The last 18 months have been a roller coaster ride for me professionally. There were times when I have doubted my own ability and judgement. I was going through a terrible phase in my professional life before I embarked on the journey of bringing Plick.in to the public. I was royally ripped off by an unscrupulous bastard who promised me projects and ruined my life (I am writing a book on this). My life was at crossroads when I decided to start an online marketplace along with Jacob Kurian, my brother in law and Pretty Sunny, my wife. She was the brain behind Plick.in, even though she plays no part in it.
When we decided to go ahead with Plick.in, we had no idea of what we were gonna do and how we plan to get the sellers. The first thing we did, like any entrepreneur, was to jump into Facebook and started marketing our Brand without even realizing we didn't have anything to market upon. Then we started searching for Boutique owners, designers and artisans in Facebook and bombarded them with details about Plick.in shamelessly. There were hardly any positive effects from this strategy.
We decided to change our strategy now. We started collecting the details of all the sellers from Facebook (I know FB comes over again and again.. Guess I would have been working behind a desk for a lousy company, if not for Mark Zuckerberg) and decided we will do an email campaign to attract more sellers. Now this had a better effect and we got our first seller on board. It was a great morale booster and we started getting confident. We visited many flea markets and started talking to sellers over there (Mind you, we didn't even have a business card with us). Though the response was generally positive, it didn't actually convert into seller sign ups. We were disappointed and started to lose our confidence slowly. We decided to wait and watch.
The next challenge we had was to recruit employees. I never thought getting manpower would be this challenging. We had 5 positions to fill up. We started our process in June 2013. We had gone through 1000s of profiles and spoken to 100s of candidates. Either we were not happy with the candidates or the candidates were not happy with our salary package. Even fresher with just an Under Graduate degree was demanding INR 400,000/- as salary. It took me 5 months to fill up 3 positions. We still have 2 openings and God Knows when I will be able to fill them up (this is why genuinely pray for IT companies to downsize big time).
After going through all this, we are finally launching Plick.in on December 4,2013 (even the launch date was changed twice because we were not ready).
We are going live on December 4, 2013 with 15 sellers and some very good products. We request you to visit our site www.plick.in and encourage us with your feedback and of course PURCHASES!!
