The 20-year-old Shiv Shankar Ganesh, CEO of the Kaching app may have come up with a revolution for Chennai's food lovers! His app offers the best discounts and deals at over 350 cafes, pubs and restaurants.
SSG dropped out of Loyola College in his first year to invest all his time in the creation of the application. The optimistic young man feels that education isn't necessary to reach the ladder of success and who can be a better example than him?
What does Kaching mean and when did you launch it?
Kaching is the sound of money. 'Chaching' is a very common expression in the West and elsewhere where it is meant to denote money. With Kaching, you make more money and when the merchant uses Kaching they receive more business. We launched it on January 1, 2017 where we made a video with 'jumpcuts' and the video has about 2.5 million hits. We did a ton of marketing then, now we are have 85,000 users with over 350 brands.
Was it worth quitting college to create the app?
It coincidentally happened to be the time when I had my exams which made me have a very convenient excuse to drop out of college. And yes, to be fair, the course material of BBA in Loyola was as good as what I studied in my 11th and 12th grade CBSE syllabus and I didn't find the necessity to go through 3 years of that. Although convention says that having an undergraduate degree is a must, I'm somebody who likes to go the other direction.
How did you get this idea?
However wacky or peculiar it sounded, when I was in college, I wrote down every joke or an idea that knocked my head on the back side of my notebook. Eventually, Kaching was one such idea that has created this to my life.
How profitable has this turned out for you?
I'm somebody that believes in running really lean and not spending a lot of money on what other people would essentially call 'expensive'. We at Kaching understand customer value and focus on its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.
How did you market your brand and convince the restaurants to follow your deals?
The easiest and the most common way to market our brand was through social media and the influence through online marketing. Another wacky idea that hit my head was to stick posted notes that read 'If you don't download the Kaching app, a Poochandi (Poochandi meaning ghost) will kidnap you in the night' on cars and bikes. We even handed them out to the people at the beach and common public places. Initially all the restaurants were super critical and judgmental about Kaching and its functioning especially because I was just a 'small kid' according to them. Eventually, we got a really big chain of restaurants to get on board with us which made other cafes and pubs agree to our deals as well.
Do you plan to broaden your horizon? Who are your competitors?
We are currently only doing F&B (food and beverage). We are looking to expand into retail spas/saloons and have a solution for malls and cinemas and airports as well. The app 'little' was our competitor (the same time we were operational). Currently they are virtually being shut down and are acquired by PAYTM making them into one entity.
What was the biggest setback Kaching has faced?
The app bugs! The One-time-password (OTP) was not getting delivered because at any one time there were over 75 people asking for the OTP. The serves got jammed as they couldn't handle the traffic which made over 90 people rate us 1 star and thousands of people uninstalling the app because they simply couldn't log in. It wasn't in our hands to handle the situation as it was the carrier's mistake (Vodafone or Airtel or Idea). But crossing all that, we have a rating of 4.6 stars and 100,000 downloads with 85,000 using the app. We have also started a pilot in Coimbatore.
What plans for the future?
We are building a technology were we can automatically identify when a customer walks into a store. We feel like this has a lot of relevance to malls, theatres, stadiums etc. That's some tech that we really bullish on and solves a lot of problems for people in the industry. For customers, when they walk into the store, their deal gets redeemed automatically and the merchant can keep a track of how many people are being sent by Kaching.
