Meet the SHEROES - Yosha Gupta

“In the next few years, we want to be the dominant go-to savings platform for consumers across India…” says Yosha Gupta, Founder & CEO at LafaLafa, India’s leading Mobile First Coupons & Cashback business.

She talks to us about her entrepreneurial journey today and professionals plans for the future.

Tell us a little about yourself

I have spent 10 years in the Fin Tech space with my last role being a Financial Inclusion Consultant with the World Bank Group (International Finance Corporation) where I worked on projects across China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines for SME Payments, Agri Payments and Mobile Banking. I was previously the Regional Product Director for Monitise for Asia Pacific.

The first 16 years of my life were spent in Aligarh and since then I have been all across the world.

How did the idea of Lafalafa come about?

I've spent a long time in the mobile payments industry and launched really interesting payments products - the one common theme always was that to drive adoption we had to add offers to attract customers. Loyalty rewards and payments are inextricably tied together, so this time I decided to approach it from the angle of loyalty directly. There's also big customer problem to solve - a price conscious customer has to look at price comparison websites, coupons websites, cashback websites, check bank offers, any reward point offers, so our idea was to seamlessly combine this into one place to create the best savings platform for customers in India and later Asia as well to leverage all my experience across markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Hong Kong where the scope for this proposition is also huge.

What differentiates your venture from other coupon offer sites?

While coupons only websites offer only coupons savings to customers and keep all the affiliate commission they earn from cashback businesses while in our case we share most of the affiliate commission we earn with our customers as extra cashback so for customers is double savings – customers can earn upto 50% cashback as Real Cash on www.LafaLafa.com which they can then redeem for bank transfer, mobile recharge or shopping vouchers. We are also the only mobile first cashback business and have a significant lead on mobile as our app has more than 400,000 downloads already in less than 7 months of launch and customers can get cashback on the go through our android app on Google Play here.

How long has it been since inception and how has your journey been?

Its been almost an year now since we started development on our product and launched the website late last year. But within a month of launch we realised that more than 70% of our customers were accessing the mobile optimised version of our website. This was a clear indication of the power of mobile in India – as a team we made a decision to focus on mobile and lauched our Android app in true Lean Startup methodology by launching our bare bones MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in April. Since then we have constantly been improving our app and user experience and crossed 400,000 downloads in just 7 months and we are now a completely Mobile First product. The high points have been getting selected for Facebook’s FB start programme & of course now being part of the 500 Startups Accelerator and working with amazing startups and mentors at Silicon Valley. The best part of the journey though is the camaradrie and relationships with the team that we have managed to get together – none of this would be possible without them.

What are the biggest challenges you face in this field?

The challenges of a tech startup in India I feel would be the same for many startups – the fact that internet connectivity is still very patchy even in a city like Gurgaon makes it very hard for our tech teams, tech infrastructure in India needs to progress much faster than its current pace, maybe that’s an area some start-ups should address. Hiring is always a challenge too - committed, resilient people with fire in their bellies is who we look for and it takes a while and a lot of effort to find them! Overall for our industry , coupons and cashback, it’s a competitive space with many players (which is good in a way as a lot of customer education is needed so the more players the better it is) so the ability to keep differentiating and moving forward is key.

What professional plans do you have for the venture and yourself in the future?

In the next few years, we want to be the dominant go-to savings platform for consumers across India and expand to Asia, as e-commerce is really taking off in other Asian markets like Indonesia and Vietnam, and I can leverage my deep experience and relationships in these markets. We want to make it as easy as possible for consumers to find the best savings with the least possible effort and a lot of tech innovation is being planned for that. Seeing LafaLafa app on every Android phone is one of my dreams

What is a typical day at work like for you?

I typically start the day earlier than the team at about 7:00 am so I can plan my day and decide the priorities for each team and team member and also get some alone ‘thinking’ time. Once the day starts with the rest of the team it is packed with team meetings and calls-  Most of my time is spent on product, marketing & hiring but now that the business is scaling up I am also spending time on customer support, I try and log in to our customer chat platform every other day to be able to chat with  few customers as ultimately that’s most impportant to be able to understand what issues customers are facing, how can we make things easier for them. I’ve also seen that its easy to get carried away with meetings, reading a lot and not really get anything productive done in a day so what I try and do is maintain a daily task list and check things off at the end of the day and how much time I spent on each task, its quite effective!

Can you leave our readers with a few thoughts?

My mantra for life is very simple and is pinned to my Twitter profile too – ‘Whatever you do – be a good one’. For me, the only kind of people worth anything are the ones who take pride in whatever they do and I truly believe nothing can ever stop them.