Rohit Verma: Millennial Entrepreneur Operating A Hyper-Local Marketplace For The Modern World
Rohit Verma
Founder & CEO
1.Tell us about your journey
I was born and brought-up in a Marwari business family in Indore. The source and force of my passion is the legacy passedon to me by my late grandfather who co-founded the Marwari community in Central India. I had an immense amount of interest in everything related to national & international business. When I was 19 years old, I started working as an intern in a mobile app development company and made my way up to the position of Asst. Business Development Manager. The internship was a turning point for me. I was amazed and intrigued by the world of technology, startups, international business, digital innovation, and software solutions; it was a whole new experience.
During my corporate tenure, I tried learning everything where I could get my hands on, starting from Google search, lead generation, content writing to app development consultation, sales, marketing, documentation, project management, wireframing, prototyping, UI/UX designing, branding, and mobile & web app testing. By the time I turned 24, I met & consulted techpreneurs from more than 70 nations, worked with NGOs & International government organizations, and more than 400 startups coming from various
categories like e-Commerce, healthcare, education, hospitality, real estate, finance, social, entertainment and many more.
2.What led to the foundations for Byloapp? Shed some light on the strategies that have helped you compete?
A vision to make our Indian marketplace a 'Digitally Organised, Easily Accessible and Well-Connected Community" led to the foundation of Byloapp. The Indian market is a huge reservoir of opportunities, so there cannot be a defined set of strategies, but to begin with, we have introduced Byloapp as a face of the market place. We have prioritized millennials and GenZ as our immediate target audience because this community is the future of our nation and will soon overtake the economy by 2030 and they are the early acceptors of digital transformation. Additionally, the messaging of our campaigns is designed in such a way that is helping all the new age customers and merchants build trust among each other through our two-gated iCommerce platform.
Furthermore, the service industry teaches you to put your end users first, be very flexible in the market, and always be prepared to pivot accordingly. I always take the pilot route with a clear objective to check the market's response. We do A/B testing of the different phases of the pilot route. Initially, we didn't go to the market with a full-fledged product. We developed an MVP and released it in our home turf among the same beta users to test it for real time and paid attention to the offline and online analytics. Our strategies have helped us to make our own unique way instead of getting into the competition even though we don't have any direct competition with any Indian company.
3.Can you describe the leadership challenges faced and how do you perceive your role as the CEO
When I started, I was in the habit of doing everything by myself because I'm keen on achieving perfection in every thing that I do. Eventually, it started slowing down our pilot launch process, which triggered a series of challenges. Building my core team as the solution to these challenges turned out to be the key element. In association with my core team, I started setting up micro milestones on a weekly basis, and in just a couple of weeks, our
The mission of Byloapp has always been to build an easily accessible and well-connected market place community, and the pandemic has made our business model more needed by the merchants and their customers
2.What led to the foundations for Byloapp? Shed some light on the strategies that have helped you compete?
A vision to make our Indian marketplace a 'Digitally Organised, Easily Accessible and Well-Connected Community" led to the foundation of Byloapp. The Indian market is a huge reservoir of opportunities, so there cannot be a defined set of strategies, but to begin with, we have introduced Byloapp as a face of the market place. We have prioritized millennials and GenZ as our immediate target audience because this community is the future of our nation and will soon overtake the economy by 2030 and they are the early acceptors of digital transformation. Additionally, the messaging of our campaigns is designed in such a way that is helping all the new age customers and merchants build trust among each other through our two-gated iCommerce platform.
Furthermore, the service industry teaches you to put your end users first, be very flexible in the market, and always be prepared to pivot accordingly. I always take the pilot route with a clear objective to check the market's response. We do A/B testing of the different phases of the pilot route. Initially, we didn't go to the market with a full-fledged product. We developed an MVP and released it in our home turf among the same beta users to test it for real time and paid attention to the offline and online analytics. Our strategies have helped us to make our own unique way instead of getting into the competition even though we don't have any direct competition with any Indian company.
3.Can you describe the leadership challenges faced and how do you perceive your role as the CEO
When I started, I was in the habit of doing everything by myself because I'm keen on achieving perfection in every thing that I do. Eventually, it started slowing down our pilot launch process, which triggered a series of challenges. Building my core team as the solution to these challenges turned out to be the key element. In association with my core team, I started setting up micro milestones on a weekly basis, and in just a couple of weeks, our
operations, marketing, development, sales and the pilot launch was right back on track. The self-taught lesson here is that a startup should start by building people first instead of perfecting the product or service. Your 'people' will help you perfect the product.
It sounds too fancy, but I don't take the designation of 'CEO' as an entitlement. Here, I believe that building people is my biggest role and responsibility as I try to lead by example, this has been my approach since day zero. On an individual level, I want to transfer and share my knowledge to interns like myself in the past that will somehow help them to genuinely understand the potential lying inside them. I want our country's youth to stop believing and following reel life professionals i.e Bollywood actors. They need to start inspiring themselves from startups rather than cinema, they need to start following Founders & CEOs rather than TV/cinema professionals. I believe there is still some time to change your role models.
4.How has Byloapp adapted to the changes in this pandemic situation and what are the opportunities for the company in e-Commerce in near future?
The mission of Byloapp has always been to build an easily accessible and well connected marketplace community, and the pandemic has made our business model more needed by the merchants and their customers. Initially, we were conducting onground sales and marketing campaigns, but during lockdowns, we redirected our offline operations to online. For merchant engagement, we set-up a virtual on-boarding department, created video tutorials and started writing educational blogs. For customer's engagement, we started organizing giveaways through contests, games and quizzes, and started building India's first hyper local in fluencers community, encouraging them to write about their city's marketplace as a local customer.
In respect to launching our platform, instead of releasing the mobile version, we launched our web version as India's first hyperlocal marketplace search engine, improving the communication gap between millions of local customers and the local merchants popularising the post pandemic commerce behaviour called, SOSO i.e Search Online & Shop Offline.
In the next five years, the opportunity for Byloapp platform is that it will be accessed by every Millennial and GenZ customers and merchants on a daily basis because the hyper local market has understood that e-Commerce and social media platforms are not meant for our Indian marketplace.
Rohit Verma, Founder & CEO, Byloapp
Rohit is a millennial techpreneur who consults businesses with a demonstrated experience in mobile & web based product branding, designing, development, marketing and sales.
It sounds too fancy, but I don't take the designation of 'CEO' as an entitlement. Here, I believe that building people is my biggest role and responsibility as I try to lead by example, this has been my approach since day zero. On an individual level, I want to transfer and share my knowledge to interns like myself in the past that will somehow help them to genuinely understand the potential lying inside them. I want our country's youth to stop believing and following reel life professionals i.e Bollywood actors. They need to start inspiring themselves from startups rather than cinema, they need to start following Founders & CEOs rather than TV/cinema professionals. I believe there is still some time to change your role models.
4.How has Byloapp adapted to the changes in this pandemic situation and what are the opportunities for the company in e-Commerce in near future?
The mission of Byloapp has always been to build an easily accessible and well connected marketplace community, and the pandemic has made our business model more needed by the merchants and their customers. Initially, we were conducting onground sales and marketing campaigns, but during lockdowns, we redirected our offline operations to online. For merchant engagement, we set-up a virtual on-boarding department, created video tutorials and started writing educational blogs. For customer's engagement, we started organizing giveaways through contests, games and quizzes, and started building India's first hyper local in fluencers community, encouraging them to write about their city's marketplace as a local customer.
In respect to launching our platform, instead of releasing the mobile version, we launched our web version as India's first hyperlocal marketplace search engine, improving the communication gap between millions of local customers and the local merchants popularising the post pandemic commerce behaviour called, SOSO i.e Search Online & Shop Offline.
In the next five years, the opportunity for Byloapp platform is that it will be accessed by every Millennial and GenZ customers and merchants on a daily basis because the hyper local market has understood that e-Commerce and social media platforms are not meant for our Indian marketplace.
Rohit Verma, Founder & CEO, Byloapp
Rohit is a millennial techpreneur who consults businesses with a demonstrated experience in mobile & web based product branding, designing, development, marketing and sales.