“What is Mobisy’s vision?” I was taken aback when a couple of new colleagues in Mobisy asked me this question last week. I always assumed that our vision was as clear in everyone’s mind as it is in mine. But then I realized that we have never bothered to document it.
So, here is an attempt to transparently document Mobisy’s Vision!
We first thought about this question in 2012 when we were moving from a profitable services business to a more risky products business with Bizom.
In one line we described our vision as – “Create products affecting hundreds of millions of people and build a billion dollar revenue business in that process”
Affecting the lives of a 100 million people became our “why”, and we still remain highly committed to this.
More recently, in late 2016, we came up with a “what” that will help us achieve this — “Build an awesome team of people pursuing excellence. They will create products affecting hundreds of millions of people and build a business with billions of dollars in revenue in that process”
Now, let me explain the story behind this and talk about how we are reaching there:
In 2012, we started pursuing a slightly different path than what we are doing right now. We decided to focus on “India Enterprise Mobility”. Let me break that down:
India, because being in India, we understand “Indian” problems better. Also, with our population, our aim to reach hundreds of millions of people can be fulfilled right here at home. It also has a nationalist patriotic emotion to it !
Mobility, because apart from the fact that the founders had worked in mobility throughout their professional life, we truly believed from 2006 that future of the world and India will be mobile (Incidentally, that has already come true).
Enterprise, because we believed that in India consumers could not be easily monetized, especially with products like Mobile apps.
We believe that the way to affect consumers in India is by helping the enterprises who serve them. The first Bizom business plan was to enable the 350 million Indians working outdoors work more effectively using smartphones. These included all sales reps from all verticals, distributors, retailers, delivery boys , insurance agents, etc. That is why we built it as a customizable workflow automation solution.
Our first 5 customers were FMCG entrepreneurs trying to understand working of their own downstream supply chains. References from those got us more CPG customers and then more and today we stand at 250 such brands with 100,000 odd users in the CPG domain. Most of our users are sales reps and distributors.
Sometime last year we were at cusp of a decision – we could continue to focus on our original path of automating every outdoor person in every vertical across geography or we could go deeper into CPG where we were already establishing ourselves as leaders.
To illustrate the point, following are some graphics:
Total outdoor potential users in India
Total users India Market Focus area
Let’s Break up FMCG further down.
Breakup of FMCG users wrt kind of solutions they are using
Lets break up Cloud SaaS mobility further down
Bizom vs Rest in Cloud SaaS Mobility
As you can see, Bizom is clearly the market leader in Cloud SaaS mobility in FMCG space in India. We know 2 more facts.
- All the non digitized companies are directly jumping to Cloud Mobility due to ease of adoption
- Even the largest enterprises on legacy on-premise or computer based solutions have started moving to Cloud Mobility due to the cost and time benefit it offers.
This is also demonstrated by our growth in the last 3 years where we have been growing 3x year on year in Bizom !!
Coming back to the decision point, we decided to let our channel partners focus on non core verticals like BFSI and Pharma, while we decided to go deeper into FMCG itself. This means we started making our customer’s customers as our customers. But why?
- We understand the CPG business in India very well now
- Retail in India is the largest business segment currently contributing $600 billion to the GDP. 90% of it is done through small retailers who are our customer’s customers.
- We are already reaching more than 3 million unique retailers in India through our customers. This is almost 30% of the entire India retail market !!!
- This helps us make a dent in India and emerging markets faster. More importantly our hearts lie here.
In future, I can visualize us making our customer’s customer’s customers (i.e. consumers) as our users as well. These consumer apps will be focused on creating more value for our customers (FMCG Brands) and our customer’s customers (Small retailers).
Our current ambition, is to have 1 million daily active users(sales executives and distributors) on Bizom by march 2020 and 1 million weekly active retailers on our retail application in next 5 years !
Now, what does it mean for Bizom’s roadmap. In coming days, I see following being our key next steps
- Improve Bizom’s UX further to ensure our customers (brands) and their users(sales reps and distributors) find it pleasing to use Bizom with “whatsapp” level of simplicity
- Make Bizom even more intelligent along with simple so all the decision making heavy lifting is done through our machine learning analytics engines
- Make Bizom more “fun” through our social gamification capabilities so every user of Bizom enjoys using it !!
- Take our business logic layer next gen to make it even more flexible and customizable. This will help us bring on board every CPG enterprise using offline and legacy software in India and emerging markets.
- Make Bizom completely DIY and multilingual so it can proliferate on it’s own to farthest places worldwide
- Build and market a world class retailer app suited for emerging market user. This involves building simple yet intelligent solution in the class of “Uber”.
- Continue our fanatical customer success program with our business analysts and customer operations teams to continue making our customers and customer’s customers even more successful.
- Make more people aware about Bizom’s unique and better promise to improve their lives through targeted marketing.
I can already feel the excitement of what lies ahead of us in this journey to millions of users .. or what my colleague Arun calls as our journey to a billion dollar dream !!
