A corporate wallet to simplify business payments and expense tracking: The Happay Story

B2C wallets like Paytm and Mobikwik are known well enough. The B2B wallet story, however, is still in its nascent stage. Happay is that wallet which helps companies manage their expenses through employees, using corporate wallets.

Varun Rathi and Anshul Rai were classmates at IIT Kharagpur. They worked for 2 years before they started up. After toying with different business ideas, they zeroed in on payments, and thereafter, quit their jobs.

Happay started as a platform for splitting payments or transfer money through its wallet. However, the team, even with over 2 lakh registered users, was unable to find a good revenue model. They pivoted to address B2B payment management hassles. They have tied up with Ratnakar Bank to issue corporate cards which double as expense management system for the company. The companies can issue these cards to all their employees, and, at the back end, track, or even cap the permissible amount for each card.

Here is an excerpt from Varun’s interview with iSPIRT:

Why did you Startup?

VR: “I come from a business family and so, I think I inherited the urge to start something of own business. It was different from a typical Marwari business, because I wanted to make a technology business that was scalable”.

Why did you choose to address payments?

VR: “The payments market in itself is globally very large and scalable. So even if you solve a small problem in payments, it can go big.

Last 5-10 years have seen a lot of sourcing through wallets. So we thought this was the problem we should solve. Our solution was quite a hit between students and young professionals. However, there was no strong revenue model. Also, we had to go to all vendors and get them to accept those payments through our instrument, which was proving difficult.

On the other hand, a lot of businesses would come to us looking for payments solution. There was no product that would address their issue. So we decided to pivot.”

You decided to pivot from B2C to B2B. What were your major challenges?

VR: “First biggest challenge was to unlearn whatever we had learned and focus exclusively on talking to customers which we didn’t do with the first product.

The first product seemed more intuitive to the team, as we ourselves were the customers. This time around the team talked to over 1000 customers to understand their problems.”

As for aligning the team, Varun shares, “Our team was very young, with no one with more than 2-3 years of experience. So they were open to learn new things. Besides, it took us 9-10 months, to come up with the new product. This gave enough time to the team to align themselves.”

Next challenge was in terms of requirements of the business. “With a B2B product, we realized that businesses needed handholding at every step. Where we scaled to 2 lakh registered users with just 5 members in the team, this time around, we ended up hiring for different teams, taking the number of employees to about 100.

We hired the first person that could give a demo to the customers. Then we needed someone for lead generation, as the product does not automatically reach the target audience. Even after a customer is acquired, we needed to hire for relationship management and customer support. The customers even after signing up would not take the next steps themselves.”

What are the challenges in coming up with an expense card? Why have other expense management companies not done it?

VR: “ Getting such a card and its integration in place, is a difficult process. It requires a license, partnership with the bank, a certification with VISA, and a strong technology team to support all of it. It takes about a year to complete just the processes.

We were in the business of payments, from the start. So our initial aim was to develop applications over the payments platform. We first solved the payments problem and then later on built expense management software over it. Other players made the software and started selling it. They never had the intention of going deeper into the payments problem.”

How is scaling a B2B business different from a B2C?

VR: “There are both pros and cons. B2B is slow and time taking but steady. There are some safe landings in between, so I cannot go down all of a sudden, as is the case with B2C. I can become an overnight success in a B2C product, with maybe some good PR but that can go away in a second, as it is very fragile and there is a lot of competition. In B2B, customers don’t sign up that fast, but they give you time. Once you have their trust, even if something is not perfect, they give you a month or 2 to make it right. That gives more stability to the business.”

What are the 3 things you wish you knew before you started?

VR: “Launch soon: One mistake we made was not launching the product soon. We, like most other companies, were trying to build a perfect product. But the sooner you take it to the customer; the steeper is the learning curve.

Talk to your customers: We assumed what our customers needed and built the product around it. Customers don’t know what they need till they see it. So let them see it.

Making the team will take time: Time required in hiring and nurturing team is very high. It takes almost 50% of our time. We didn’t account for it from the start and this has come across as a major learning.

What is your advice to other people starting up right off the college?

VR: “Understand the market first. If you start fresh out of college, you can take more risk. In terms of technology, you can stretch your limits, as you don’t have any responsibilities. But scaling brings problems. Hiring, building and managing the team and responding to the market needs more finesse. Understand the market so that you have at least some idea of how to respond.”

Corporate wallets address a very crucial bottleneck in managing expenses in an organisation. We wish Varun and his team at Happay, all the success.

 

Can you implement Growth hacking in your small business?

With new start-ups coming up on a daily basis, the competition in the market is intense. To be successful in this competitive world, you have to think beyond the ordinary. This is probably why growth hacking has become the go-to word when looking for people you may want to hire! If you can scale your growth beyond a linear curve and find multiple ways to expand your reach multi-dimensionally, you will survive. There is no other way to make our mark.

Growth hacking is not a new thing and unmindful of the same, you might have been using it in a different variant in the recent past.  Here are some powerful marketing tools in your hands as a business entrepreneur, to hack your growth.

  1. Encourage People to use your Products

    If you have started product manufacturing, its popularity among masses can be increased by incorporating a mechanism wherein the actual product can be shared. A business card company by the name of Moo has used this strategy effectively.

    In its pack of business cards, it adds some cards which encourage people to pass it on to other users, giving them discount as an incentive. Try this strategy in promoting your business and you will find that the customer affinity with your range of services will increase randomly.

  2. Identify potential Partners

    Small businesses often grow well if backed by someone who is already established in the market. Identify some of the successful leaders in your niche and try to establish a business linkage with them. Get someone to mentor you, or get them as a customer. If they are doing an event, try to get into some kind of partnership. This will help your business to gain effective visibility in relatively less time.

    PayPal and eBay are a perfect example of this synchronization. eBay was already a successful brand by the time PayPal came up. However, the concept of offering a safer transaction to its customers impressed eBay so much that it tied up with PayPal helping the company grow at a rapid pace.

    Use this strategy in your business promotion initiatives and help it prosper.

  3. Endorsement for your Endeavours

    Endorsement by someone successful in the niche area in which you are trying to get a foothold also has its imminent benefits. Your customers will take you seriously and will start believing in your promotional initiatives. You can hire the services of someone with a visionary outlook and help explain to your customers, the services or ideas you are trying to spread.

  4. Free products along with some Paid Services

    This is another viable method of implementing growth hacking successfully. You should offer some free services or products to the customer initially to build upon their trust levels. These free products or services can be offered in synchronization with paid services.

    A company by the name of Moz has been trying this successfully. One can sign up for free SEO tools on Moz but will have to pay up for premium services. People will eventually connect with you and go for paid services when they find that the quality of your product or service is trustworthy.

  5. Using Social Media Tools

    The advent of social media has drastically changed the way small businesses are perceived. Join the bandwagon and reap the benefits. Link up your promotional content on to the social media platform. The users on the social media channels will do the rest for you and the worth of your business will spread multifold.

    Pinterest has used this growth hacking strategy successfully for promoting its reach. Pinterest allows its users to find up content on the site and share the same on their Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter page.

    Make it easy for people to distribute your content on their social media pages easy and you will be able to connect with users in an effective manner.

Growth hacking has been in use since long. The techniques and tricks of using the same in business promotion have been evolving with time. By incorporating the above listed tips in business promotion you will be able to improve your prospects in the competitive business world and grow at a rapid pace.

This post is contributed by Kritika Prashant, together with team MyOperator, this IIT Delhi alumna is committed to make business calls as efficient and manageable as emails for small businesses in India.