A plethora of tariff plans are available from the fundamental provider carriers inclusive of Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Tata Docomo across India related to records, communicate time, SMSes the three main community uses for any cell subscriber. These plans are in addition divided with the aid of country and circle of coverage depending on wherein the user is based totally out of. Then, there are roaming plans for folks that journey constantly.
In short, the thoughts boggles at the wide variety of selections a person has and how they can cross about deciding the exceptional plan – statistics, talk-time, and SMS – for themselves.
It is precisely this ache factor that co-founders – Nizam Mohideen, Prasanna Hegde, and Rajesh Badgeri – decided to cope with when they founded iReff three years lower back.
IReff – The Origin Story
“There are approximately 20,000 plans put out by using the telcos for prepaid subscribers, supply or take,” begins Rajesh Badgeri, co-founder and COO of iReff. “The common person will stroll right into a retail shop and choose the plan out with no forethought or making plans. The store can not help the user because they're not knowledgeable on the contemporary plans themselves. The telcos don’t think of supplying facts at the side of the plans. The stop user, the subscriber, continually has to answer ‘WHAT’ to recharge every month.”
This way a extensive loss in terms of time and money, and that is in which iReff is available in – it's miles “a recharge plan and discovery choice-making platform that is most beneficial and value-efficient for cell subscribers.”
“When Nizam first started out the platform over three years ago, it become built the usage of SMS,” says Rajesh. The concept changed into easy – supply subscribers statistics concerning their teleco-specific plans thru messages at the display screen, just like the (*121#) USSD code messages that seem when a consumer assessments the balance on information, talk-time, and SMS.
“We had a truthful amount of users however couldn’t scale rapid sufficient. The product was not intuitive sufficient and in this age of smartphones, was now not consumer-friendly,” says Rajesh. This is when Nizam decided to pivot quickly and went directly to construct an Android app in 2013.
Rajesh came on board as COO about two years back, intrigued to paintings with his classmates Prasanna and Nizam. According to him, iReff changed into one of the early adopters of Android in 2013 and for this reason controlled to chart to the Top five Apps on the Google Play Store. The platform makes it clean for customers to discover statistics regarding tariff fees, the first-class available plans on budget as well as the latest plans. And then, due to the fact the cease person nevertheless needs to get the plan activated on their smartphone, the app lets in for transactions of the equal thru 1/3-birthday party fee structures including Paytm, Mobikwik, and Freecharge.
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A One-Stop Shop For Information Discovery To In-app Transactions
“As I said, we got into the Android app sport early on. This intended that one of the challenges we confronted was convincing humans to come back onboard and strive the app. Luckily for us, we had been able to get phrase-of-mouth going from the get pass and we were capable of maintain a 4.5-superstar score at the Google Play Store,” shares Rajesh.
He puts the reason for the 1 Lakh plus testimonials they received, all the way down to iReff being a ‘Google’ for recharge plans.
The platform gives more than the normal plug and pay plans – it objectives to create a actual value upload for its customers, specially on the Android app. According to Rajesh, there are widgets which enable USSD code capabilities and give the user facts concerning SMS/records/talk-time balance, cutting-edge offers activated through the telco.
“What we're trying to do is simplify the pay as you go recharge marketplace in India. So the next cost supplying might be to change the manner transactions take region in a aggressive, ever-changing market,” says Rajesh.
To this end, iReff brought in-app transactions for recharges and plans thru partnerships with 1/3-celebration price vendors consisting of Paytm, Mobikwik, and Freecharge. But, because it believes in imparting actual price to the patron, iReff took it one step similarly.
“Since we are an information portal, a discovery platform, we figured it's far only honest that the person gets the high-quality possible plan for the great viable fee and so we put out the facts concerning charges from every of our partners along with Paytm or Freecharge and the person is unfastened to go together with the plan that he feels is high-quality acceptable for him.”
It is because of steady innovations like this that Rajesh claims that the platform has seen ninety five% boom organically.
The Numbers Game
“At a hard estimate, there are about 20 lakh recharge outlets in India. A respectable percent of them deal with approximately a hundred customers daily who use iReff. So you may imagine the ease-of-use that iReff brings to the retailer in terms of staying up-to-date at the modern-day plans to be had,” says Rajesh.
According to Rajesh, the platform has visible a complete of five Mn downloads and 1.Five Mn lively users every month.
“I can competently say that approximately ninety% of our customers are on Android with the closing 10% dispensed amongst iOS, Blackberry, and Windows,” he adds. He claims that their app on the Google Play Store has about 4 Mn downloads. In addition, their internet site drives visitors of over 1 Mn page views consistent with month.
IReff’s crew of seven is based out of Bengaluru and became incubated at Nasscom 10,000 Startups in 2014, sooner or later being named as part of the Emerging Top 50 startups. It was also a part of Google Launchpad in February 2015.
Monetisation for the platform happens in one among two approaches – through in-app ads and fee charged for every recharge transaction through the 1/3-celebration bills platform. Rajesh additionally stocks that they fee for each new person that gets brought onto the 1/3-celebration payments platform when they transact using iReff.
“Sometimes, people who have been the use of local outlets decide to interchange over to an app like Paytm or Freecharge once they see the cheapest plan available on that specific platform. This way, our systems additionally get new customers through the in-app transaction and this is additionally a part of our commercial enterprise model,” he says.
“Product Market Fit Is The Focus, Not Unit Economics”
“We preserve doing small experiments to test which channels are running and usually have,” says Rajesh. This is the principle cause that the startup claims to have visible a 2 hundred% increase in 2014-2015 and 154% this year, up to now.
It is a bootstrapped startup and has not obtained or approached traders for institutional funding. When requested approximately the identical, Rajesh says,
“We are not absolutely monetised, neither have we managed to crack the candy spot of unit economics and PMF. Since we're nonetheless at an evolving stage, our focus is on PMF. We have a consumer base now, from a discovery platform we have now come to be a staple for a lot of our users. The subsequent step might be to leverage the records we've got accumulated via analytics and spot in which we have to go.”
Marketing, though, has been a issue that has allowed competitors which includes Mubble, Bill Bachao, Bill Pay and extra seize up with the first-mover iReff. So how does iReff plan to live a step beforehand and address the opposite contenders inside the vertical?
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“For one, each of us has our own area of interest areas that we consciousness on,” says Rajesh. “For every other, we don’t accept as true with in giving cashback and giving discounts to escalate patron acquisition.” An issue which, at the side of competitive advertising by its competitors, were causes of concern to the platform. “We are interested by including value to the lives of our users. IReff has grown totally thru phrase-of-mouth so far due to the fact our product works. And we agree with that this kind of product have to supply us growth, not inorganic reach,” he provides.
Looking Towards The Future
But Rajesh does acknowledge the trouble areas of scaling up on advertising. “Every prepaid subscriber is our target audience. We need to attain out to them so that they recognize of the smooth and easy manner to stay connected online with regards to recharges. Marketing might be one among our primary attention factors within the coming months,” he says.
The startup is also seeking to do a little critical fundraising over the following three-six months by using first leveraging on existing monetization opportunities. “Adding extra capabilities on our Android platform, strengthening our product and focussing on engineering will be what we try for in the long-time period,” says Rajesh.
