This interview is sponsored by Instamojo
Sampad Swain is popularly known as one of the first movers in the financial technology space in India. He launched Instamojo in 2012 along with Akash Gehani, Aditya Sengupta and Harshad Sharma. The product was an instant success and has helped more than 300,000 individuals and small businesses to expand the market for their products and services in a cost efficient manner. Sampad is enthusiastic about mentoring newcomers to the dynamic FinTech space. He holds trust, transparency and accountability in high regard — both internally & externally. You can follow him on twitter at @sampad.
I often wondered what it would be like to build a machine that never grows obsolete. What would it take to build a product that’s like a “transformer” - multi-purpose, badass and something that could save the world!?
That’s why, when we built Instamojo, we built it on a boilerplate. We built a simple product that we could dynamically experiment on and build upon without having to compromise on time, resources and effectivity.
I think I’ve always wanted to work in the micro business space. Before starting Instamojo, I started Wanamo, a coupons-based company that enabled hyperlocal micro merchants to list their services and reach out to more people. It was a marketing platform. It got successfully acquired by DealsandYou later.
I’ve dabbled in the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) industry for more than a decade - that’s enough time to discover how deeply underserved the market is. This segment also happens to be a minefield of potential! A huge chunk of the Indian entrepreneur segment resides in smaller parts of India. Access to technology was a problem and I essentially wanted to solve that problem.
Instamojo's primary source of market research was talking directly to our existing micro business owners. Our business model is simple and unique. It promotes a personal touch and allows us to have direct and ongoing interactions with our micro merchants who in turn help us to learn, innovate and improve our product.
A payment product company could be hard to build in a country like India. With its cultural and language barriers, you could come wrought with a number of challenges while trying to make an impact in a space as niche as the MSME market.
Was it easy for us? Far from it. But building a flexible product helped us deliver faster, better and smarter. Today we are 300,000 plus merchants strong and have the highest number of active merchants as a B2B company, which shows Instamojo works!
**A payment product is a machine in so many ways. **
It truly is an apparatus of several interrelated parts, all of them with a function of their own.
Payment gateways are built to fit the market and its channels. It’s never the other way around. This is important for more than one reason.
When we started building Instamojo, we knew exactly who we set out to serve and where we fit in the tremendously underserved market - the micro-businesses. It was incredibly difficult for a seller from a small city to get started with an online business, especially because he/she had no technical knowledge. We wanted to enable anyone with a bank account and a phone number to be able to grow their business on the Internet.
We identified the problem and the market before we set out to build our product so our product-market fit was sorted.
We also let our channels influence how our product shaped up. In fact, we kept our product so simple that it could be used on any social channel. Shareable payment links have ever since been our most powerful feature. While we have come a long way in terms of product features, payment links are the most popular to date.
The day a company gets complacent about its offerings, its doom has begun. This leaves no room for growth and innovation.
At Instamojo, simplicity is one of our biggest strengths. We strive to keep building great business features that are not only easy to use but are also effective in business growth. We make that possible with continuous hustling and market research. We try to talk to as many people and reach the deepest parts of our customer base to understand what we could offer to make their lives easier.
Who doesn’t like value addition? Especially for product companies in India, when you can offer a something extra, in addition to the one thing you rock at, you become a memorable brand and are carving a growth path for your product.
Innovation is at the crux of the idea. Yes, Instamojo offers easy payment solutions. But it also offers several other e-commerce features like a forever-free online store, a functional dashboard and a loaded app-store that aides business growth - on top of the core payments feature.
Every quarter, we are releasing at least 3 new features or additions to the product.
The speed of executing these value additions is significant because business needs are never stagnant. To be able to add value at supersonic speed has been one of our greatest strengths and should be on every product company’s priority list.
Newbie or not, you’re bound to make a few mistakes when building your product. The trials and errors never stop and that’s a good thing.
At Instamojo we’ve conducted several pilots, some of which have failed miserably. For example, in our initial days, we experimented quite a bit with product copy on the website. Just changing a single word sent our customers into a tizzy. They actually thought we were shutting down! We got bombarded with e-mails and calls from our customers and while we managed to do damage control, this massacre was a huge learning for us.
Each failure has been a valuable lesson to us and we’ve used the learnings to put it back into the machine - hustling, innovating, and executing.
If you’d ask me reasons why a payment product company fails, I’d be confident to list “lack of a vision” and “perspective” to be some of the biggest. If you aren’t confident about what or where you want your company to be in the next 3 year (at least), it could get tricky.
Building a vision gives your company a lifespan and a clear path to segway into. Small everyday goals can lead to a bigger quarterly plan, which could in turn become an annual strategy.
Vision helps give purpose to work and it’s important to revisit the vision once a while, because every so often, we lose perspective. Since we are too busy building the product and are too close to the it, we fail to see its shortcomings.
Structures and roadmaps make goals more achievable and at Instamojo, we tackle these with being completely clear about our big vision and what we stand for. Multiple teams sit on a product feature to test for its viability. We also have a sleek A/B testing environment that helps us safely run pilots without messing up the user experience.
For us at Instamojo, the bigger picture is the manual to running the Transformer.
As India takes bigger strides towards growth and development, I foresee more payment product companies springing up from not just the metros and big cities but also from the small towns.
India will be the next Transformer!