Enabling businesses to launch referral campaigns in minutes across 18 international languages: InviteReferral’s story

Launching a referral programme has never been easy for startups, especially the tracking and analysing aspects eat up a lot of time and efforts. However, over the past few years a handful of startups have been evangelizing the space to simplify customer referral campaigns. And one of them is Delhi-based InviteReferral which helps businesses to design and launch customer referral campaigns (one time integrated) in minutes. InviteReferral is brainchild of two brothers - Siddharth and Aman Gupta who have common passion for coding and building SAAS products.

The duo started tagNpin, a location based photo sharing platform in September 2011; however, very soon they realized that the product was not scalable. While exploring other ideas for pivot, the duo agreed on the idea of InviteReferral. “Being close to startup community, we interacted with different startups and noticed that launching a referral program without technical (HTML, coding etc) know-how was not easy,” says Siddharth. After spotting the relevant and scaleable pain-points, the duo pivoted tagNpin’s business model and became InviteReferral.

InviteReferral is also amongst ongoing incubatee companies at Startup Village and featured as top five companies in incubator’s January 2013 list. Prior to launch tagNpin, both brothers completed their engineering from NSIT (Delhi). “Aman and I started our first venture as tagNpin in mid 2011 and since then worked together. We complement our skills and have great understanding of technology and common passion for coding,” adds Siddharth. The startup’s technology is completely developed in-house and this helped them to iterate product rapidly. As of now,InviteReferrals is bootstrapped and revenue positive. “Learnings from tagNpin helped us scale faster and tap into existing network for customers,” adds Aman.

InviteReferral’s support, simplicity and dashboard features (which gives in-depth analytics and actionable insights) are its major differentiators from its competitors. Multiple type of customer referral campaigns can be designed via InviteReferral to engage customers instantly. Importantly, the startup supports over 16 languages including Swedish, Russian, Polish, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese amongst others. “InviteReferrals targets international markets and currently more than 80% customers are from across the world. Campaigns can be designed in 18+ languages,” adds Siddharth.

At present the company has been successfully serving 150 customers across the world and some of the leading Indian brands Including Valyoo’s portfolio (Lenskart, Bagskart, Jewelskart), Purplle and Exotel. As far as challenges are concerned, getting the product market fit with constant iterations and acquiring early customers were the major ones. “Apart from above the journey has been smooth , though now the major challenges are constant innovation and flawless client servicing,” adds Aman. The company plans to work to grow its customer base to 2500 customers over the next two years.