MyUpchar

Visit app.wellmo.in to find health insurance options for your small business or team. Prioritize employee wellbeing over anything else! Affordable plans that won't strain your budget.

Madhu, CEO & co-founder of YAP shares his incredible journey from being at Visa to raising almost $6M to build the fintech platform of the future, using leverage & bank partnerships to create a moat.  

You can learn more about YAP @ https://yappay.in/  

Prominent angels, co-founders of Citrus Pay Jitendra Gupta & Amrish Rau, founder of CRED & Freecharge Kunal Shah, Singapore based VC fund BEENEXT are the set of stellar investors in YAP.  

Visit app.Wellmo.in to find health insurance options for your small business or team. Prioritize employee wellbeing over anything else! Affordable plans that won't strain your budget.

This is a clip from my chat with Krishi Fagwani (co-founder of Hashtag Loyalty), talking about some of the things Hashtag Loyalty had done once the lockdown has started, how they've supported the businesses that they work with.  Also, he shares the launch of SaveLocal (https://savelocal.in/) as a Hashtag Loyalty initiative to allow patron of independent restaurants and stores to support their neighbourhood small businesses by buying gift cards.