Bookkeeping Application OKCredit on Its Journey of Constructing 5.5 Million Active Consumers

OKCredit, a bookkeeping app that aims to digitise accounting for compact organizations in India, has come a extensive way in three years. Started in 2017, the application enjoys in excess of 5.5 million active consumers with close to $7.5 billion (approximately Rs. 54,739 crores) value of transactions recorded in the month of October. In this house, OKCredit has rigid opposition from Khatabook, which obtained 10 million downloads through phrase of mouth in merchant networks in a calendar year of its start. Nonetheless, OKCredit has been growing at a continuous speed, OKCredit CEO and co-founder Harsh Pokharna asserts, with the business anticipating its lively user base to develop close to 18-20 per cent in this fiscal.

The OKCredit app is offered free of charge of price tag on Google Enjoy and Application Retail outlet each. The enterprise acquired seed cash from Lightspeed Enterprise Partners not too long ago that must support scale buyer foundation even extra.  

Pro viewpoint: PN Sudarshan, Spouse, Deloitte India suggests, “SaaS as a business design has proved successful in the digitization of smaller and medium enterprises around the planet. India is an essential industry both of those from a source and need point of view. SaaS revenues in India have achieved $3.5 billion as of FY2020 with 75 p.c coming from world sales. From a need perspective, India is heading by means of mass digitization, which provides market value chains into the digital fold enabling shared facts exchange across the provide chain. Modest and medium enterprises are an integral portion of our production and companies industries in India, and to definitely reach the probable of mass digitization, it is needed that little and medium enterprises obtain enterprise-level software package provisioned at flexible pricing versions. SaaS as a business design is absolutely well-positioned to catalyse this modify and value-successful electronic applications would aid us shift from a ‘data-poor’ to ‘data-rich’ economic climate. The latest COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed the charge of technologies adoption throughout industries. In this context, SaaS as a enterprise product can witness increased adoption, as flexibility and affordability becomes a key for enterprises to regulate the pandemic response and prosper in the altering market dynamics.”

We spoke to CEO and Co-Founder of OKCredit, Severe Pokharna to know how the corporation options to deal with competitors and its long run ideas.

CEO and Co-Founder of OKCredit, Harsh Pokharna

1.What were you doing right before OKCredit was brought to daily life?

After graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2014, I and Gaurav took up a position at Flipkart. My pal and batchmate Aditya Prasad who is also the co-founder and CTO of OkCredit went on to work with a facts business named Fuzzy Logix. The start out-up ecosystem was just obtaining set up in India and the three of us desired to do anything of our own. We crafted a couple apps which did not function and even attempted our hand at blockchain. In 2017, out of our very own private working experience, we begun OkCredit.

2. What was the conceptualization system guiding OKCredit? When was it that you eventually decided you want to begin OKCredit?

We experienced a to start with-hand sense of the challenge and that immensely served us build a item that would fix issues not just for the SMBs but also his consumers. Whilst living in Bengaluru, we utilised to get from this grocery retail store opposite our condominium. Once we went to the retail outlet to settle our month-conclusion credit rating equilibrium and we were being astounded by the shopkeeper’s unpleasant procedure of taking out just about every monthly bill and calculating it up. The approach was fraught with mistake and manipulation and squandered a great deal of time, equally for the customers and these store proprietors. That is when we determined that there was a want to make this transaction easy and easy, supplying start to our idea of OkCredit.

3. Had been there any operational difficulties (or any other troubles) that you faced when beginning OKCredit? You should offer you our visitors aspects on what these issues ended up and how you overcame them?

The biggest challenge for us was the buyer inertia in adopting a digital solution. The ledger book tradition is so deeply entrenched in India that quite a few shopkeepers are unable to even assume of employing an application to do calculations. For them, it can be a extremely cherished issue and frankly, it truly is heart of their small business. Sharing that essential doc with a startup will not materialize easily. Next, the shopper established we cater to is not essentially the urban metro buyer. In fact, most of the periods, it can be a smaller business in a tier-2, tier-3 setting.

As a firm that has learnt initial-hand from its buyers, we have labored a lot on developing have faith in, getting accessible usually and creating positive that the product evolves in tune with our customer’s desires. To that result, we launched two far more goods this 12 months which will go a prolonged way in bringing little businesses up on the digitisation curve. In this article once more, we are striving to solve two key suffering points. OkShop serves the will need for offline shops and enterprises who want to go online to maximise their small business likely. OkStaff, our 2nd initiative will help enterprises with team management, be it salaries, advance, leaves etc.

4. Did you have to set in any income to start the organization? When did you make your mind up that funding was necessary? Could you present broad details on how a start off-up will get funding in India and how OKCredit managed its very first spherical?

Right before beginning OkCredit, 3 of us ended up operating. I and Gaurav with Flipkart and Aditya with Fuzzy Logic. We experienced some financial savings. Later on, we also did some consultancy function on blockchain that supported us fiscally for some time. But as our business scaled we essential much more funds and assets to improve additional. Which is when our batch mate and dear buddy Farid Ahsan, also co-founder of ShareChat, stepped in and assisted us out by offering us his place of work room. For the upcoming 3 months his business area turned our only abode, in which we tirelessly and relentlessly labored in direction of acquiring OkCredit. Observing our devotion and passion he served us link with Lightspeed Ventures, which grew to become our first investors.

5. Could you share some attention-grabbing stories about your preliminary times? What learnings have you picked up from these hustle days?

We to begin with started off functioning exclusively with grocery stores, which we acquired as a result of referrals. We wished to grow our market attain and check out other segments. For that to come about, we started talking to folks in the industry and on that we realised that the identical problem existed through all categories and source chains. There was a dire require in the industry for generating account administration basic and that the sector was marginally neglected. After that, we slowly and gradually commenced establishing ourselves and there was a spurt in demand from customers for our solutions across all current market segments and geographical areas.

6. Is there any incident that is monumental in OKCredit’s journey? Be sure to share that incident with our visitors.

The incident that is constantly heading to stay shut to our hearts is our extremely first person. The 3 of us use to share an condominium appropriate reverse to a grocery retailer Foods Choice, wherever we use to make most of our home buys from. A person high-quality working day Aditya arrived back from the keep and narrated the entire cumbersome method he went by at the store just to shell out his charges. The storekeeper at the store would rummage through all his costs, tally them and would then check with you to pay out your dues, which we aren’t fully absolutely sure was at any time precise. This posed as a challenge not only for us, but hundreds of prospects and the shopkeeper himself. This led to the inception of OkCredit. The really 1st module we designed failed, as it was so intricate for them to fully grasp that they couldn’t run it. So, we went again and forth to acquire a system that would occur to his assist and was straightforward to understand and function. At first, the storekeeper had tiny faith in our application and use to sustain his publications along with, just to be confident. But, slowly but surely he began getting self esteem in it and also gave us various other referrals. Due to the fact then we have extra over 5.5 million lively consumers and two far more product or service choices.

7. Could you assistance give a sense of how considerably OKCredit has come? From when it commenced to where by it is now

In 2017, we began with 1 user and at the moment we have 5.5 million lively end users with all-around $7.5 billion (around Rs. 54,739 crores) transactions recorded in the month of Oct and its increasing at a very good speed. We have surpassed our pre-covid ranges. We be expecting our active end users to improve all-around 18-20 percent in this fiscal.

8.  Has there at any time been any failure or troubles? You should give element about one particular major incident and how you overcame that.   

We have experienced several failures through our journey. We have labored for multiple goods and tasks, lots of of which have ended up not doing the job out. In a way they have all been our failures. However, we by no means gave up and ongoing to strive from all road blocks. We were being pretty obvious on what our mission and purpose was, that is to enable billion Indians and we did that towards all odds. We under no circumstances allow our failures uninteresting our ambitions. 

9. You’ve got received opposition via many bookkeeping apps including Khatabook? What differentiates you from Khatabook?  

Our largest USP is that all our solutions are basic, protected, and technologically sophisticated. It runs on a essential smartphone and allows automate the full approach pertaining to the organization transactions of suppliers with their prospects and with wholesalers. Users also get to continue to keep track of the buyer’s credit and can also ship them well timed payment reminders. 

10. What was it like sailing as a result of the COVID-19 crisis?  Did you see a fall in small business or unforeseen surge? How did you deal with it?   

Through the country-extensive lockdown previously this calendar year, we noticed that retailers experienced stopped promoting on credit thanks to the uncertainty. Advertising on credit history is a quite common affair in the course of standard moments and therefore there was a dip in the business enterprise. But as the lockdown eased, we saw that merchants utilised social networking apps like WhatsApp to market their goods and make catalogues to interact and market to their buyers, which soon grew to become aspect of the new normal to endorse contactless transactions. Getting claimed that, our retention and revival post COVID-19 have been phenomenal and absolutely natural. 

11.  Any advice for younger Indian entrepreneurs out there?    

The upcoming period will be transformational for smaller corporations as both equally internet and software package usage is likely to go through the roof. As more SMBs (modest and medium enterprises) come on the web, there is a substantial prospect to go further in this sector.  We would want to really encourage budding founders and business people to ideate about probable methods to problems that SMBs are struggling with. We would also recommend them to target on just one incredibly distinct section of small business group in resolving a trouble. At first, focus on a person user and work close to it to remedy the issue efficiently so that you build your journey based on it. Aim on acquiring in depth facts about the buyers even though fixing the trouble so that they can undertake your merchandise. Generally have a prolonged -time period vision and generate a sustainable item. It is critical to understand that this market is just opening so there will be a ton of players but the vital is to have a very long- phrase target and resolve challenges sustainably. 

12. What are the massive strategies in the potential?    

With a suite of straightforward, mobile-very first products, we are resolving some major troubles for distinct segments of SMBs, giving us several entry details to kickstart their enterprise digitisation journey. A strong network outcome will be vital to digitising the 50 million SMBs more than the subsequent decade. We intend to aid these smaller businesses to develop into at par with huge e-commerce gamers in leveraging engineering to services their consumers as perfectly as simplify procurement, and integrate them with the official economic climate and digital ecosystem. 

13. What is the personnel energy? Is OKCredit hiring at this time?  

At this time, we have a workforce of 100 workers. And, of course we are actively employing. When COVID struck, quite a few firms ended up providing pink slips and deducting salaries but OkCredit stood with their workforce. In point, we have strengthened our team in 2020.