ISB students publish case study on Chaupaati

August 2009: Laxmikant Vyas, Gaurav Chopra, Mini Paul, Rohit Kumar - students of Indian School of Business 2010 performed a study of Chaupaati Bazaar as part of their final project of the core course in Entrepreneurship. The mandate for the report was to identify an individual who has been involved in starting or growing a venture, identify the challenges or hurdles faced by this individual through his/her journey and the course of action adopted, analyze these actions and their impacts and conclude with any valuable insights gained.

In order to analyze the sustainability of Chaupaati’s business model, they studied a similar venture started by Abhay Singhal, an IIT Kanpur graduate. Abhay was one of the first to realize the potential of phone classifieds and had started his venture in Bombay in 2005 backed by $500,000 in VC funds. They analyzed the reasons why the SMS based phone classified service did not take off as expected and contrasted it with Chaupaati’s business model that overcomes these problems.

The report says that Chaupaati’s key strengths are the business model, affordability by small businessmen, focused top management, and quality of customer experience. The report identifies Chaupaati’s future opportunities in expanding from a phone classifieds to a phone commerce platform, and expanding geographical scope from Mumbai to rest of India; and cites Chaupaati’s agility to adapt to market conditions and change as the biggest factor that makes it eligible to address this opportunity.

Chaupaati was particularly impressed with the “Learning and Reflection” section in which the report draws parallels between Chaupaati’s real world approach and business theories learned in the classroom; in the areas of evaluating and developing the opportunity, securing resources, and growing and sustaining the enterprise.

Thanks Laxmikant and team, for a brilliantly written report and your insightful coverage. And thanks for letting us share it with the world beyond your colleagues and faculty at ISB. Best of luck from the Chaupaati team!