This week we invited yet another promising tech entrepreneur Sukin Shetty for an exclusive interview with us. Sukin founded Toolxprez – a B2B tech procurement startup that makes procuring Industrial products fast and easy for manufacturing companies in urban and rural areas. Let’s read more about Sukin’s Journey and his startup in detail:
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with him:
How did you come up with this idea? Tell us a little bit about your startup Toolxprez, please;
Toolxprez is a B2B procurement platform making procuring industrial products fast & easy for manufacturing companies in urban & rural areas.
We are building a digitally enabled experience in procuring industrial products. Indian Manufacturing companies still follow traditional way of procuring industrial products which is a time-consuming and long manual process. Toolxprez is digitizing the traditional procurement process in manufacturing companies using technology. We are one store for various brands & different categories of industrial products.
I have 10 years of experience in manufacturing industries. Worked in various departments. Working in manufacturing companies I saw a problem of delay in procuring industrial products. This is a very traditional problem. Working in root cause analysis team I loved solving problems. So in 2015, I did some research on this problem. I realized that the Indian industrial products sector is unorganized and fragmented without any digitization and technology. There are scattered vendors, a communication gap between vendors & customers and long manual process. We are in the Industry 4.0 era and all the areas in manufacturing industries have to change if India has to be a top manufacturing hub in the world. The Indian manufacturing sector contributes 16% of India GDP. The Indian manufacturing industry has the potential to reach $1 trillion industry by 2025. This why I began my entrepreneurial journey to solve this difficult & untapped problem by digitizing the procurement process in manufacturing companies in India.
What problem does your startup solve?
Delay in procuring industrial products which are due to scattered vendors, communication gap & long manual process. Indian Industrial products sector is fragmented & unorganized without any digitization and technology. We are in the Industry 4.0 era and all process in manufacturing companies needs to be automated and we are working to automate the traditional procurement process in manufacturing companies in India.
How do you find the industry/niche that you’re in?
The B2B eCommerce has picked up in the last 3 years in India and very soon it will be bigger than B2C ecommerce. I see many manufacturing companies are looking for solutions in modernizing procurement process. There are many players in this industry, but we are not same as other players in this industry. We educate our customers and then sell products. The first main differentiation is that we are omnichannel. We have mapped our customer’s journey and we saw a lot of touchpoints where we could serve our customers. That is how we are both online and offline platform. We are not forcing our customers to buy products online only. We sell products to our customers through different channels.
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
Yes, I have faced all kinds of obstacles what a new entrepreneur has to face. It can be a lack of knowledge, co-founder issues, cash flow issues, distractions etc.
Being from a non-business middle-class family and having shop floor experience it was difficult to launch and run a startup. I took some time to launch my startup because I was trying to understand what I don’t know. Attending seminars, workshops & startup events helped me to gather some knowledge. There were other factors like demonetization and GST also which made me delay the launching of my startup. I wanted to see how the market behaves after these huge changes.
Initially, it was difficult to find a mentor, as nobody wanted to become my mentor. But didn’t give up and found good mentors who changed my life. I feel it is very important to have a mentor when you are starting your journey as an entrepreneur. I was bad in finance, I always felt finance is a boring area. But I learnt it in a hard way. I suffered a lot to get everything right in the finance area. Now I realize finance is very important. I think of being stubborn about not giving up made me sail through. I had decided whatever happens even if I had made huge mistakes, I will never quit. Will learn from my mistakes and work on improving myself by taking baby steps.
What do you think are your key USP’s?
We are an omnichannel platform. We reach out to customers through different platform whichever our customers comfortable. We provide personalized and customised services to our customers. We sell products to our customers through WhatsApp also. Using WhatsApp we share some of the videos of the products, where we educate our customers about the products and decision happens in WhatsApp itself. Sometimes our customers call us to check their process to see if any tool could help them improve their process. Recently we helped one of our customers to reduce the cycle time of the process by 15mins by recommending a pneumatic cutting tool instead of normal scissor. We also set up production lines for our customers. We are experts in the manufacturing industries. We have combined more than 40 years of experience in manufacturing technology in our team. We also use AR to give accurate details of the products. In fact, we are the first to introduce this in Indian industrial products sector.
Our main USP is that we have a unique web portal for each customer. Here customers can place an order by selecting products. Customers can view each & every transaction happened between us. Notifications of quotes sent, PO received accurate details of product movement etc. Also, the documents related to every purchase are stored in this portal so no need to maintain hard copies. This portal also gives purchase reports for our customers.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Sell the problem you solve not the product. Focus on your customers, they will help you to build your startup. The more you listen to your customers, the more ideas you get to build your product. Customers are you first investors, so don’t ignore them.
One more advice I would like to give is to learn how to make money without money because if you know this you can survive any catastrophe coming your way.
And never give up, learn to survive that’s what entrepreneurship is all about.
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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.
