Think of the last craving you had. Maybe you have a favorite restaurant which is all the way on the other side of the town, and you’re too lazy to leave the house while no one delivers the delicacies to your home. Maybe you are fed up of always paying a high price to get your food delivered to your home or maybe a food delivery experiment from an unknown restaurant has gone wrong. If you live in Pune, then Kwyk is definitely the solution to solve all these problems. Read on to know how a humble start up that delivered school books during Covid-19 pandemic is on the path to revolutionise the food delivery space.
We (Paytm) had a chat with Pravin Adik, Founder & CEO, Kwyk about his work and his entire journey of ongoing growth and success.
A big fish from a small pond
Pravin Adik, was born in a middle class family and raised in Aurangabad. With his background in Computer Engineering and an MBA in Marketing and Operations, he is the first of his kind in his family and village. In our conversation with Pravin, his humility reflected in his voice. “My parents always encouraged me to pursue what I wanted. Regardless of our financial limitations, there was a lot of freedom and support from them. It gave me a sense of responsibility.” Today, the boy who sold ad spots in the yellow pages is not only an MBA graduate, but also a successful entrepreneur.
After completing education, Pravin went on to become a seasoned management professional with more than 16 years of experience across industries like BPO, KPO, Market Research, Consulting and Retail. He held leadership positions for over 8 years, managing large teams to create and drive successful businesses. Pravin has successfully scaled the businesses and brought them on the path to profitability by building high performing teams, improving operational efficiencies and delivering better customer experience.
He has worked in reputed companies like TESCO, VIDEOCON, to name a few, and also helped a few budding entrepreneurs and idea stage startups for product improvements and formulating business strategies. Although he had a successful and rewarding career, he had some big plans in his head which he was always passionate about.
“I always wanted to start my own company. I wanted to be a job provider rather than a job seeker.” He added, “My idea was to solve major problems that no one has solved before. Something is always left out by big companies. It’s always about making the customers happy. Give customers what they like and what they want rather than selling them what you have.”
A success story in the making
Innovative Business Concepts Pvt. Ltd. was founded on 21st Feb, 2020 with the brand name ‘Snackaro’. The idea was to provide a platform to small food business operators to take their popular food concept from one corner of the country to another. Eventually building a network of the most innovative street food companies all across the nation.
“But with the pandemic shutting everything down and locking everyone inside their homes for the next 3 to 4 months, it was a bit disheartening that we had to stop immediately after starting”, says Pravin.
It was only after the lockdown was relaxed that the team found a new opportunity with the beginning of the new academic year in various schools. With schools printing their new books and students attending online classes with no one to deliver new books to them, Pravin saw this opportunity to address the market gap. “We spoke to my daughter’s school and asked them if we could do home delivery of school books to keep parents safe at their homes. The school had no objection and we immediately created an order page on www.Snackaro.com website with a google form and shared it in a parents WhatsApp group. Within 2 hours, we received our first order and by the next day, we had 12! Without a single rupee spent on marketing and just with positive word of mouth, that month we had over 2,000 website visits and we completed 400+ deliveries with an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 96 which is very impressive by any benchmark in any industry.”
After receiving multiple delivery requests from parents to deliver other everyday items, Pravin observed that customers want specific things to be delivered from a specific place and this is an unattended need by existing market dominating players. “We never said NO to any customer for anything they wanted us to pick & deliver from anywhere in Pune”. The team later branched out to deliver things to people quickly as a hyperlocal delivery company. That’s where the name Kwyk came from.
The team launched a user friendly website (www.kwyk.one) and an Android App for customers during 2020 Christmas. The company, in a short span of time, received about 3,000 app downloads and has successfully delivered 200+ orders only in Pune. Kwyk is now embarking on their concept of building Kwyk– One App for All Customer Needs!
But how is Kwyk different?
Kwyk is an on-demand hyperlocal delivery service company that connects customers, merchants and delivery partners to facilitate hassle-free transactions. Kwyk makes it incredibly easy for you to order your favorite food from the city’s most famous, popular and iconic restaurants… irrespective of the distance!
Whether it’s the greatest food from your favorite restaurant anywhere in the city, gourmet food from a specific store, organic vegetables, exotic fruits and everything that is best in your city, they’ve got you covered with their curated list of the merchants across the category. Kwyk carefully curates the best across the city, so you’re never disappointed!
Unlike other Food Delivery aggregators, Kwyk does not charge any commission from Merchants/Restaurants to ensure products listed on Kwyk are at restaurant menu rates. This means you always pay less on Kwyk for the same food from the same Restaurant!
A Kwyk journey with Paytm
As the business scaled up, they noticed the challenge at the time customers make payments. In the words of Pravin: “We started with a well-known payment gateway. But saw 20-30% payment failure rate at the time of checkout which gave a bad experience to a few customers as their payment was deducted but order could not get confirmed due to payment gateway failure. Providing a fast & secure payment option is very crucial to build trust with customers so after some research, we decided on integrating our systems with Paytm Payment Gateway.
I could create the APIs from my personal account. The documentation process was instant and took only a few minutes. The onboarding team immediately contacted us and finished the process in a day. We tested the APIs on the next day and were good to go on the third day! Customers could pay through Paytm which led to 100% payment success rates. Building loyalty and trust with our customers is something that Paytm helped us to do.”
With close to 100 carefully handpicked restaurants already registered on Kwyk, Pravin’s ambition is for Kwyk to be the first name in the minds of people when they want City’s Best Delivered To Their Doorstep from anywhere in the City! Kwyk has plans to scale up quickly to other categories with 500+ curated vendors across categories and achieve 200+ orders daily. Pravin adds,
“The business is currently bootstrapped and we are very frugal in all decisions to be capital efficient. We are maintaining right unit economics and will soon look out for fundraising to build a more efficient technology platform, provide an improved customer experience and scale up faster.”
With the pandemic impacting many startups, Pravin has a wonderful sign-off message for all fellow startup founders.
“A Problem is a chance for you to do your best. Never let your head, hang low.” – Pravin Adik
Many new online businesses and startups face a similar problem like Kywk. Poor checkout experience decreases trust in the brand and they lose out not just on paying customers but also creates a negative word of mouth. This can hurt a startup during the early phase of its journey. Paytm with its best in class payment success rate not just reinforces trust in a startup brand but also ensure that business does not lose any single payment.
