Whack.in - Get your daily dose of Quirkiness, Shop A whacky product everyday.

At exactly 12:01 AM on 1^st January, 2011 - four friends - Nitin, Gaurav, Ankur and Shlok - three hardcore techies, a commerce grad and a swarm of ideas to get rich came together and launched Whack.in. What took birth from this pool of ideas has managed to grow into something these four young entrepreneurs cherish. We at Yourstory.in caught up with Shlok, who did his schooling from what is sometimes referred to as the Eton of India, Modern school, to know more about the venture. Excerpts from the interview:Tell us about Whack!

We don’t think of Whack.in as just a business, for us Whack.in is basically a cool place to be. We're as focused on giving our members something funny or to smile about every single day, as we are to bringing people the coolest and latest products. Whack is not a deal site. Our products range from being value for money items to being luxurious indulgences. Instead of trying to provide customers something which is available everywhere in the market at like a 10% discount like most other sites, we focus on bringing to our visitors, products which they can't (easily) get in India. A small quirk that we have is that we’ve never repeated a product. Well just once, that too cause we all were so engrossed in the India-Pakistan World Cup semi-final that we forgot to update the site! Otherwise it’s always something new!

How do you come up with a Whack every day?

Hard work, lots (we mean loads and loads!) of research and an inherent coolness. It’s tough sometimes but we eventually pull it off.

How many orders do you receive everyday on an average?

We started out slow, but now we get an average of 15-20 orders everyday with the ticket size ranging from just Rs. 75 to even 5 figure amounts (though these are rare). The average ticket size is around Rs 600-700.

What are the payment options for the customer?

We have a tie up with EBS, which means that we accept most major credit and debit cards. Our customers also have the option of paying directly through net banking and of using cash cards to pay for their purchases. We also have a special store on Facebook where the customer can buy stuff and pay using any of these methods on Facebook itself!

How do you market Whack? 

Our marketing strategy is based around our content and our products which we believe are our USPs. Since Facebook is where most of the action is these days, we rely heavily on it for marketing including our page and also paid advertisements. We also use Google Ads, though they are used less extensively than Facebook. Since our products normally manage to create a WOW factor in our customers, we’ve found that word of mouth publicity is a very strong marketing force for us!

What is your revenue model?

 Our revenue is basically generated either online through our website or through our tie-ups with various online and offline partners which include mass-selling channels and also corporates which use our products for gifting and branding purposes. We’re also in the process of upgrading our business model to one which allows us to bring more cool products and better variety of products and services to our customers.

How much capital did you need to startup? Have you broken even?

 Whack started out as a fun experiment for all of us, and initially we started with a capital of just 1 lakh rupees. But then things started getting serious and we started seeing a real opportunity in the website and since then we’ve invested way, way more money than what we started out with! We have not broken even as of yet, but we make a healthy profit on a monthly basis and we hope to break even some time in the middle of next year.

Can someone get his/her hands on an old whack?

We believe if you like something, you should not wait to get it! Getting an old whack is a very rare and tough chance. But since we like making our customers happy, we do try to entertain special requests sent to [email protected], but even then we’d say only one in a handful ever get lucky.

How do you forecast the demand for each offering?

Between the four of us, we cover a lot of different types of likes and sensibilities. So we just sit down and estimate how many units of each product we think would be sold, and then keep some extra over that estimate just in case!

Check out the whack of the day here!