How Practically, Byjus's, Milk Basket & others got their early users?

Whenever a startup enters the market for the first time or starts off in a new market, or introduces a new product, they often struggle to find its first users or customers.

There are lots of great resources out there for acquiring early users,

But very few of them share real-life examples and insights on acquiring early users from an Indian startup point of view. 👀

That’s why I decided to dig deep and conduct my own research online to understand the experiments they did to acquire early users. 💪

This is not a perfect list so feel free to suggest if you know other acquisition hacks used by the startups I mentioned.

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

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ZOMATO

Zomato is an Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery restaurant company founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008.

It provides information, menus and user reviews of restaurants as well as food delivery options from partner restaurants in selected cities.  

👀 Target Group

• The Primary Target Audience of Zomato is almost the same as Swiggy, they are those 18 to 45 years of age, they are working professionals who need food in their offices or students who need food in the hostel or those who don't have time to cook food.

🤔 How Zomato got its early users

• Zomato started off as a rebranded version of the food directory services Foodiebay. 

• The idea was to help hungry Indians discover food nearby their locality along with an option to leave online reviews showcasing their dining experience.

• Foodiebay scanned the menus of restaurants and posted them on the company’s private website. Soon the employees of Bains & co (Zomato Co-founders used to work there before) started using the website and thus saving their time.

• Within 9 months, FoodieBay became the largest restaurant directory in Delhi NCR. Later, its services were extended to Mumbai and Kolkata.

• In 2010, Foodiebay changed its name to Zomato. The reason behind changing its name was to extend it beyond the food sector and also to avoid possible confusion with the brand “ebay”, which sounds similar to “Foodiebay”.

CRED

CRED is a lifestyle platform that rewards its users with CRED coins for making credit card payments through its app. 

It significantly reduces the hassle of managing multiple credit cards by making the process extremely simple, easy, and convenient.

👀 Target Group

• The platform primarily caters to affluent Indians (~110 million), who account for $1 trillion of India's GDP.

• These people generally own expensive phones (e.g iPhone), earn over 10L per annum, prioritise convenience, go on foreign trips, send their children to elite private schools, and frequently use D2C products & credit cards.

🤔 How CRED got it’s early users

• Kunal Shah announced the launch of Cred on Twitter on November 5 2018. He explained Cred as “a platform to celebrate and reward the most creditworthy people of India.”

• Thanks to the massive following and credible personal brand of Kunal shah…Cred was able to acquire its early 10K users pretty easily in a short span of weeks. 

• To create buzz during its early days, CRED sent cakes and Gift boxes to existing users who were employees in popular brands like Netflix and co-working spaces like WeWork. This was surprising and unexpected for people and they started bragging about CRED on social media generating word-of-mouth publicity.

Byjus

BJYU’s is an ed-tech company and the creator of a K12 learning app which offers learning programmes for students in classes 4-12 (K-12) and competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CAT, IAS, GRE and GMAT.

👀 Target Group

• Every student/ learner from grade one to students trying to crack entrance exams such as JEE, CAT, IAS or any other.

• On the other side, Byju targets the ones that make the “purchase decision” the parents.

🤔 How Byjus got it’s early users

• Byju started giving workshops and live sessions for CAT preparation in Bangalore. The target audience was then IT professionals who aspires to crack CAT so Byju's initial marketing messages were focused on them.

• Once Byju started getting famous he started giving his session in large auditoriums in other cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Kochi etc.

After the success of his auditorium sessions, Byju started offering a 10-week full-fledged course on competitive exam preparation, followed by pre-recorded sessions for students in other cities.

Practically

Practically is India's first experiential learning app, designed to make learning immersive and increase retention in STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) for students. 

👀 Target Group

• The students between grades 6th to 12th, and those preparing for IIT-JEE/NEET foundation courses, IIT-JEE, NEET, Olympiads and NTSE.

🤔 How Practically got its early users?

• The first beta version was launched across two major educational institutions in Andra Pradesh/Telangana which encouraged the team and validated its initial product. 

• During their pilot study, The team divided students into 2 groups. 

  • Group I was given only reading material and Group II was given access to immersive videos and simulations on the app. 

  • After two weeks, the team gave both groups a series of questions for testing the retention of concepts studied as part of this study.

  • The results demonstrated that Group II was able to recollect 50% more concepts than Group I, and Group II students on average spent three times less time learning than Group I, students.

• Initially, their strategy was pitching to schools offline by providing them FREE practically school solution work.
  
  Read this case study on how practically got 1.5L+ app installs: Link

Udaan

Udaan enables small manufacturers, Wholesalers, farmers, and brands to market and sells their products across the country at low cost with payment security and complete transparency.

Its major product categories include fashion, electronics, mobile phones, food, grocery, beauty and personal care items.

👀 Target Group

• Small & mid-sized retailers, wholesalers, traders, and manufacturers. 

🤔 How Udaan got its early user?

• Initially, they started with Logistics which helped them to foster a relationship with the buying and selling community in the B2B space. This allowed Udaan to gain insight into who is buying what and build a database of buyers and sellers before getting into the supply business.

• Udaan used the “Feet on the street” sales team model to reach out to sellers asking them to place two initial orders to see what happens. They gave them products, delivered them to their shop and also gave them cash on delivery. So, for them (sellers) it was just an easy way to download the app and start trying.

• Udaan has hired relationship managers to maintain regular contact to educate, engage and service these customers. Consequently, relationship managers have a deep understanding of their customers’ businesses, which opens up potential opportunities to up-sell subscriptions based on the customer’s business needs.  

Milk Basket

Milkbasket is a subscription-based micro-delivery service that provides customers with regular dairy necessities and household needs each morning.

👀 Target Group

• Primarily caters to educated working young and the corporates and consumers who naturally find it convenient to order groceries online.

🤔 How Milk Basket got its early user?

• Milkbasket founders started in 2015 when they first set up a stall in an apartment complex in Gurugram. The founders soon got the first paying customer, who installed the app. 

• The founding team of Milkbasket initially started to deliver milk by themselves, in their personal car. 

• With the increasing demands, they eventually had to hire an autorickshaw to deliver it. 

• The order volume further increased, which made Milkbasket partner with corporates and automotive companies and ultimately set up its own delivery fleet.

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 :)