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Entrepreneurial Story of Satish Medapati who founded TouchPoint Data Sciences Private Limited (bounty app) located in Bangalore
About:
- Mr. Satish Medapati – Founder, Satish has about a decade of experience across geos. He did coated steel sales, credit risk modeling, analytics-consulting, banking & service delivery before becoming an entrepreneur. He is passionate about solving problems that are integral to consumers through the use of mobile and data sciences.
- Anita heads the technology and has 18 years experience in building and managing large scale IT projects.
- Sandeep manages partnerships and alliances
- Amitesh looks after operations and customer service.
- Team consists of 8 full time employees, 3 part-time employees and few interns .
When Started: 08/02/2015
Location: Bangalore
What motivated you to start your Business?
The idea behind this initiative and source of inspiration is – how knowing and understanding a simple everyday activity like eating or a weekly activity of visiting a mall or taking a cab can be so much more powerful in driving consumer experience that also results in businesses targeting with a context instead of spamming the consumer with offers/discounts . Being from an analytics and data sciences background, this problem of mapping offline consumer behavior driving value to consumers and businesses without friction on either side and executing it seamlessly has excited us and thus bounty was born.
Tell us about your Business
bounty is a free mobile app that rewards you for just walking into places! Every time you walk into any of our partner place, the app’s ‘intelligent assist’ feature automatically recognizes your location and alerts you to collect reward points. This technology works even without your GPS being on or when your internet is switched off too. These bounty points can be redeemed for a host of online or offline gift cards with no conditions. Say, if you have 500 bounty points, that’s equivalent of Rs.500 in cash that can be spent for any of the brands’ gift cards listed in the app. Think of us like a digital platform for offline businesses to acquire, engage and manage their consumer base in real-time with context.
Tell us what an average day in your life looks like.
The average day starts with taking stock of various functions like technology, data sciences, operations, customer delight, business alliances etc and ensuring that we stay focused on what we want to do and why we want to do what. A bit of brainstorming on some growth hacks, some operational efficiencies, looking at consumer comments very seriously and understanding why we are still getting feedback. Then of course a look at every possible metric probably by the hour or two and then planning for the next set of growth. I do not have time slot divisions exactly but an overall plan for the day and executing it as well as checking on what we as a company had accomplished that matters to the consumer.
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.
Perseverance – I think start up life automatically teaches it and how much ever you read, you need to experience it. We tried a lot of experimentation and stuck together as a team when the previous pivot did not work out.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far? How did you overcome these challenges?
One of the major problems in a business such as ours is that you need to capture both ends of the chain simultaneously. That is, we need merchants onboard to get users, and users onboard to involve merchants. What we have learnt from our experience is that managing the merchant side or seller side is most critical in our business. You need to sell to a few guys without anything and then start consumer acquisition. Slowly the tempo builds on both sides as you grow up. Today we have about 4200+ partner places where people can get rewarded for just walking in, tens of thousands of users and 100+ gift voucher options ranging from flipkart, amazon, bookmyshow, mobile recharge etc.
The other big issue was that mobile marketing is very different from web app marketing and we too learnt it the hard way. In our current business model, we really did not promote the app. Having a drop dead proposition for consumers and making sure service is outstanding has helped us. We took customer feedback seriously to make sure referrals are easy too. That’s the way we have been growing. However to achieve better scale, we plan to make use of online channels including FB/SEM etc. The only hurdle we see is marketing budget as we seem to be on course for scaling.
Another important problem is attracting the right talent when you cannot really afford them.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
If you have consumers and a strong value proposition, every customer will fall in line and numbers speak for themselves.
What advice do you give to other business owners?
I think everyone has their own way of looking at things and don’t need advice. If someone really needs my advice then mine would be to start focusing on one single metric and solving one problem at a time.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
We had gone through lot of troubled times but the team has been fantastic in trusting my intuition and keep sailing the oars. The fundamental belief of both the vision and execution and the very fact that we are learning and not repeating mistakes kept us motivated. We as a company measure everything, well, almost everything and that kinda helps you see what is working and what is not.
What are your Marketing, Funding, and Team Building Strategy?
We would be growing city-wise and within a geo is the growth going to come from. Initially we have presence in Bangalore. We just expanded to Hyderabad and Chennai and we will stay put in these cities till we ramp up numbers. As expansion is less than a couple of weeks for a city for us, we can go ahead with growth capital and expand to few cities
On funding for bounty, we just started the process and hope to close the round soon.
Iam fortunate to have a team that delivers amazingly well, went through rough times and yet stuck together only for making it happen. Once we have money, we would need few key positions and we would want someone who fits the bill – believing in our vision, working hard and smart, never giving up etc..
Your Achievements?
bounty has been growing very fast since its inception in Feb and some numbers could be like this:
Over 70% of downloads happen through referrals alone.
Over the last 12 weeks, we grew over 59 times in number of check-ins that consumers do.
We have givenout over 10 lakh points through bounty that consumers could redeem for whatever they wished for.
What’s your favorite quote?
Keeps changing with priorities in mind. However one is about Houdini’s story of how he could not open the lock of a channel islands door which actually was not even locked. The quote is about how limits exist in your mind and may not be in reality. What you believe is what happens.
Who inspires you?
Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, MS Subbulakshmi and a host of others.
Share your Business Philosophy?
No-nonsense for consumers. Make it hassle-free, easy and absolutely delightful to consumers
