Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena and Kaushal Shubhank while running Giveter.com (which is a gift recommendation platform) noticed that female users discover products, save products and return to the website. This behavior was very different from the male users overall. Thus came the idea of Roposo.com, a Gurgaon based fashion portal startup. Roposo.com is India's first fashion-focused social-network that allows women to discover and shop new fashion products from across 5000 online brands and 150 e-commerce portals. These products are curated and recommended to each user as per her individual taste.Because Roposo is social, users can observe and follow trends that are created real-time by other users.
Roposo.com, now has over 2 lakh products across 5,000 brands from more than 150 vendors. All of these products are curated and recommended to each user as per individual taste. Roposo.com has crossed 100,000 monthly visitors, the company claimed.
Roposo has recently raised bridge funding successfully through existing investors bringing the size of the total investment close to $1 million. The initial funding was raised from India Quotient, 5 ideas start up Fuel and co-founder of Flipkart Binny Bansal as an angel investor.
The 3 co-founders, all batch mates in IIT Delhi are expert in their fields. Avinash started his first company 2 years out of IIT and then went on to become the CTO of Zomato.com. He left that position to start this company with Mayank and Kaushal. Mayank has an MBA and a background in consulting oversees most of the Business Operations at Roposo.com. Mayank says 'My wife is my mentor. I observe her shopping habits all the time'. Kaushal, the wiz kid of the team left his job at a top hedge fund because he realized that women's fashion is a cooler place to solve problems through algorithms.
With a team of 25 people in Gurgaon, they curate more than 20 lakh products and break them into attributes to make it easier for women to search for products online. They have a complex recommendation engine (which was a result of the matching algorithm master-minded by the co-founders) which makes them different. With a very organized and user friendly website, women view 2,030,000 products every day which they get from more than 150 vendors! Since they are first in their field, nobody else has the depth of inventory like they do. Roposo was opened for public last month with 500,000 unique monthly visits.
When asked about the beta phase, Avinash said 'During the beta testing period, our motto was to prioritize, prioritize and prioritize. We were 7 people last November, and so short of hands, and so sleep-deprived. So we didn't have a choice. We prioritized the features that were most compelling and needed to be built first. We prioritized vendors. From a marketing perspective, the focus was on finding the most efficient channel to get early adopters as fast as possible and building familiarity with the brand. Then we raised more money, and then began to hire more people early this year, so we could start scaling rapidly.' We can see how their hard work has paid off.
We asked Avinash what kept him awake at night and he said, "All sorts of things run through my mind at night! But most often, I find myself obsessing over a feature I've just made and wondering how I could make it absolutely clutter-breaking and super-duper-awesome for a woman to use". He believes in focusing on the larger goal and not looking back. As a series we have been asking all entrepreneurs an advice they would give to future entrepreneurs. Founders of Roposo say that entrepreneurs should find an interesting problem to solve that genuinely excites the geek in you and consumes you' and be flexible and adapt fast.
Advertisements