Brief biography about Founder
I am Ravi Trivedi, an entrepreneur, a marketer and an investor, is the founder of CouponRani. I am a growth marketer and has run Consumer and SAAS businesses in India and US.
I completed my MBA from Duke University, Fuqua School of Business and holds a Masters in Computer Science. I started off my career as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard and later worked in sales & marketing, consulting, and merger integration functions at HP. I have worked as an equity analyst with Bank of America where I covered technology companies over $120B in market capitalization. Post that, I was a venture capitalist and have worked as Principal at Southeast Interactive Technology Funds. In my earlier years, I have also co-authored the book Web Services Security, and have been part of Web Service standard bodies.
When and how did you think about CouponRani.com?
It all started after I came back to India in 2011 from US when I found that e-commerce was growing at a great pace here. This made me think to start a coupon site. I believed that customers will be attracted to this platform as all of them want to save while they shop!
Moreover, I was into deal hunting while in the US and have also been marketer running online businesses. I had an interest on these and thought of incorporating my skills and to make use of the business opportunity in India for online business. Thus, CouponRani was launched.
Introduce your Team.
We are a small team of 15 members who strive hard for the growth and betterment of our firm. Sai Kumar Sarkar is the General Manager for CouponRani. He did his B.Tech from NIT Jalandhar and holds a MBA in Marketing from SP Jain Center of Management, Singapore. Sai started off his career as an engineer at Nokia Mobile Phones, has worked as a business manager at Embeco IT services Ltd / Jolivi.com. He has an overall 8+ years of industry experience.
Explain more about CouponRani.com, what makes you special and how is it different from others?
CouponRani is one of the fast growing Top Online Coupon websites in India, and ranks within the Top Coupon 4 sites in India. We are a coupon site with 1M+ visits every month. We have over more than 3350+ merchants listed on our site and over 400+ exclusive coupons. We have listed coupons and offers for varieties of categories including fashion& accessories, beauty & makeup, travel, mobile recharges, bill payments, etc.
Our differentiation comes from 2 aspects :
- Customer satisfaction is our main focus. We strongly believe that we can stay in the market if our users are fully satisfied with our service no matter how high the competition level is! We had worked a lot on this metric for several months and we have been successful in establishing ourselves as a strong opponent to our competitors.
- We excel in digital marketing and product, and know how to drive traffic to our site – We indeed have a strong team that works on ongoing campaigns for customers, which can drive traffic.
What challenges did you face while setting up CouponRani.com? How did you overcome?
Some of the best plans for startups never materialize. When we launched we had expected a faster growth in our first year, but it took time to reap success. We remained persistent and increased our pace of innovation in marketing, and kept on trying various tactics and growth hacks to get more traffic to CouponRani, and it paid off. My message to other founders would be to not give up, and keep trying to get success.
What’s the current path, CouponRani funding and future plans?
Currently we get 1M+ visits a month to CouponRani.com and we want to grow that to 2x in the next 1 to 2 years. Also, we plan to grow our merchant reach, and list every new ecommerce site which is selling online on our site with their coupons and offers.
We are also looking at new online and offline channels to reach customer. We are currently present in Malaysia with CouponBelanja.com. We hope to grow in many more geographies within 10 years.
At the end, please share your feedback about VID.
ViralIndianDiary is a great platform for getting to know the upcoming and successful entrepreneurs and their stories. It is gives an inspiration to others who are in their initial stage of starting up a business by providing motivational and inspirational success stories from various startups in India. I am glad that CouponRani could be a part of this.
