Meet the SHEROES - Smita Mishra

Today we talk to Smita Mishra who tells us about her latest venture Pool Wallet. In simple terms, Pool Wallet is a place where users can create pools for sharing of expenses! Doesn’t that sound interesting? Read on to know more about Pool Wallet and Smita’s story!

Tell us a little about yourself

I am from Bhilai, Chhattisgarh. I did my schooling across different parts of the nation. My first job was at – Nucleus Software exports Ltd. There after I worked with many organizations like Churchill Insurance, Royal Bank of Scotland, HCL Technologies Ltd., National Aluminum Company.

My passion lies in problem solving, I love finding the right solutions for my customers.

In 2010, with 10 yrs of solid software testing experience, I felt the need to move away from the way testing was getting commoditized and wanted to offer context based testing solutions, that wasn’t one fit for all but specific solution to the very unique need of each of our clients.

I founded QAZone – a firm providing software testing services and solutions.

This September, we launched PoolWallet – our latest venture.

What does your venture Pool Wallet provide users?

PoolWallet is a split payment platform that allows user to create pools and online real-time sharing of expenses. It allows users to create pools for all the joint expenses they make.

Plan, share and pay - with ease!! 

So you have a WAW discussion board for your PLANning. Quick and automatic ways to send notifications and convert the discussed event to PRODUCT to SHARE. And finally - you make PAYments against your links for your share of amount. 

Here are some ideas on how the existing users of PoolWallet are using it:

Paying for shared services – cab / food / travel/healthcare/shopping/movie
Paying for a product online by combining balance from user’s multiple cards as partial payments.
Corporate gifting in teams
Individual wish list (baby shower / wedding / Festivals)
Sharing of healthcare cost for families.

How did the idea for Pool Wallet come about?

More and more financial transactions – whether banked or unbanked are beginning to happen online. However, anytime we share an expense its almost always offline and definitely not real time.  And in a world where we are sharing cabs, pizza, handbags, travel packages, parents medical bills, I felt there was a need for the sharing to go online and that there was a section of society that would benefit a lot from this.  And thus the idea for PoolWallet germinated.

What were the challenges you faced when starting out and what daily challenges do you have to deal with in this field of work?

The biggest challenge that I started out with, was to validate my ideas – not just by select few investors and VCs and entrepreneurs but a good set of real users – people whom I would be targeting or who are more likely to use my app.

Once I started to get positive response - I began to feel good about going further with this. My daily challenge is to keep coming up with new ways of customer acquisition / engagement / retention. Especially the engagement part. If I am able to engage them well, I don’t think I need to worry a lot about other 2. But it sure is a daily challenge to find something new every day.

Where do you hope to reach, professionally, with your venture - say in the next five years?

Our immediate goal is to be an “adda” for college friends, young professionals and our users in general – where they can add the items / products they would like to buy and notify their choicest folks in their network (in order for them to contribute towards the product). We want to be a place – that anyone thinks of, the moment they think of gifting or having fun with friends and family.

Over next year – we plan to build our own payment gateway. Currently we are built on PayUMoney. And are talking to Paytm to add and would be looking at other players too. However, the long term plan is to build this out into our own Payment gateway and build complete solutions around the domain that shares the highest. We plan to invest more on the security aspects and being technologically the best!!

What is a typical day at work like for you?

Typically, I start my day with a quick read of emails. I respond to the urgent ones, forward those to the right folks that need to be answered by someone else. Then I catch up with the newspapers and social media – typically my twitter / facebook / linkedin – my company pages, tweets about them etc.

Then I look into the customer feedback from the previous day. We may not have a feedback everyday but we do have it quite often.

Then I plan my priorities and work accordingly. Most of my day goes in working on features to improve the product and identifying partners that we can add for our customers to spend their pool money on.

Can you leave our readers with some thoughts?

I would love for all the readers to download and try the PoolWallet app. Use it to pay your rents, utility bills like electricity / water, plan group travels, weekend adventure sports etc.

To start with, create a WAW for your next upcoming weekend with your friends for movies and eating out. Once you know for sure, who all are sure to join, convert it into product and go for it!