Snapdeal is a leading Indian e-commerce company headquartered in New Delhi. It is founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal in 2010.
Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl, owners of Jasper Infotech, a multi-channel direct marketing platform company in India and owners of a portal, went to school together and now are successful business partners. In fact, Bansal and Bahl had entered a pact when they were students at the Delhi Public School. They had agreed that after finishing their studies and gaining required work experience, they would start a project of their own. Bansal tucked in an engineering degree from IIT, Delhi and Bahl went to Wharton business school, USA.
Previously, Kunal co-founded a detergent company in the US while at college.Took the product to 4,000 stores – all bootstrapped. That’s where he figured out the big business in couponing/sampling space.He has also worked at companies such as Deloitte Consulting and Microsoft in the US. Kunal is an engineer from the University of Pennsylvania and holds a business degree from The Wharton School. The company was started with a seed capital of 40 lakhs.
He returned from US and started business with his IITian friend Rohit, but whatever he learnt in USA was of no use in India as the market here was completely different (lack of awareness regarding couponing).Fortunately, recession happened (At least for them)! Retailers had a lot of inventory, so they were more open to couponing.They realized that in our business, a single product company can never become a large business. They have to take a portfolio approach. Their first instinct was not to build a website, rather the first instinct was to how do make money that month.They had to pay around Rs. 5 Lacs of salary and they only had Rs. 53,000/ in the bank account. They faced key challanges in Hiring.
They were operating out of a residential area and candidates were not so interested in working in such an outfit.They constantly experiment with new products. Many of them failed.Started Neighborhood Coupon mailing. Aggregated discounts from retailers and delivered door to door.Failed experiment, but helped the team in understanding the needs of local merchants.In Mid of 2009, market improved.They experiment again. Now they added second city with a leap of faith. In first 16 months they had 1 city, in another 18 months they had 29 more cities from 4 countries.
When a restaurant owner told the duo that he had got five customers from their website Jasper Infotech, it became an inflection point for them. They launched Snapdeal.com — daily online deals. But later Snapdeal.com is expanded into product retailing across various categories.
A privilege last earned by Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata (Tatanagar), and Gujarmal Modi (Modinagar) has been extended to snapdeal.com.
In June 2011, Snapdeal adopted a remote village(Shiv nagar, UP) in India and enabled clean drinking water facilities by installing
manual pumps. To show their gratitude, the village’s residents decided to rename their village to Snapdeal.com Nagar.
In June 2010,SnapDeal.com has aquired a leading Group Buying company in Bangalore-‘Grabbon’ (www.grabbon.com) founded by three XLRI alumnis jackson fernandez, Tony Navin and Sandeep Komaravelly.In April 2012, Snapdeal has acquired esportsbuy.com, an online sports goods retailer founded by two IIT-Delhi alumnis Amit Monga and Prateek Agarwal. In June,2013 Snapdeal.com acquired Shopo.in, an online marketplace for Indian handcraft products, founded by Theyagarajan S ( alumni of NIT Trichy ) and Krithika Nelson (alumni of MOP Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai).
