Bankruptcy to Breakeven

From almost defaulting on our mortgage and laying off our employees because our investors backed out of the agreed investment to ShopTap becoming operational breakeven. That’s the power of perseverance, re-inventing the business model and ideology of “Things should get better”.

Between those turnarounds from bankruptcy to positive cashflow were hundreds of investor rejections, dozens of new employees hired and too many fires to count.

But the glue that held it all together was the conviction that a passionate startup team deserves early access to what they are owned so they can thrive.

The way we accomplish it is by teaming up with right stakeholders and understand the customer pain points, re-inventing the solution from scratch so that we can thrive in the market regardless of the investment.

So, how did we manage to come out of the chaos? After shutting down our assisted e-commerce business due to some unforeseen circumstances, we were left out with bad debts, thousands of vendors PAN India and unpaid salaries to our employees. But one thing that held us together is the perseverance of the core team to find a way out. We spent hundreds of hours re-visiting the business model, product-market fit and realized how good we were on on-boarding vendors and reducing the procurement cost of the products. This gave us a ray of hope to test the waters by catering large corporate companies with their procurement requirements. We approached NASSCOM with a proposal and got the first purchase order for Global Entrepreneurship Summit, 2017 at Hyderabad, India. Thanks to Rahul Kanuganti, founder of Flytta.

Not to get carried away with the breakthrough, we considered it as a positive sign to explore the market of procurement as a service (PAS). We signed up with big brands like value labs, Welspun Flooring and PALCO as a vendor for procurement. Having spent over 2 years into procurement as a vendor and working closely with purchase managers and CPO’s, we came up with the vision of simplifying procurement through technology.

ShopTap 2.0 is a procurement sourcing partner for medium-large scale organizations. Our procurement as a service (PAS) platform ensures hassle free procurement through digitization of vendor consolidation and supply chain management. We are like an extended wing to the CPO’s and purchase managers, helping them with the day-to-day procurement of goods and service vendors. Not only the companies can save thousands of working hours and dollars, ShopTap will bring in 100% transparency in the indirect procurement of the company.

We are thankful to everyone in the startup eco-system, to our customers and to all the supporters