About This Episode
Naman Sarawagi is the Co-founder of Refrens.com – a business management tool for B2B service providers in India. Previously, he founded FindYogi – a price comparison app for Indian e-commerce websites and sold it to Way2News. Naman is also an early investor in companies like DailyNinja, Cashfree, Holidify and more.
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In this episode:
Priyam: How has the COVID impacted your business and industry overall?
Naman: We are into the business of providing invoicing and payment solutions to our customers.
→ We are an early-stage company and the customers were doubling every month pre-COVID. Suddenly the pandemic happened, and most of the industries got affected tremendously.
→ A huge proportion of our client base dropped off because they stopped getting regular work and they didn’t require our services eventually.
→ From the hiring standpoint, we were going aggressive to onboard young employees, although our onboarding process wasn’t mature. This proved a lot difficult for us, to directly manage the young hires in a ‘work from home’ scenario in the initial days of their job.
→ We are hopping onto the digital methods of internal communication. Even the client interactions are scheduled over a video call, and it has saved us from all the traveling required to attend important meetings.
Priyam: How have you changed your marketing strategies given the impact of the pandemic?
Naman: Our market has shrunk drastically over the past few months of lockdown.
→ Our efficiency in reaching out to the new users has seen a downward curve. Most of the clients have their businesses shut and therefore, they are of no value today.
→ We are adapting to enhanced content for reaching out to users on different channels. The open rates of the campaigns have increased. But it still hasn’t added much value because the target audience is running out of their business opportunities.
Priyam: What are you working on to increase demand in the future?
Naman: We are doubling down on our efforts to enhance our product.
→ The demand is low right now, and there is an ample amount of time for the engineers to carry out their plans for product revamping.
→ The demand is going to shoot up suddenly post lockdown, and if there is still an issue of supply or product shortfall, you don’t have any excuse to give.
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