Startup Story Of MyToolBag, Co-founders & CEO - Prashant Dodiya and Saurabh Chavda

1. Please introduce your Startup and give a brief about yourself.

A. Our Startup MyToolBag is a hyperlocal delivery marketplace App for stationery stores near you aiming to cut the rush to your favourite stationery store and delivering anything within 2 hrs. Launched in 2016 with just selling 20 products MyToolBag started with campus deliveries, taking orders through WhatsApp initially and expanded delivering throughout the Ahmedabad city and eventually with huge customer response and love MyToolBag App provides a wide range of 10k+ stationery products with 80+ onboard vendors selling through the platform.

I am Saurabh Chavda, Chief Technology Officer, MyToolBag. graduated from L.D College of Engineering.

2. How can you describe your Startup?

A. MyToolBag is a App which enables it's partner vendors to sell anything throughout the city with zero technology and marketing cost by providing our handy and easy-to-use technology infra with highly trained delivery ecosystem. We act as a guiding and scaling platform for local stores to take them back to the race and compete giant sales of other e-commerce megastructures. what we believe truely is also that MyToolBag is the team it is operated by. So yes MyToolBag is a bunch of crazy minds who believe in creating something unique and useful for the society.

3. What were you doing before?

A. We founded MyToolBag during our college days only so it's our first initiative leading a full fledged venture.

4. What is your inspiration behind your Startup?

A. Me and the co-founder Prashant Dodiya are not based out of Ahmedabad and so it was difficult for us to find all these products which we are selling at reasonable rates and sometimes its available at a distant store which consumes a lot of your time when we came to Ahmedabad and further researching the markets  of cities like Ahmedabad and Mumbai we came to know about the drastic decrease in sales of local vendors due to online penetrations and so we decided to start a venture which delivers all the basic college stationery within 2 hours at lowest rates partnering with these local stores.

5. Describe Your Startup Name, Why you are using this Name?

A. MyToolBag is a people's App so we always wanted a name which people can always relate to when they think of shopping online and thus MyToolBag was first used.

6. What was the idea behind starting Startup?

A. To help local stores and vendors reach potential customers. Imagine a situation in which you are purchasing something online which is also available at youe nearby store consuming store's space and vendor's investment and it comes from a far away set fulfillment center which in no way benefits the local store near you. So the idea is to empower these local vendors get into this race again where customers have their own choice of purchasing online or offline but from the nearest store which can directly benefit the small stores and vendors.

7. What are the services you offer to your clients?

A. We provide a free technology infra to our partner vendors for selling and marketing their products throughout the city. Also with our delivery and supply chain spread across Ahmedabad we deliver each and every order to our customers within 2 hours.

8. What are the factors which influenced you to start the ‘Startup’?

A. 1.Growing consumer trends of online shopping.

2. declining in the sales of local stores.

3. adaptability of consumers and partners in terms of technology.

9. How did your journey start towards your startup from planning to funding?

A. We started with an initial investment of Rs.11k and grew exponentially with our academics on other side to cope up. Then as we grew our customer base wee launched our website and eventually we are now operating through Android/iOS Applications. As we always thought that untill and unless we don't require outside funds we won't reachout to any of the investors or VCs for external fundings and so we had dropped some of the offers too. But in near future we will be raising our first round to expand and strengthen our team.

10. What your stack on the competition? who are your competitors? How you are overcoming them?

A. Currently we don't see any other big player operating in this market but swiggy and dunzo may try to compete us in near future and we believe it is always good to have competitions for healthy growth on both sides. Also we consider ourselves fortunate enough for the team we have who are the backbone of this journey and are working day in and out to provide the best services ever so competition doesn't creates a buzz here.

11. Is the Startup growing at good phase according to your plans? What are the upcoming plans from your end?

A. We are currently providing our service across Ahmedabad and growing fast in terms of generating orders and so witihin few months  as per our plans we will be starting our operations in 4 new tier I and 2 new tier II cities aswe are almost done with setting up our network there.

12. I think everyone has some inspiring person in their life and some taglines? who are they, what is their role in your Startup life?

A. Both the founders doesn't comes from a business background so it was not so our childhood dream to become an entrepreneur but it's always people who loved the solution we provide and thrives us to improve ourselves after each and every customer interaction. So yes our customers and the MTB team are our true inspiration and we believe they will always make us keep growing.

13. What is your experience as an Entrepreneur?

A. Its not a work profile or designation but entrepreneurship is a way of life and it has always intrigued us the way we see things in our real life. It teaches us at every step to keep patience and trust the build.

14. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

A. The coming years are truely going to be a fantastic journey for our team as we are now able to give our 24 hours after completing our graduation. In 5 years MyToolBag Team will empower each and every local store or vendor to regenerate the livelihood of their stores and sales through our highly active technology and delivery infra having a huge cluster of consuming habits which can provide a real-time purchasing trend. MyToolBag will deliver everything a consumer requires witihin matter of minutes running almost 90% on automation. We will try to stand with our words of being a people's App.