Go big or Go home: Vijay Shekhar’s success mantra

Go big or Go home: Vijay Shekhar’s success mantra

(Odyssey of Paytm From Mobile Recharge to E-Commerce Market place)

Paytm was started in 2010 as as a prepaid mobile recharge website. Now, the scenario is completely changed  it has scaled up and has wide verticals of operations ranging from mobile recharging , bill payments, payment of wallets, wallet to bank transfers for many leading internet based companies like Bookmyshow, Makemytrip, FoodPanda, IRCTC has its own online space for selling . They offer fully equipped e commerce market place offering variety of merchandise ranging from clothing, home accessories, baby products , electronics, books  and so on. Started by Vijay Shekhar Sharma ,backed up by Alibaba group and Ratan Tata, the company raised $575 million from Alibaba group for a share of 25% in the company.

Paytm is expanding in all horizons and has  over 20 million registered users as per their current data available on internet .Their  app downloaded on various platforms has touched the mark of 7 million.

Supporting  features like Bargain power makes it unique  in comparison to other such latforms in same domain and its unified dashboard has made the selling and buying more interesting. Monthly order of over 15 million is completed over here.

Success Story

Vijay Shekhar with support from his batchmate  Harinder Takhar started his own company and got seed funding from an angel investor in early college days .Two of their friends joined them till 1999 and later it was sold to Living Media India for half a million dollar which is presently the India Today group.

After working for some time with the company,Vijay left the job and had Rs. 200000 which served as initial fund to start his own venture. He started mobile value added company One97 communications Ltd with Rajiv Shukla his colleague, a mobile value-added services company. Unfortunately, their business crashed in 9/11 disaster and his partner left him. Having no money in hand , he had to face all hardships i.e. started using public transport and lived on two cups of tea. His father persuade him to take up job and he had repeated urge from family to get married but no girl in heaven was ready to be his spouse.

Then, he took up job to meet up daily challenges but his vision was to do something different. Smartphones were quite popular that time which forced him to do something around the same line and to everyone’s surprise he launched Paytm, a mobile wallet in dec 2010.

 Currently,  Paytm has 50 million consumers doing 60 million transactions a month and is expected to touch 100 million consumers till the end of 2015.Paytm in February 2014 launched its mobile based marketplace and now recently has launched a seller dedicated app with zero commission model.

Besides, Paytm has also contracted with IRCTC to make Paytm wallet as one of the online payment option while booking a ticket. IRCTC processes around 180 million transactions every year; and Paytm has a strong base of 60 million wallet users who can use their wallet instead of using plastic card details. These wallet holders have an access to shop over the app and pay with Paytm wallet across 21,000 merchants.

Over the next six months, the Noida-based firm is considering at 25,000+ tickets per day using Paytm wallet on IRCTC platform.

According to a report, “Paytm claims to earn revenues of over $500 million now but Sharma says this will jump to $2 billion by December 2015. Half of Paytm’s run rate will then come from the m-commerce marketplace push. And the focus will be on getting more users. Alibaba also echoed its view and Erik Jing of Alipay says, “We don’t care about profitability. We care about SMEs, users on the Paytm wallet.”

Paytm has recently joined in the hyper-local venture by starting grocery delivery in Bangalore. The hyper local market has raised more than $60 million over the past two months from various venture capitalists.

Paytm has recently expanded its operations and has  raised a funding of $575 million from Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group. Subsequently, India’s leading investor and businessman Ratan Tata has also invested in the company. Paytm will utilize the fund in recruiting fresh talent, acquisitions, marketing and brand building as per market sources.

The company is currently dealing in number of verticals like mobile and DTH recharge, bill payments, bus tickets, data card recharges, e-commerce marketplace, payment gateway, Paytm deals and coupons.

Success mantra according to Vijay is Go BIG Or GO Home !!!