Around this time, the Bansals uploaded one of their personal mobile phone numbers as the Flipkart helpline. They worked on improving the website and attracting more users. Sachin quickly became adept at manipulating Google. Having initially received advice on the matter from the Chakpak founders, Sachin now learnt new tricks on his own. Soon, Flipkart was featuring at the top of Google searches, not just for books but for all sorts of products. Sachin’s newfound expertise didn’t just bring more customers to Flipkart; it accidentally started a chain of events that would transform the company two years later, at the end of 2009.
Through trial and error, Sachin and Binny gradually discovered what strengths each possessed. In the company’s early days, their roles weren’t clearly defined. Both tried their hand at everything. But it quickly became evident that Sachin excelled at marketing, website design and other tasks directly linked to attracting customers, while Binny showed proficiency in organizing the supply operations. In Binny’s own words, ‘In four to five months, it just happened. Sachin would think ahead, how to grow the business, how to get customers. And I would think about how will all this work at scale.’6 This was the template they followed over the next few years. Sachin formulated the vision for the company – how much they should expand, what direction it should take – as Binny set up the infrastructure to realize that vision.
Despite a few milestones, Flipkart’s first year was a period of struggle for the Bansals. They found great success in pleasing a few thousand customers who bought books through the website, but in almost every other aspect, they faced one setback after another. One of the biggest jolts came from their failure to convince any of their friends to join them. In the first few months after launching Flipkart, Sachin and Binny had asked more than a dozen friends and acquaintances to join the company. Among the persons solicited were Sachin’s former hostelmates, nearly all of Sachin and Binny’s NGV flatmates, and a few other people known to Binny. But not one of them was willing. These engineers were sceptical about entrepreneurship, the potential of e-commerce, selling books online (Who reads books anyway? they said). They were especially unsure about Sachin and Binny. In college, Sachin and Binny had been mediocre students, as unimpressive outside the classroom as they were within it. No one had thought they could be leaders. In those years, when entrepreneurship was almost a middle-class taboo, the Bansals’ venture had struck their friends as a whim, an amusing but eccentric pursuit. They were to be indulged, like children, but joining them was considered preposterous. They were so alone that when Sachin got married to Priya in April 2008, Binny could not attend the wedding. He had to stay back in Bangalore and keep the website running as he was still one of the only two employees at Flipkart.
Anil Kumar, Binny’s batchmate from IIT, also lived in Koramangala, just a few minutes away from the Bansals. After graduating, Anil had found work as a management consultant. He too lived with old IIT classmates in an apartment. Anil had found Binny to be an unimpressive guy in college, lacking ambition, energy and purpose, much like his hostel, Shivalik. Despite being on the board of IIT Delhi’s student publications, Binny had achieved little other than an influential position. When Binny and Anil ran into each other in Koramangala in late 2008, Anil asked him, ‘What are you up to?’
‘Startup ...’ said Binny.
‘What kind of startup?
‘We sell books.’
‘Abbe, who sells books? Where is your salary coming from?’
‘How will we get a salary? We’re looking for funding.’
‘Funding kaun dega be?’ Who will give you funding, man?
Anil had thought that Binny was talking gibberish; why would anyone offer capital to two novices, especially when one of them was his neverdowell classmate? ‘I thought he had gone mad,’ says Anil today. ‘I left the conversation at that ... And now I keep talking with my other IIT friends that if I had just managed to even put together one lakh – begged, borrowed, stole – and given it to them ...’
A few months later, in 2009, Anil launched a consultancy startup, RedSeer Management. He would meet Binny a few more times that year and exchange notes about real-estate prices in Koramangala, where both their startups were located. He didn’t see Binny for nearly two years after that. During this time, Anil and his friends forgot about Flipkart, their scepticism entrenched.
This is why, the next time Anil heard about Flipkart, he would have an identity crisis.
BY MARCH 2008, six months after launching the website, the Bansals’ commitment to their customers materialized into a tangible benefit: Flipkart had broken even. The startup was generating sufficient revenues and achieving profit margins high enough to be self-sustaining. It was pulling in a few dozen orders every day. Customers were happy and kept coming back to buy more. Encouraged, Sachin and Binny moved to their first office, a small two-bedroom flat in an area called Wilson Garden, a few kilometres away from their apartments in NGV.7
Soon after, Flipkart hired its first official employee. Until now, Sachin and Binny had employed part-time workers to help them with sourcing and handling packages. But the increase in orders prompted them to look for a full-time employee to oversee the procuring and packaging of books. A delivery worker at First Flight Couriers, one of Flipkart’s courier partners, pointed the Bansals to a former colleague of his named Ambur Iyyappa. After working at First Flight for four years, Iyyappa had taken a break to complete a diploma course. First Flight had warned him that he may lose his job. By the time he returned to Bangalore a few months later, the company had already replaced
