GTM Insights š from Swiggy, Qshala and ā”FreeCharge!
šĀ Hi, Iām 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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Hey folksš,
Itās been almost a week since I am in Bangalore and I am loving the āStartup Vibeā, you canāt find anywhere else š
If youāre somewhere closer to HSR and interested in Startups, Products and Growth Letās catch up for an evening coffee ā (Feel free to drop a DM on my Whatsapp)
Now over to this week's edition where Iām discussingā¦
How hypergrowth Startups like Swiggy Freecharge and Qshala got their early users?
Dive in š
Swiggy
Swiggy is India's largest online food ordering and delivery platform.
Apart from food delivery, Swiggy also provides on-demand grocery deliveries under the name Instamart and an instant package delivery service SwiggyGenie.Ā Ā
š Target Group
Swiggyās primary audience is the 18-35 years of millennia, tech-savvy age group.
They are fluent in using apps to get services and look online to fulfil their daily necessities.Ā
š¤ Swiggy Go-to-market strategyĀ
In 2013, the duo co-founders, Nandan Reddy and Sriharsha Majety, designed an e-commerce website called Bundl to facilitate courier service & shipping in India.
But Bundl was halted and was rebranded to enter the food delivery market instead.
Swiggy started off with 5-6 delivery partners and 15-20 restaurants within Koramangala, Bengaluru.Ā
They had to go to the popular food lane near Jyoti Nivas College in Koramangala and hand out pamphlets to customers visiting there.
Sriharsha's friend who worked at Flipkart at the time spread the Swiggy name in the company's internal groups. The next day, when there were approximately 35 users on the website.
In addition, the Swiggy team distributed hundreds of pamphlets to restaurant owners, who would then offer the service to their visiting customers.Ā Ā
On the customer side, Swiggy partnered with Paan and Tea stalls and requested them to advertise Swiggy on the back of the matchboxes.
This way Swiggy is able to onboard corporate employees in Koramangala as its early users.
QshalaĀ
Qshala is a curiosity platform consisting of live online courses designed to foster life- skills and pique the inquisitiveness of young minds through quizzes, stories and activities.
This startup works with children of all ages and helps them to acquire a mindset of lifelong learning.
š Target Group-Ā
Primarily targeting K-12 students from private & government schools.
Caters to corporate employees as well.
š¤ Qshala Go-to-market strategy
Both the co-founders Sachin and Raghav, the association dates back to their school daysā¦used to participate in inter-school quiz competitions.
Sachin slowly became a competitive quizzer, with national and international accolades to his name.
The duo started organizing quiz events in schools, colleges and corporates in Bangalore.Ā
Numerous online engagements are conducted for firms such as Hindustan Unilever, Oracle, HP, Adobe, Juniper Networks, and Wipro among others.
In addition, They started organizing a series of launch events across premier management institutions such as IIMs, and XLRI. Plus,Ā associated themselves with college fests and inter-college quiz competitions as well.
Qshala became the first company in the world to conduct a quiz on all 7 continents in world including the Antarctic Peninsula, and 2 Limca Records are testimonies to that.
FreechargeĀ
Freecharge services are used for savings, payments, insurance, investment and lending. Freecharge consumers can pay utility bills, pay Landline bills or recharge Mobile, Broadband, DTH and Metro cards.
š Target Group
The target audience mainly consists of tech-savvy youngsters.Ā Ā
š¤ Freecharge Go-to-market strategy
During itās early days, The core team reached out to IITB students through Namanās (Head of Product @Freecharge) cousin.Ā
None of these students had a debit card that worked online, back then. So Naman spent his weekends, made them transact using his credit card, collected cash and gave coupons instantly.Ā
The team leveraged a similar strategy by sending coupons to ISB, IIT D and NIT Surat students via his cuisine and a Mumbai-based college through Kunal Shahās brother.
From one IIT to others and also NITs, free charge spread virally. The viral effect kicked in strong, by Oct. 2010 team had coupons delivered to all IITs and IIMs.
The company got featured in Pluggd.in, Trak.in, Alootechie, Telecomyatra (themobileindian), and telecomtalk.info in the second week of launch. Freecharge was doing 200 transactions a day by the end of the 4th week from launch.
in addition, The team also created a fake Facebook id (a beautiful girl) that immediately got to a few good thousands of friends. The idea was to reach out to several college kids using the fake id, which they didā.
Thatās all from this post folks!
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