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!

We are calling for volunteers (in Mumbai) to pledge blood donation. Chaupaati in association with the Rotary Club of Bombay (W) and Inner Wheel of Bombay (W) is organizing a Blood Donation and Collection Drive at the Rotary Service Center, Rotary Chowk, Juhu Tara Road, Santacruz (W) on the 1 July, 2009 (Wednesday).

All you have to do is, call us at 922-222-1947 to register and pledge blood donation. Give us your blood group, age, contact number and time when you can come to donate. Visit the camp at the Rotary Service Center, Rotary Chowk, Juhu Tara Road, Santacruz (W) on the 1st of July 2009 (Wednesday) to donate.

Chaupaati maintains an active database of all the volunteers (blood group, age, contact number). People in need of blood can call Chaupaati to instantly get contacts of matching donors through SMS.

By organizing this free service for the people of Mumbai today, we are doing our bit that takes us a step closer to our mission. And we sincerely request you to come forward to donate and encourage your friends and family also, to make this drive a success.

Call Chaupaati at 922-222-1947 now to pledge blood donation and be a part of it.

Event: Blood Donation and Collection Drive

Association: Rotary Club of Bombay (W) and Inner Wheel of Bombay (W)

Place: Rotary Service Center, Rotary Chowk, Juhu Tara Road

Date: 1 July 2009 (Wednesday)

Time: 8:30 AM onwards

To Register: Call 922-222-1947 or go to www.chaupaati.in/give

A lot of you have asked us about the localities that Chaupaati users call from?

Here is a view of our user base on the map of Mumbai. Red balloons represent low user density, Blue is medium, and Green is high. When we went live in July 2008, our user base was primarily along the Central suburbs, but over time there are more greens along the Western suburbs between Dadar to Borivali. Customers from Chaupaati call everywhere from Murbad to Vasai, Churchgate to Virar, and Masjid to Bhivandi. Call 922-222-1947 to connect with these users for buying or selling whatever it is that you care about. Sorry for not providing an interactive map. Maybe when we hit a million users…

Apologies for the not-so-clever title for this blog post. As a startup based and operative in Bombay — the megapolis you can love or you can hate, but you cannot ignore — we have all come to live with the ordeals of traffic jams, transport strikes, fuel strike, truckers strike, rains and bad roads. And then you have events like Raj Thackerey’s arrest and 26/11 attacks.

We were reviewing our data from 2008, and it was interesting to see a correlation between “events” in the city to our business (measured by incoming phone calls in the graphs below). In case of Thackerey’s arrest in October 2008, we saw a huge dip in calls on 19th, 20th and 21st (almost a 50% decrease). That was bad for business, and I am sure a lot of other local businesses felt the same.

In case of the unfortunate attacks on the city in November 2008, we saw a huge surge in calls on 28th November (a 150% increase) and a steady decline in the days that followed. Almost all calls on 28th came in from citizens willing to donate blood to the victims of attacks. We were moved by the show of solidarity and experienced the “spirit” first hand.

One of these days, it would be interesting to see how we do against the stock market, the Satyam fiasco, Obama’s swearing in ceremony and other events - local and global. Our guess is, we are more affected by the small local events than by any big global events.

We receive least number of calls on Sundays and most on Saturdays. The Saturday call volume is more than double that of Sunday. Now some of this call volume can be attributed to marketing campaigns that go out on a particular day. But it is still interesting to note that the call volume almost monotonically increases through the week - Sunday to Saturday - the only outlier being Monday.

% Call Volume by Weekday

We’ll keep you posted with more such trends at Chaupaati. Meanwhile, what’s your take on the above trend?

Chaupaati recently completed 15,000 received calls. Several thousand individuals and dealers in Mumbai used the service to connect with buyers and sellers of second hand items. From all the calls we received, we are excited to share some usage trends.

Top 5 items offered by most involved customers *

* Customers who exhausted their Rs. 200 trial credit

Top 5 locations of fulfilled sellers*

* Sellers who connected with buyers

Only 37% of fulfilled searches specified location as a filter. Of these, 40% of searches fulfilled in exactly that location, while the rest required neighborhoods.

Distribution of listings by price range

Average asking price: Rs.17,000

Supply-Demand Fidelity

Who Sells, Who Buys

- In all cases of buyer-seller connections, 96% of buyers were individuals and only 4% were dealers. However, on the seller side, 49% were individuals and 51% were dealers.

- Dealers constitute 21% of all users, 28% of all sellers, and 57% of all customers who have consumed their trial credit of Rs. 200/- and are eligible to pay.

Top 5 most valuable items listed

1. Hummer H3 in Borivali West for Rs. 75,00,000
2. 300 acres of land in Murbad for Rs. 67,50,000
3. 2BHK flat in Powai for Rs. 60,00,000
4. 1BHK flat in Vasai for Rs. 20,00,000
5. Nissan Skyline GTR in Borivali West for Rs. 17,00,000