The Bulbul Soars
Atit and I got together in October 2018 to work on Bulbul with the motivation & mission to make online shopping real via video and live streaming. The thesis is that India is home to a large, fast-growing video-first demographic that loves to window shop, does not necessarily read product descriptions or reviews, and most importantly has tons of questions. Live video is a great way to make online shopping fun, engaging and social, while offering consumers the opportunity to discover new and exciting products.
The biz is being built to create a trusted marketplace of hosts, sellers and consumers that will use Bulbul as a platform to create videos, go live, sell products and services and for consumers to consume content and make informed purchase decisions, much like they would do in shops and bazaars across the country.
We started building the team and began work on the product in earnest once Sanjay came on board to lead technology in January 2019. As part of our pilots, we went live on FB and Insta with products across categories to understand the level of engagement and interaction that a live environment provides. We also shot and distributed a video a day over WhatsApp to gauge early PMF and to analyse conversions. Both engagement and conversions were thru the charts and gave us even more confidence to build and scale the business quickly. The days flew by visiting smaller Indian towns to engage with consumers, travelling to China to understand supply lines, products available, live-streaming tech etc and spending time between Bangalore and Gurgaon hiring, learning video production, on boarding hosts and sellers.
We quickly launched early March’19 and have scaled the business exceedingly fast. We’ve recorded GMV worth Rs.15 cr already, serviced over 280,000 customers & 400,000 transaction, with very high gross margins. Consumers have consumed 10M minutes of content with over 15M video views, 1.4M likes, 6M shares and a 1M comments…..whew!
Along the way we have built an amazing and diverse cross-border team in Gurgaon, Bangalore, Yiwu (China). Forty percent of our team is now women, in addition to the 100s of female hosts across the country who create and distribute product videos for us. Over time we see these hosts becoming key drivers of our business with the potential to generate substantial income for themselves.
E-commerce in any form is hard work, and the pioneering work done by Flipkart and Amazon has paved the way for companies like ours with a tech, product and content DNA to build an ops efficient and unit-economics positive business.
Our ambition is to be a 3rd and significant front to Amazon & Flipkart, in India’s e-commerce space, create earning opportunities for 1000s of women, introduce consumers across the country to a diverse set of everyday products and build a sustainable business that our team, investors and we, will be proud of.
We are also very grateful and proud to have Leo Capital (Rajul Garg), Surge (Shailendra, Prateek & the entire Surge Team), Sequoia India (Mohit and Shraeyansh), CDH (Damien Zhang) as our advisors & investors and we look forward to soon welcoming one of India’s most revered entrepreneur and his fund to this elite group, as part of our current Rs. 105 cr funding round.
Thank you everyone for making Bulbul soar and as our credo goes…Machayenge!
