'What Facebook is to your personal life, we want Wooplr to be for your shopping needs'

When four friends at MacAfee (now a part of Intel) - Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, Soumen Sarkar and Ankit Sabharwal-decided to branch out and start something on their own, they came together to form Wooplr, a fashion discovery app. In February, Helion Ventures invested $5 million in the company to help it expand its team and market the app. Recently, Rajratnem, who acts as the Chief Marketing Officer, and Sarkar, who is the Chief Technology Officer of Wooplr, shared their views with Business Today's Venkatesha Babu on the evolution of the company, the funding and its aftermath, as well as future plans. Excerpts:

Q. What prompted you to put on your entrepreneurial hats?

Rajaretnam: We (co-founders) used to work together for MacAfee under same manager. Soumen and I were in the same team, the site advisor - a browser tool that warns users about safety features of a website. It was an MIT startup that MacAfee had acquired and it had clocked 100 million downloads in 2007. 

Though we were part of a large company, the start-up culture was predominant. Ankit (co-founder and chief product officer of Wooplr) was part of MacAfee's GTI (Global Threat Intelligence) team, which was working on defence projects. He was more of a cutting-edge R&D guy. Arjun (co-founder and CEO of Wooplr) was part of MacAfee secure, which ensures safe payments and transactions on websites. We spent a lot of time together as we were working under the same manager.

Soumen, Arjun and I had started a side project called auto404.org. It was an online grievance redressal platform dealing with complaints against auto drivers. We had experienced problems while dealing with errant auto drivers on the streets of Bangalore and thought of addressing it as part of a social initiative. We had planned to build the product on the BOT (build-operate-transfer) model. We had made a presentation before the Bengaluru police commissioner and he liked the idea. But, with a change in government in Karnataka in 2008, the initiative never really took off. However, it set the tone for us to work together.

Q. So how did Wooplr happen?

Rajaretnam: From our experience with auto404, we knew what it took to hit the street and execute our ideas. Wooplr came from the pain points we experienced every day. On a Thursday or a Friday night, after a hard day's work we always ended up visiting the same places for shopping, food or movies. The idea was to change that - how does one discover new places and new products. We wanted this process of discovery to be accessed by everybody and Wooplr was born. We wanted to create a platform where people could share and discuss products across three verticals - fashion, home dcor and collectables, based on their social standing, location and occasion. The idea was to make it personalised and curated, instead of having a long catalogue and having too many SKUs. If the user is interested in boots, we wanted to show him (the variety of) boots and nothing else.

Q. How is it different from a (product discovery platform) Sweet Couch?

Sarkar: The best part about it is its originality and local content. One can access our mobile app through Facebook or Google plus and, hence, we get to know the user's location, social circle, gender, email address and activity on the app. At the end of the day we create a social layer above the shopping layer. This makes it social commerce and, hence, relevant to you.

Q. Do you get paid when users visit other sites based on your recommendations?

Sarkar: That is the model we will eventually have. Right now we are focused on discovery and we are working on it. Once people start shopping on Wooplr, we will get a cut out of it and (this transformation) will happen in another four months approximately. We are focused on discovery for now and then we will get into the integration of e-commerce where we take a cut out of the transactions. Even with our limitations of being a fashion discovery platform we can actually inform shoppers about relevant shops through recommendations and inform them more about the shop. If anyone accessing the app right now clicks a feed to get to know more about it, he or she can find out who recommended it (a product or service) and then he or she can try to find out more about the place where the recommender got it from. That is how it works. Other people can love or comment on it and this creates a social layer, a closed shopping ecosystem.

Q. How is it different from Pininterest?

Rajaretnam: Pininterest is about everything, whereas Wooplr is focused on shopping and it does not pin things from an ecommerce sites. It is all fresh and original content and that is what makes it different. We would also have content from stores, content from the curated team in our company, and most of our users will also contribute to our content. They have already discovered 14,000 businesses for us. It would have been impossible for us to find out about these businesses. We are not limited to offline stores, we would also have online stores and anyone who intends to sell, can be a flea market store or focused brands like Chumbak or a happily unmarried or it could be a big retail brand like Zara. They can get on the platform, leverage it for driving more leads and sales. The defining feature is unlike any e-commerce website, which usually have a model wearing a product, photoshopped and made to look extremely perfect - a look that lots of shoppers do not identify with. Wooplr users post their own pictures and, therefore, other users can relate to them better.
It is a place to share your shopping taste, as you have Facebook for your personal life, LinkedIn for your professional life and twitter for writing about anything. Our aim is to make Wooplr the platform for showcasing your shopping taste, portraying your choice of brands and products, creating your shopping profile and discovering people who have similar tastes in shopping.
 
Q. Do you have competitors?

Sarkar:  There are competitors in every business. Fancy in the US and Code eye in China enable shops to sell on an app, but that is where the similarities end. We are more focused in finding social trends, as we have a data science team which identifies the trend as per the various posts we get on the app and then personalises the content for our users. We do not have a media-focused app, and this is where it differs from Fancy. We are India-focused and the biggest advantage is that we are building a Wooplr community in India. This would help us sustain and grow in the future. The shoppers in the community post about their shopping experiences, and make recommendations. They come here to spot trends and buy products.

Q. Do you have the critical mass in terms of user base?

Rajaretnam: We are getting there.  Till now we had only focused on Bangalore, but after the funding we are looking to expand to other cities. We have more than 100,000 users and a 25 per cent month-on-month growth. We launched on March 8, on International Women's day (nationally).

Q. What does Helion bring to the table beyond the money?

Sarkar: Hellion ventures invested $5 million as lead investors, and they bring in mentorship and handholding. We also have a great advisory team consisting of Sunil Kalra, Jaspreet Bindra, Rahul Chandra, Vivek Pandit and Rajiv Mehta.

Q. What will you use the funding for?

Rajaretnam: Our primary focus is to build the team. We were 25 people. Now, we want to scale up to at least 70 in the next two months.

Q. Apart from moving from discovery to e-commerce, what are your future plans?

Sarkar: We want to have a standardised support for Windows, iOS and Android, and then build the data science team that will become the core of the company. We need to have a good team and then we need to make sure we support the robust product which we already have by adding new features on a continuous basis. This will ensure the turnaround time from the market to be much lower. We would keep experimenting with new features to see what works and what does not. We would also focus on user acquisition.

Q. Are you generating revenue currently?

Rajaretnam:  We need another three-four months to get the e-commerce feature. Our tech team is at it. We are putting together our business development team, working out our business model, running some small pilots with some free market brands and working out the price points of the products. All these things are happening simultaneously so that our tech team and our business development team are ready with a plan and a model. They will look for user acquisition, in terms of brands and local stores, and for anyone who intends to sell (on our platform). We are looking at viral features, including Facebook shares and through the built-in chat system in the app, apart from word-of-mouth initiatives by users so that they can get their friends into this. We are also looking at brand campaign, associating the users to participate and hence get into their mind space.