Instamojo has always been looking to help other startups and help grow the ecosystem. One such opportunity was enabling Pracly sell their services. Pracly is a platform where startups can seek advice from experienced entrepreneurs and domain experts on any business problem over a call. This is what Ritesh, the Co-founder of Pracly had to say about us.
Starting up is difficult. All of us know that. Especially in our 20’s, without much experience. We either form a team of close friends and then try to think of an ‘idea’ or are passionate about something and go around convincing friends that this is the ‘idea’ in which they should invest the next X years of their life. Once all this is sorted and the idea and team are in place, comes the big question – how do we execute it? No one has a clue. Things were all rosy in the drawing room and coffee table discussions, but not so much when we think about doing it. As it happens, the world doesn’t care about your product as much as you do.
For a startup, it’s vital to get out there and get all the relevant information rather than building the entire product based on assumptions. We, at Pracly, followed the lean way and began talking to people with just a landing page. Fortunately, we realized that our potential customers could see value in our service – connecting entrepreneurs to experts for business advice. Instead of building the entire platform firsthand, we launched a basic version initially and added features based on feedback.
Sometime into our endeavor, we realized that true validation of our idea could only happen once users were willing to pay for our services, and honestly speaking it wasn’t a very happy realization. With this came the hassle of integrating an entire payment gateway, of which no one in the team had prior experience. Sure, with tons of e-commerce sites coming up, people are doing it, but it eats into the time and bandwidth of a small team to learn and implement it. It spells considerable delay in market validation.
We had a chat with Akash from Instamojo during a Hackathon and learnt how one could possibly sell anything on Instamojo. And when we did actually check it out, we realized that we don’t have to do anything – it’s all there! We could charge for our services through Instamojo, completely customize it and also re-direct the user back to our website after the payment. All we had to do is create tickets on Instamojo and link it to our website. Voila! More than two weeks of work reduced to just half a day. Such is the power of the platform!
Platforms such as Instamojo make the life of new entrepreneurs easier than it was before and provide us the much needed support at different stages in our startup journey. We have used the services of American Tech giants, but using the services of an Indian startup in building our platform also gave us a sense of trust in our ecosystem.
‘It’s the (Insta) Mojo Rising!’
Ritesh
Pracly
