[Startup Bharat] Here’s how GoPaani is helping water service providers digitise their business

The pandemic has accelerated the growth of digital economy. However, daily deliverables like water, milk, vegetables, newspaper, laundry, and others still happen on pen and paper in most parts of India. 

Childhood friends Ankit Ranka and Arpit Sharda wanted to solve the problems faced by water jar suppliers back in 2019. They realised the problems associated with managing the ‘daily sheet’, which the employees had to carry with them every single day to record total products delivered, collected, and to take customer signatures. 

“I was into plastic sourcing, manufacturing, and trading business for over eight years. I saw the pain points of delivery businesses such as water and milk suppliers closely and every now and then got requests from them to help with technology. I discussed this with Ankit, and we decided to launch a digital representation of daily sheets - that was the starting point for us. From there on, we kept on building what our customers needed,” Arpit tells YourStory.

In June 2019, they launched GoPaani, registered under the name Boond Tech Pvt Ltd. The GoPaani app was launched on the Playstore in August 2019. 

The Indore-based startup aims to solve problems like product loss, billing issues, and poor customer service, faced by over 1.2 million water delivery businesses in India.  

How it works?

Available on both Android and iOS, GoPaani business app allows businesses/business owners  to keep track of product inventory -- from dispatch, delivery, collection, and unloading. 

The app gives separate login credentials to employees of these businesses to make delivery entries, and the business admin can track and generate real time reports on employee’s work. 

The customers of these businesses can keep track of deliveries, make bill payments, give ratings, contact business owners, and order additional products such as pet and cool jars, water bottles, etc., through the GoPaani Customer App. 

It also has an event app that allows businesses to manage bulk orders for weddings, parties, etc., However, this app operates in a different manner from the regular business. 

While GoPaani is mostly B2B focussed, since customers of these businesses also use the app, it operates as B2B2C as well.

“Transition tools that we have built allows these businesses to move without disrupting their business from offline to online medium,” claims Arpit.

The team

With a team of 45 members, Ankit (CEO) looks after product and design, while Arpit (COO) is responsible for sales and marketing.

Ankit did his master’s in Computer Science from Columbia University, NYC, and co-founded TapFame in the US, before starting GoPaani. 

Arpit did his masters from ICFAI University and was a proprietor at Harsh Pet, which was into manufacturing and trading of plastic products - water jars, milk containers, etc.

The market and business model

As per the co-founders, there are over 20 million daily delivery businesses in India. From a software subscription perspective, it's a $2.3 billion yearly market. 

The startup charges businesses between Rs 4,000 and Rs 36,000 per year, depending on the total number of customers they have. 

At present, around 20,000 businesses have signed up on the platform, out of which 4.5 percent are paid businesses. These paid businesses include those who pay the company to use the premium version of the app. 

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There is also a free version of the app that allows businesses with less than 50 customers to use the app with limited functionality such as keeping daily delivery records of up to 50 customers, downloading individual customer bills, making online payments, payment reminders, and more. The free version also limits the download of business reports and bills, inventory management, adding employees, etc. 

“So far, 1.2 crore deliveries are supported by GoPaani and an average of 50,000 deliveries are done every day,” says Arpit.

Speaking of app downloads, Ankit says, “We have around 50,000 downloads for our business app, and around 70,000 - 80,000 for our customer app. Event app is in its early stage and was launched only this year. It has under 1,000 downloads.”

GoPaani’s current Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is Rs 60 lakh, and it aims to attain Rs 7.5 crore ARR in the next 24 months.

Funding and way ahead

In April this year, the startup raised $600,000 in seed funding from 3one4 Capital, PointOne Capital, and a host of angel investors, including Dunzo Co-founder Mukund Jha, among others. 

Speaking  of future plans, Ankit says, “With GoPaani already present in 16 states across India and in eight different languages, we plan to continue our focus on water delivery businesses and build the product for a wider set of delivery businesses starting next year.”

“Our product will have templates for these businesses, which they can use to get started and customise according to how they run their business,” he adds.

The startup competes with players Khatabook, OkCredit, and Vyapar.