• Inspiration

Akhilesh Bali joined Accenture in 2008 as a software engineer only to realize within six-seven months that he was not made for a 9 to 5 job. Deciding to quit, Bali wanted to start something which was easy on capital, easy to set up and unique in itself.

“That is when we hit upon the idea of Mithaimate. Everyone is selling flowers online, books online and we realized that if we go anywhere in India, mithai shops or sweet shops do really good business. The same thing, however, was not done online and India being India, I thought if we can give people a platform where they can choose any mithai from anywhere, get it within a time frame and at a reasonable price, it could become a good business opportunity,” says Bali.

He teamed up with two of his friends and towards the end of 2008 the idea was conceived as they went about finetuning it and getting to know the market better. “We all knew how to make a website and we knew if it is an idea which would click, in the online medium one does not need a lot of capital. We decided to give it a try as the initial amount involved was less than Rs 20, 000,” says Bali.

A market survey was done and issues like freshness, quality and apprehension on health risks if the sweets are spoilt were some areas that needed considerable brainstorming.

“We decided to partner with known offline stores and aggregate such stores that are famous and people know them for their quality. For example, in Delhi we partnered with Nathu sweets and people instantly recognized what they had to offer and quality was never an issue,” says Bali. “We went about other cities in a similar way and in the initial phase started with Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. This was, however, the easy part. The difficult part was in reality approaching the sweet shops and convincing them to do business with us. All of them were doing brisk business on their own and we asked for preferential pricing for our site, which made it a difficult proposition for them to offer,” he adds.

Bali was, however, able to convince most of the sweet shop owners, as for the first time, he offered these players a pan-India reach.

“For example for a sweet shop in Delhi, his customers were mainly from the NCR. With my platform, even a person sitting in Chennai could now order his sweets.”

Starting the business around April 2009, Bali banked on expensive logistics companies like Blue Dart and FedEx to deliver sweets.

A mithai delivered to them at 6 in the evening is with the customer by 11 in the morning. Mithaimate also delivers within 24 hours in all the metros and takes around 48 hours to deliver in smaller cities.

In this case, both Mithaimate and the sweet shop are accountable for the products. In case a customer says the sweets were broken or were not fresh, they are given a free redelivery and in case the customer is not pleased even then, a refund is usually given.

“I got to know of Mithaimate one day when I was randomly browsing the internet to check ways to deliver sweets within Mumbai. I was impressed with what a bunch of young guys were doing and got in touch with them. Mithaimate has done much better than what we expected and quarter-on-quarter has been churning out good numbers for us,” says Anuj Goyal of Mumbai-based Brijwasi Sweets.

Today the site has grown from getting 1-2 orders every week to about 40-50 orders in a day and the festive season is a good hit.

A back of the hand calculation shows that an average order on the site is about Rs 600 per customer, which pegs Bali’s monthly revenues at about Rs.7 lakh-Rs.8 lakh.

“We have stayed cash flow positive on every order. I am comfortable with my situation as of now but expect to need funds when the company starts scaling up,” says Bali.

©Entrepreneur September 2011

Tags:
Accenture, Akhilesh bali, brijwasi sweets, mithai, Mithaimate, nathu, sweet tooth