A ‘serial entrepreneur’ who pitched his online seller platform for ‘kirana stores’ on Shark Tank India drew concern from Deepinder Goyal and Aman Gupta. The founder, who was joined by his two partners on the reality show, said that his goal is to harness the over 2 crore local stores in India on his platform Kiko Live, and eventually bring them onboard them on ONDC (Open Network of Digital Commerce).
The company doesn’t charge any commission currently, but will begin charging a 5% commission once the partners join ONDC. They asked for Rs 1 crore in exchange of 1% equity in the company, which valued Kiko Live at a whopping Rs 100 crore. Vineeta Singh and Anupam Mittal smiled wryly at the valuation, while Deepinder began to offer his insight as someone who has tried to break into this market himself through Zomato.
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Deepinder was doubtful of the company’s scalability, and said that their success depends entirely on the success of ONDC. He said, “To get shopkeepers on this platform isn’t an easy task. It requires them to go out of their way and put in an extra effort, while they could be doing their regular job and making money. Every shopkeeper has fielded proposals from at least 100 such companies already, and their interest boils down to one thing, can they increase revenue. And from what we’ve seen so far, they can’t.”
Deepinder said that at Zomato, he sees a 0.3% ‘failure rate’, which means that 0.3% orders remain unfulfilled every day. He said BlinkIt would originally source goods from shopkeepers and then deliver them to customers, but he had to ‘give up’ on this dream because of these problems. In this industry, he told the founders, they’re looking at a failure rate of 30%, which is impractical. Aman wasn’t interested at all. “I have a fundamental problem,” he said, adding, “There is no need for this business. I don’t even want to put Re 1 in this business.”
Vineeta Singh said that this is a market that Jio ultimately wants to crack, and is currently in the process of entering. “We’re just sharks, they’re the blue whale,” she said, as she bowed out. “Fighting them with just Rs 1 crore is going to be difficult. It’s always difficult when a small company goes up against a big company,” she said. “I’m out for today, but I really hope you can give them a good fight.” In the end, all the sharks dropped out of the deal.
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