As part of our relentless pursuit to bring inspirational stories from the startup ecosystem, this week we invited a passionate and committed entrepreneur, Sudheer Mareddi, Co-Founder and CMD of Ebutor. During his successful journey, he held leadership roles across diverse verticals and industries.
Let’s know more about how he tapped into start-ups, his vision way and his advice for our community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Sudheer:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, please
I have done my Engineering at BITS Pilani and started my career with providing tech solutions to Fortune 500 companies in the USA and Europe. I have held executive leadership positions with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Virtusa and had a two-year executive stint with a leading Infra company managing large construction projects pan India. My entrepreneurship journey started in 2009.
Can you tell us more about the founding of the company and what the problem is that you were addressing?
Three of us have started a digital tech solutions company in 2010, called Suneratech, which grew to 1200 employees serving 200 global businesses with digital solutions such as digital supply chain, digital marketing, cloud computing, conversational AI bots, and data sciences.
During digitalizing supply chains and trade marketing for many consumer goods majors in India, we have discovered the limitation of direct distribution coverage and how the brands and small convenience stores are disconnected from each other. This has led to founding Ebutor in 2016 to address the challenge of using technology, data science, and standard.
The 9 million medium, small and micro mom-and-pop convenience stores (called B, C, D & E class outlets) contribute to 70% of total consumer goods sales in India. We help these outlets with sourcing the exact weekly quantities of the right products curated through data science. We help national brands extend their direct distribution coverage while regional and foreign brands sign us up to explore nation-wide markets. We help brands with outlet expansion, channel expansion, geo-expansion, and line extension.
We have launched our operations in a major metro running our logistics for two years, and after having built the foundation and perfecting the model we started expanding into other towns and cities across India using our partner network.
What are some of the USPs of your startup?
We follow a hybrid model that combines the benefits of inventory-led and market-place business models. We are asset-free, requires no working capital for inventory and doesn’t involve in last-mile logistics or collection.
Did you raise any funding?
Yes, we have raised a total of 3.5 million dollars thus far.
How can brands expand their markets beyond current regions with Ebutor?
We help the brands with a four-dimensional growth strategy:
1 – Outlet Expansion – identify the outlets that are not being covered by current distributors and place products in them.
2 – Geographic Expansion – curate products for geographies that are not addressed and add new markets to brands. Both regional and foreign brands take good advantage of this.
3 – Channel Extension – add new channels and proliferate the brands with a focused strategy.
4 – Line Extension – analyze sales trends and identify gaps to add new lines (variation of pack size or flavor or form) of products.
Who are your biggest competitors and how do you differentiate yourself from them?
Players such as Amazon B2B, Big Basket B2B, Udaan, Jumbotail, etc. address the needs of the Kirana segment with different business models. We differentiate with our business model that is asset-free, multi-tier, inventory-led and crowd-sourced and we work directly with brands to enable them to succeed in general trade.
What is the traction thus far, and what are the plans?
We have received a tremendous response from all the stakeholders in our business – Retail Outlets, Brands and Partners that helped us scale rapidly across the country in the past 12 months.
We have signed distribution agreements with over 70 brands including all the leading national brands, and currently cater to nearly 100,000 retail outlets through our 125 distribution and fulfillment centers across India.
We have embarked upon a three-pronged growth plan:
1 – Geo expansion beyond India
2 – Category expansion beyond food and personal care
3 – Artificial Intelligence in marketing-mix and distribution
What advice would you give to someone starting?
Look ahead and predict trends over a longer period (longer-term vision) and visualize the operational model to scale fast and smoothly.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
