[Monday Motivation] This social entrepreneur is making it easy to give back by helping people donate pre-loved goods

While growing up in Noida, Anushka Jain always used to wonder why her mother donated her clothes only during her birthdays.

She thought her mother was busy, but later realised that the real reason was that “there was no easy way to donate goods”.

“I realised this is because there is a gap between donors and NGOs – but not only a gap – as donors were not aware of the requirements of NGOs, had trust or communication issues with the NGOs, or had no time to drive to the NGO,” Anushka tells SocialStory.

To fill this gap and to know where and how materials were being used, she started Share At Door Step (SADS), a service that comes straight to your door to pick up gently-used goods and facilitates their donation to an NGO or charity.

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Humble beginning

Anushka, an engineer by education, was working with Accenture in Bengaluru when she decided to start cause-commerce platform SADS.

She says being a corporate working professional with a stable job, starting SADS wasn’t easy at all. Anushka belonged to a middle-class family and starting something of her own wasn’t “an idea approved by the family”.

However, she was determined to do bigger things and wanted to solve the problem of piling goods through tech so that the preloved goods go to someone in need and don't end up in landfills. Thus began her journey as a social entrepreneur.

As an initial step, she put up a website through which people could schedule a pickup for donations and requests started pouring in.

“I started the social venture in 2015 when I was still employed with Accenture. I would go for pickups in the morning before heading to work, and with each pick and drop, my belief in wanting to start this social venture formally just kept getting stronger.”

She did the initial 150 pickups herself to understand if there is a product-market fit and to have a complete hands-on experience of how things functioned.

“We started getting customers organically through word of mouth. All we did was to provide an avenue for people and brands to channelise this positive attribute and thereby give back to society, which is actually very satisfying and rewarding,” she says.

Since her idea was new for everyone at that time, it was a struggle for her to convince and get that first client, first customer, first partner on-board.

“It requires good convincing power to gain the trust of someone without having any records or data to back yourself up,” she explains.

The SADS journey started with just a few volunteers and two NGO partners in Bengaluru. Today, SADS operates across 11 major cities, including Delhi-NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Surat, and Chandigarh. It has limited operations in 600+ cities (light pickup option only). Additionally, it has partnered with 120-plus NGOs, 100-plus corporate, and has half a million users across the country.

So far, SADS has facilitated donations for ~1 million users through their platform or B2B2C partnerships, supporting its NGO partners. It has worked with 100+ companies/brand partners, including ITC, Narayana Health, Snapdeal, Nautica, The Chopras, Freecharge, Soti, Akamai, Randstad, Crack Verbal, GSK, etc.

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Going strong

Anushka was among the 10 entrepreneurs selected by Indian School of Business (ISB) and DLabs for their Envision accelerator programme for advanced stage startups.

SADS has also won various laurels, including in the ecommerce category at the Digital Women Awards (DWA-2017), the Manthan Award (South Asia and Asia Pacific – 2017), Women Entrepreneurs Award (Confederation of Women Entrepreneurs – 2018), and Seaside Startup Summit (Social Track – 2018).

SADS was also a part of YourStory's Tech 50 2021 list of startups.

Currently, the enterprise is working on a rewards system - it will reward users each time they donate through SADS. It aims to create a “Fitbit-like” platform for sustainability - an app that helps people achieve sustainable living goals by tracking and incentivising everyday actions.

Eventually, users would be rewarded for making other sustainable choices such as buying eco-friendly products, shopping from ethical brands, opting for cleaner energy sources, etc.

Apart from this, SADS also plans to expand to the US market and a few parts of Europe, focusing on environmentally conscious consumers.