GTM Insights 🚀 from Fampay, Ola, Unacademy & more!

👋 Hi, I’m Harkirat Singh. I write Inside Startup, a newsletter to help Startup founders and Product growth managers to accelerate their product growth through GTM strategy, growth and marketing experiments.

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Do you know how top Indian hypergrowth Startups like Ola, Unacademy, Fampay, Jar, Wint Wealth, Trell got their early users?

That’s what we gonna discuss today!

Around 5 months back I spent almost 30+ hours (~ 2 days) researching GTM strategies of 30+ Indian startups and published all the insights on Gumroad.

And in this post, I’m covering GTM insights from 6 startups included in the same document.

So, without further ado, Let’s dive in!

Unacademy

Unacademy is an educational platform with a massive transformative purpose of being the world’s largest educational respiratory by empowering great educators and making it accessible to everyone. 

👀 Target Group

• 15-25 years old school & graduation level students. 

• Students preparing for competitive exams to get into college & those who are pursuing graduation level courses.

🤔 Unacademy’s Go-to-market strategy

• Co-Founder Munjal started Unacademy as a hobby on YouTube in 2010 where he began offering Java coding lessons while still being an engineering student. 

• Gaurav became one of the most-followed people on Quora for questions about computer science.

• In 2014, Roman Saini (who already had an established reputation as being one of the youngest persons to clear the IAS exams) joined Unacademy as a Co-Founder and he started making UPSC videos for free and took Unacademy to a great new level.   

• Both Roman and Gaurav scale the Unacademy youtube channel from 100,000 subscribers in 2015 to 800,000 subscribers in June 2017. They added a form on their youtube page so teachers can become unacademy volunteers.

Ola

Ola Cabs is an Indian Multinational ride-sharing company, headquartered in Bangalore. It also operates in other business verticals including financial service, cloud kitchens and the used car market recently they launched their e-scooters in India

👀 Target Group

• They majorly cater to people in the age group of 20-45 years who are financially independent, young, office workers, college students and many more.

• Basically, they target Indians who aren’t interested in owning a car.

🤔 Ola Go-to-market strategy

• On the supply side, The team used to visit gas stations, Petrol pumps and reach out to cab drivers to use the app for free whenever there was a booking without pushing them to completely switch from their normal taxi service.

• Initially, paid their driver 5000/day tips even if he had completed one single trip in the entire day. 

• Deep partnerships with banks and manufacturers so they can give very deep discounts/loans to drivers on cars.

• On-demand side, Ola provided a promo code on their website to give huge discounts.

• Launched its partnership with Makemytrip. customers of Makemytrip would receive a rental car facility for pick up and drop at the desired destination.

• The referral program was a hit with users getting Rs. 200 Off on the first 5 rides

Jar App

Jar is a daily gold savings app that lets you save money. It invests spare change from your online transactions into digital gold, automatically.

👀 Target Group

• Monthly Gen- z earning between Rs.3-Rs 25 lakh per annum had little or no understanding of financial instruments beyond Fixed Deposits.

🤔 Jar Go-to-market strategy

• The founder duo Nishchay & Misbah being active in the startup ecosystem for the last six years and leverage their network to build an engaging community of early adopters. 

• The team evangelized their product in small communities…from women seller groups on Facebook to ‘many many’ Whatsapp groups. 

• The Jar team uses these groups to get quick feedback on screens and features – checking if users understand instructions and design intent. For example, they found early on that the concept of ‘rounding-up’ was not clear to users until they explained it using a gulak reference.

• Leveraging micro-influencers on Instagram has also proved to be effective for them.

• Refer & Earn: Jar incentivized its users with Rs. 10 to Rs. 50 referral bonus if someone signs up on the app with its referral code. This feature was promoted heavily by youtube influencers

Fampay

Founded by Sambhav Jain and Kush Taneja, FamPay enables teenagers to make online and offline payments.

With FamPay, teens can safely and successfully make online (UPI & P2P) and offline payments without the need to set up a bank account.

👀 Target Group

• Generation Z, those between 12-18 years old. 

• There are an estimated 250 million+ teenagers in India in the 12-18 years age group of which 20 million have smartphones. 

🤔 Fampay Go-to-market strategy

• The founders were selling at kiosks outside the school but that’s when lockdown happened and they need to rethink their GTM.

• After re-aligning its strategy with lockdown spending habits, the team re-launched in August same year.

• The founder created a list of 200 schools in India, hired 5-6 interns and ask them to onboard the top 5 popular kids (12-16 years) from the school as a Fam pay brand ambassador. And that’s how they got the first 300-400 users. 

• The team didn’t spend a marketing dollar because these Brand ambassadors acted as an evangelist & acquired other kids in the Fampay closed community. The number touched 10K users by then.

• After 10K the team used this referral strategy:  Ask the user to refer -> User gets a chance to spin a virtual spin wheel -> Virtual spin wheel includes various digital coins (1 coin = 1 INR)

Wint Wealth (Previously known as GrowFix)

Wint Wealth helps retail investors buy debt instruments that were earlier exclusive to UHNIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals) 

Over the last 1.5 years, the startup has garnered Rs 100 crore-plus in AUM from users on its platform.

👀 Target Group

• Retail investors

• Millennial and tech-savvy people (interested in investing) aged between 22-45 years

🤔 Wint Wealth Go-to-market strategy

• Founder Ajinkya Kulkarni has been a prolific writer on LinkedIn, which earned him the LinkedIn Top Voice 2020.

• During the early days, Founder Ajinkyawent at length talked about details of the product (Growfix at that time) on LinkedIn to get customers to land on GrowFix website. 

• Once users landed on their website, they can easily set up a time with the team to understand more about the product. 

• The team also put in dedicated effort towards educating prospective users about the offering using content creation.

• Later they tried to expand to other distribution channels like Zerodha & offline mutual fund partners to increase top-of-the-funnel traffic. 

Read more about their business model here: Link

Trell

Trell enables people in ten Indian languages, to express their opinions and preferences in the lifestyle sector such as Fashion, Personal Care, Recipes, Technology & Gadgets, Movies & TV Reviews

Until November, Trell claims to have over 50 million monthly active users, and each user is said to be spending around 30 minutes consuming Trell's content on a per-day basis.

👀 Target Group

• Caters to tech-savvy young adults based in Tier 2 and 3 cities.

• 73% of the users on Trell are under the age of 35. 

🤔 Trell Go-to-market strategy

• Before building a platform, Trell founders noticed that a lot of Instagram the handles like Mumbai foodie (sharing local interesting knowledge about food using visuals) were picking up quite well with more than 200,000 followers.

• So, the team decided to start on Instagram to test the waters, to see how people are discovering new things through such handles.

• Trell started out as an Instagram handle in Mumbai and posted about exclusive and relatively unknown things in the city. Within just four months, they went viral with more than 40,000 followers.

• The team began hosting meet-ups such as photo walks and food ones, bringing in some of the best food and travel influencers. This guided them in understanding how these influencers use Instagram to their advantage.

• Interacting with more than 1000 bloggers and travellers personally led them to realise their needs & gaps in the ecosystem. 

• The team discovered that writing in English is not natural to all, so most were more inclined to use visual mediums. 

• As a result of these discoveries, the team decided to launch a Visual blogging platform and got early traction from its popular Instagram itself.

That’s all from this post folks!

If you like what you read, please share this post within your company Slack or Whatsapp groups. It means a lot to me :)