Sachin Bansal: The Journey to Success

INTRODUCTION

As you may know, Flipchart is the biggest made-in-India online store selling almost everything on the Internet in India. It is one of the biggest competitors of Amazon, which is the biggest e-commerce website in the world. Flipchart is an initiative that is founded by two Indian entrepreneurs – Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. What started as an online bookstore from a two-bedroom apartment in Koramangala, Bengaluru in 2007 has today grown into one of the biggest companies in India, and an incredible example of the success potential for Indian startups. Flipchart’s Success story is really an inspiring story for Indian startups. 

BIOGRAPHY

Sachin Bansal was born on 5 August 1981 in Chandigarh. He went to one of the most prestigious engineering colleges of India and graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi in 2003. IIT graduates have a sparkling bright future, and here the same case applies. Sachin got a job in Techspan and later in 2006, he joined Amazon.com as a senior software engineer. In 2005 at IIT-Delhi, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal met each other and both became employees at Amazon.

STEPS TOWARDS SUCCESS

When both Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were living a quite successful life working for the biggest e-commerce company, they started to dream big. They quit their jobs at Amazon in 2007, to start a similar e-commerce company in which they were working before. They wanted to give a made-in-India online store to Indians and so they started India’s own e-commerce website, ‘Flipchart’. Flipkart was launched in October 2007 by Sachin Bansal and his business partner Binny Bansal. They also started by selling books online as Jeff Bezos did in the case of Amazon. They did not have a new idea but they had the guts to expand this idea in a nation without much knowledge of the internet and where people liked to touch and feel whatever they bought. They actually used the opportunity that India was not aware of the e-commerce market at that time. Here they decided to author the Flipkart success story. 

Their start was not so good. In early days they used to deliver books across Bengaluru on their scooters to customers. They worked hard and even gave away pamphlets of their company outside book stores. The growth after a year was not so good according to expectations, but they never lost hope and worked hard. Their journey has been a challenge. They said, “We had assumed a lot of things, especially around marketing. When those assumptions turned out to be incorrect our business model had to be changed. We have changed directions multiple times and have taken each mistake as a learning experience.”

They changed their way; they invested more in marketing and did every type of marketing possible. After that their growth never stopped, they featured in Business Today as one of the top 25 startups of 2009. They got nominated for the best entrepreneur of 2010 by Ernst and Young award. In 2010, Flipkart pioneered ‘Cash on Delivery’ in India, which was a game-changing step as now customers pay for items only after receiving them. In 2014, they bought Myntra.com, another web shopping company for INR 2000 crore.  In 2016, Flipkart achieved a milestone of 100 registered customers on their website. All this made the Flipkart success story. Recently in 2018, Flipkart did a deal of $16 billion with US retailer Walmart on about 77 per cent stake.

At last, this is the tip for coming entrepreneurs by Sachin Bansal himself –

“Don’t start out alone, it helps to have a co-founder when things are not going your way. Perseverance and hard work is very important. The core of any business is to earn money. You have not done your job well until you find a stranger who is willing to open his/her wallet to give you money for the services/products that you an offering. The next step after that is to focus on scaling it up well.”    

Bansal has successfully earned the title of successful entrepreneurship and deserves every bit of it.