Going beyond a Web Portal

A few years later, CarDekho found itself surrounded by competition. It was being challenged by companies like CarTrade, Droom Technology, CarWale and many more. However, to remain at the top of its game, since the very beginning, the company had made innovation in its bible. 

CarDekho aspires to give its user an immersive car experience before it visits the dealer showroom. It has launched a variety of features, including the ‘Feel The Car’ tool that gives 360-degree interior/exterior views with sounds of the car and explanations of features with videos; search and comparison by make, model, price, features; and live offers and promotions in all cities. Besides the consumer product features, the portal provides a rich array of tech-enabled tools to OE manufacturers and car dealers. These include apps for dealers, sales executives to manage leads, cloud services for tracking sales performance, call tracker solutions, digital marketing support, a virtual online showroom, and outsourced lead management operational process for taking consumers from inquiry to sale.

The company acquired ibibo group-owned Gaadi.com in 2014 and gradually launched BikeDekho, PriceDekho, MobileDekho, and many other platforms that combined get more than 55 million unique visitors monthly. According to a BCG study, over 85% of customers who intend to purchase a car in India, visit one of CarDekho’s platforms before making the decision. 

Following the acquisition of Gaadi.com, CarDekho became the undisputed market leader in the automobile industry with a collective volume of 15 million visitors monthly. Apart from this, the deal helped the company evolve in the pre-owned car market which otherwise would have taken years had they done it by themselves. 

Strategic acquisitions were done to enhance the user interface of the website and apps by using big data and AR/VR technologies besides other offerings. 

While CarDekho took over Times Internet-owned Zigwheels, CarTrade acquired Carwale. Continuing its acquisition spree, CarDekho later folded up six companies including Volob, SaaS startup Connecto and roadside assistance Help On Wheels.

By 2016, CarDekho had realised that it was lagging behind in the used car segment and began doubling down on it. However, by the time the decision was made, its competitors like Cars24 had already made inroads in the segment. 

The strategy of monetising the user base was pivoted a bit by introduction of finance and insurance verticals (value added services). This was the evolution of CarDekho from an autotech to auto fintech. The company got into the lending segment, an huge untapped opportunity, especially in the used car segment. Loan discovery and processing became an integral part of CarDekho’s used car ecosystem and a huge revenue making vertical. Besides bringing down the loan processing time, the company tied up with BankBazaar.com and Berkshire Insurance to enhance the offering. 

Very few players in the market have been able to match CarDekho’s in-depth knowledge and expertise with regards to used car loan underwriting. This works as a huge advantage for the company which has already captured a significant user base in this vertical.

Taking into account the company’s revenue models it has three mediums; the first and the most talked about has been their revenue through AdSense, the second and the most important source is through sponsored ads, and last but not the least is the commission from the manufacturers and dealers. 

The company has been grabbing the right opportunities for growth and expansion to expand its revenue. The zeal to constantly grow is the key reason for the company’s success and also the reason behind being able to survive in an ocean full of competition. By developing capabilities in finance and insurance of used vehicles, it has managed to build a unique value proposition. 

Chargebee Gets Funded: Journey Hurdles and Introspection

From the very beginning, the founders believed that a strong foundation of the team was indispensable for the growth of a company, it is with this belief that the team which started with zero managed to give India its 11th unicorn in 2021 and raised $125 million in its recent Series G funding. The road from point A to today was not straight and smooth, it took a lot of patience and hardwork to successfully make it past the curves and tunnels.

In October 2012, Chargebee raised its first angel round of investment, however, this was a year before the company received its first major funding from Accel. The company was introduced to Shekhar Kirani from Accel via Freshworks. For a very long time, whenever Shekhar used to take a flight to Chennai to meet the Freshworks team, his day would start with a short breakfast meeting with the Chargebee team at a vegetarian restaurant recommended by Subramanian.

Shekhar Kirani wrote in one of his blogs about one thing that Rajaraman said that he still remembers. Rajaraman said that one day Kirani would visit Chennai to specifically meet the Chargebee team and they would then be the one’s offering the breakfast slot to some other start-up.

While in the meeting Shekhar always urged Chargebee to ask deeper questions like, who is interested in buying the product within an organisation? How did they discover Chargebee? What tools/systems did they use before this? It was the ‘why’ questions Shekhar asked that got them to think about the recurring value proposition and arrive at several crucial insights. The founders of Chargebee believe that the questions Kirani raised and the problems he presented really led the company to introspect, work its way to the solutions and therefore it helped them majorly in getting the basics right. In 2012, after a lot of grilling, Shekhar finally invested in Chargebee and this happened only when the company had figured out what it was, who it was for, and why the customers should choose it and not someone else.

Since then, the company has been growing at an exponential rate with every funding series. It raised $5 million in 2015, $14 million in 2019, $55 million in 2020, and finally earned the unicorn status with $125 million raised this year. Its major investors are Accel, Insight Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

Chargebee’s Identity and Clout

The Chargebee team wanted to be a company whose main focus was the success of its customers. This was accomplished by making sure that they are available for their customers 24/7. Secondly, the team at a very initial stage understood that since the product relied heavily on working with other products, the Application Programming Interface should not be just as smooth as butter but also ridiculously easy.

Lastly, they realised how crucial their company is for the customers. If Chargebee went down, even for a small while, customers were hit where it hurts most that is their revenues. To make sure this doesn’t happen the team integrated with several payment gateways like Paypal, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and many more across 150+ countries so that their crashes wouldn’t affect the functioning Chargebee.

The founders of the company have also seamlessly integrated with firms like Mail Chimp, Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce, to make their operations efficient across different departments such as Sales, Finance, Marketing, etc.

Surviving and Thriving In A Sea Full Of Competition

The company, since its inception, has survived against behemoths like Stripe, a company valued at $95 billion, and other giants like Chargify, Zuora, Braintree, a few names from a long list. One thing that has helped the company sail through these competition-heavy waters is a clear understanding of its purpose and what the customer is expecting from the other end. However, at an initial stage what motivated Chargebee to compete with such big firms was the fact that they started working with very few overheads because of AWS. Chargebee’s entire server load was zero in its first year and cost $100 per month. As a SaaS-based model, it didn’t have to dump all its savings into infrastructure and this meant that it could still compete with large companies who already had millions of dollars in funding. Chargebee and Stripe who compete in the market also work with each other, which helps meet the strategic objectives of both companies.

One of the main advantages of Chargebee, when compared to other companies, is its user-friendly interface, its flexibility, and its customization options. The company has created the option of creating custom fields for the Customer and Subscription objects. This option can be used to track additional information about a customer or their subscription. Chargebee has always kept its approach flexible, it accommodates all the sudden pricing changes a company might have to go through. Through it, companies can run their entire recurring billing process on auto-pilot. All they have to do is schedule calendar billing dates and the Chargebee team takes care of the rest whether it is – proration, taxation, invoice consolidation.

In 2020, the customer reviews ranked Chargebee the number one finance software, not only this, over the next five years the company is predicted to grow at a rate of 17.5 per cent.