How are we doing!!

It has been quite exciting past 3 months as we took OneGreenDiary (renamed to OGD Biz) to nook and corner of Pune city. OGD Biz, we believe is India’s first customer retention platform for local businesses which enables seamless communication and transactions with end consumers by connecting OGD Biz to OneGreenDiary marketplace. OGD Biz understands customer buying pattern and help merchants to do upselling be it in store or on marketplace.

OGD Biz is simple and intuitive tablet based point of sale (POS) application with pretty complex logic now helping close to 40 merchants in Pune to interact, reward and upsell to end consumers. We have had over 3000 transactions with more than half million sales on OGD Biz. We probably are also the only Indian POS running on iPad, in fact we made our merchants buy iPad in quest to achieve best billing experience. In the world of freebies where most of the funded startups are giving it for free, we are odd. We have not even offered discount but just focused on building our merchant’s brand and we will continue doing that. And why we did not do so- yes we are just making the best use of whatever we have.

Yes, as expected it has been a bumpy ride and still going on. Signing up local businesses is tricky, though we are doing our best and learning from the experiences and figuring out innovative ways to make sign ups quickly scalable and sustainable by not selling our product at lower cost. It is also not easy to motivate merchants to bill (conventionally they are not used to with it) as they would see the benefits coming in over the period of time. We are now catering 8 different business segments and would like to serve more business types as we learn.

Things where we struggled:

1. It has been very difficult to get the right talent joining newly started company, especially when we have so much media glare for the startups who are not doing so well.

2. Signing up partners takes long, even the newest technology companies are as bureaucratic as one can imagine.

3. The other companies who have funds are burning whatever they have and killing the value proposition part for sustainable businesses. Many merchants ask it for free and that is why our numbers are not expectedly high.

4. Raising money is tough, I guess has always been tough. And if you are software product company, then forget about business loan, the founders won’t even get personal loan from banks. Thinking of Standup India, I am yet to see anything happening on ground. We have approached SIDBI and other agencies and they said there is nothing for software product companies from government.

So what next..

We believe in it so we will continue doing it.

We would continue sign up new merchants, building our product capabilities and try to be sustainable by helping our local businesses to earn more per customer. We get our energy from our merchants who use our platform and share their feedback to make it even better.

One of our merchant said “I was just dreaming to have billing system which will connect us to customers without doing data entry. OGD Biz is like dream coming true.”

We are open to partner, network and learn so feel free to reach out if you think together we can change the big small world.