When and how did you start?
Dhananjaya S and Gaurav Badarkhe co-founded Zipd- an intra-city on demand Delivery Company in 2015-16. Due to the changing market conditions, they closed Zipd at the end of 2016 and started looking out for employment opportunities. In the course of finding a job, Dhananjaya conceived the idea of ShopClients in Jan 2017 (BazaarNXT is owned and managed by ShopClients) to help Startups and SMEs with sales as a 3rd party sales company in Bengaluru.
“I have interviewed at a good number of Startups for an operational role post the Zipd episode for a job and landed at some decent Startups. But, during the job search, I found that many Startups are struggling with sales and managing sales personnel. You can pretty much outsource your logistics or training or hiring requirements to an expert but you cannot outsource your sales to an expert because there is nobody who takes it as a mandate. I was growing up in the start-up world, wanted to help some fellow entrepreneurs in realizing their dreams. Hence, I decided to let go those offers and floated ShopClients along with Gaurav”, Dhananjay stated.
Brief about the organization and founding members
Close to 250 Startups and SMEs have used our services at ShopClients. We found out that, we need to restrict our focus on one or two industries to grow fast. So, we zeroed in on Restaurant businesses and rebranded ourselves to BazaarNXT.
BazaarNXT is a one-stop solution provider for restaurants and food-related businesses (Fruit shop, Juice shops, Supermarkets, Catering businesses, Grocery and Vegetable shops, Bakery, Café, and Bars, etc) for their operational requirements. BazaarNXT connects the Manufacturers available in the market directly with restaurants for their procurements by eliminating the number of players involved in the supply chain and directly pass on the price benefits to Restaurants by charging a nominal fee for Sellers (Manufacturers) on every successful sale.
About the founders:
Dhananjaya S: Seasoned start-up entrepreneur (4 Startups) with 7+ years of demonstrated sales and operations experience across hyper-local, Logistics, F&B, and Training domains. Dhananjaya holds an MBA from VTU and BCA from Bangalore University.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dhananjaya-s-99490565
Gaurav Badarkhe: A full time and full-stack Freelancer turned entrepreneur (2 Startups). Previously, Gaurav has worked on various Startups as a Freelancer which have successfully raised external funding.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gauravbadarkhe
About funding, plans on growth
They raised a small round from their friends and family members in June-16. Soon after that, they started seeing the traction and expanded to Hyderabad too.
BazaarNXT has secured its seed round in April-2019 from a clutch of global Angel investors from India and Singapore.
“We’ll deploy the funds to strengthen our technology suite, expand to 2-3 more cities, team building and to promote our Partners Program” stated Gaurav when asked about the use of proceeds.
BazaarNXT has been serving more than 3,100+ Restaurants in Bangalore and Hyderabad. We are aiming to hit 2-3 more cities by the end of 2019 and to serve 10000+ Restaurants across 4-5 cities. We’ll have 25,000+ Restaurants using our solution by the end of 2020. We have been growing at a staggering rate of 25%-30% month on month from last 6 months, which shows our customer satisfaction and the pain points we are trying to solve for heavily operations driven restaurant businesses.
Challenges and Opportunities/ Marketing Strategies
The market does have challenges! Hence, we are trying to explore an opportunity to find a solution. We are trying to solve a couple of basic problems that Restaurants and Manufacturers are facing.
a. Manufacturers want Restaurants to buy at least a minimum order quantity which is not a viable solution for Restaurants due to space and working capital constraints.
b. Hence, Manufacturers go through the Dealers and Distributors network. Whereas, the Restaurants start procuring from the Dealers/Distributors/Corner Retail stores at much higher prices. The middlemen are exploiting the gaps found in this kind environment.
How is BazaarNXT solving this problem?
BazaarNXT has started “Partners Program” to create microentrepreneurs. These Partners are either our Restaurant Partner itself or somebody who has some savings and looking for a business opportunity but does not want to involve full time in the business or do not know what to do or unaware of the competition, etc.
We get this kind of ambitious Partners to set up small warehouses in different parts of a city to serve Restaurants in and around the radius of 4-5 Kms.
Initially, we partner with the best Manufacturers in each city and help our Partners to procure from them. Partners will store the items in the warehouse. Restaurants will place orders on the BazaarNXT app and those orders will be routed to the nearby Partner to deliver. On every order, our Partners will pay us 2%-3% of the sale value for our efforts.
In a nutshell, BazaarNXT helps Partners with the end-end process right from identifying a warehouse, setup, negotiation with Manufacturers, procurements, and sales. All a Partner need to do is to maintain sufficient stock at the warehouse and take care of deliveries.
We have one Partner each in Bangalore and Hyderabad as of now. We have received multiple proposals and are evaluating the proposals to launch 2-3 more in each city in the next 3-4 months.
Typically these Partners will be supplying the food packaging containers, groceries, milk and daily essentials to the Restaurants.
Apart from this, on a marketplace model, BazaarNXT does help Restaurants with:
o CA, Legal and Notary services (Company incorporation, GST registration, Trade license, Food license, Labor license, Tax filing, etc)
o POS: Billing machines and software along with hardware supplies
o Security and Surveillance systems
o Printing, stationery and housekeeping materials supplies
o Interiors design and setup (painting, artwork, printing, branding, etc)
o Swiping Machine and working capital loans
o On-demand services: Pest control, Sump cleaning, etc.
Future plans and funding
“We’ll be turning EBITDA positive by December-2019 and are working on launching our pre-series A round soon” states Dhananjay when asked about the next round plans.
EXCLUSIVE: Founder’s advice to budding entrepreneurs
When you decide to start a Startup, you need to be prepared for everything. It might not start working from day-1. But your relentless and continuous efforts can only make things to work.
It took us 3.5 months to crack our first sale! So, never give up!
Provide some statistics like revenues or clients acquisition etc
BazaarNXT has been serving more than 3,100+ Restaurants in Bangalore and Hyderabad. We are aiming to hit 2-3 more cities by the end of 2019 and to serve 10000+ Restaurants across 4-5 cities. We’ll have 25,000+ Restaurants using our solution by the end of 2020. We have been growing at a staggering rate of 25%-30% month on month from last 6 months, which shows our customer satisfaction and the pain points we are trying to solve for heavily operations driven restaurant businesses. At this stage, we do not want to comment on revenues.
Your website / apps / and contact details
a. Website: www.bazaarnxt.com
b. App link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.e.bazaarnxt_android_app&hl=en_US
c. Contact details:
o Name: Dhananjaya S
o Position: Co-founder and CEO, BazaarNXT
o Mob: 9844266269 / 9606131155
o Email: dj@bazaarnxt.com
o Address: #115, 2nd Floor (Behind BDA Complex), 10th Main, 14th Cross Rd, Sector 6, HSR Layout, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560102.
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