Digital India for Restaurants: Mainak Sarkar, Explorex - Backstage With Millionaires
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2024
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Explorex’s website: explorex.co/
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00:00 Intro
2:56 Eatables in Kolkata
8:36 Shifting to Bengaluru
10:23 Pivoting to QR Code Menus
14:57 Building a Startup During the Pandemic
16:22 Eatable Goes to Y Combinator
20:44 Explorex Begins
24:45 Explorex Innovations
34:28 India’s Restaurant Software Industry
40:50 Scaling Explorex
47:02 ONDC and Indian Restaurants
51:50 Offering Freebies
54:48 Forbes 30 Under 30
57:04 Outro
Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan started Eatables in 2016 while they were studying at IIT Kharagpur. This startup was their answer to a problem they had discovered while visiting restaurants in Kolkata, wherein many of the restaurant menus that they’d discover online while on campus at IIT Kharagpur were inaccurate and contained incorrect prices or items that were no longer available when they actually travelled to Kolkata. When Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan asked restaurants why this was happening, they were told that it would often take a week or two for restaurants to actually update their menus on Zomato. Mainak and Pritam saw this as an opportunity to build a platform which would enable restaurants to quickly and easily update their menus online.
Sadly, their platform didn’t see widespread adoption, with only 250 restaurants signing up and 10,000 lifetime downloads overall. They had hoped that if they relocated Eatables to Bengaluru, it would see more adoption, so Mainak dropped out of IIT Kharagpur in 2017 and shifted to Bengaluru. However, only 100 restaurants signed up. Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan were devastated. Their startup was failing.
Towards the end of 2018, Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan decided that offering an app for restaurants to keep their online menus up-to-date wasn’t working, and so they pivoted to providing restaurants with digital menus that their customers could scan with QR codes. However, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and stopped Eatable in its tracks.
Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan had basically been bootstrapping Eatable up until this point, having only raised a small FFF round. However, when the pandemic hit, Mainak asked his mentor for ₹15 lakh and was able to keep the startup alive even though all of Bengaluru’s restaurants were shut.
In 2020, Mainak and Pritam applied for Y Combinator for the third time. Their initial attempts had failed because they struggled to get through the interview round due to nerves. However, by their third attempt, they were able to crack the Y Combinator interview and got to be a part of YC’s first remote cohort. Their pitch involved Mainak explaining how Eatable would build an ecosystem for restaurants, solving all of their problems with a single platform. This impressed the team at Y Combinator, and eventually Eatable was able to raise $150,000 from YC. Then, in August of 2020 Explorex raised an $850,000 seed round, bringing their total fundraise to $1M at the end of 2020.
In 2021 when restaurants began opening back up again, Mainak and Pritam onboard three breweries in Bengaluru for their MVP, which consisted of an ordering and order management system. Their new customers loved Explorex, and the company realised that they had finally found product/market fit.
In 2022, Explorex raised $5 million from angels like Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, James Park, co-founder of Fitbit, and Taher Savliwala, co-founder of Relief Technologies.
Today, Explorex powers more than 1,000 restaurants across 15 cities in India, including Easy Tiger, Forty Six Ounces, La Casa, Jook, ShakesBierre, Stories, Vapour, Fire Station, Fox In The Field, Cafe Azzure, Oia, and Tiger Tiger Brewhouse.
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#explorex #saas #startup
Am from kenya and i have been following this channel for almost a year .Love the content.BWM should start a second channel for clips from the full length interviews .Keep up the good work
why this channel not getting many views.Gem in indian YT channel list just need to dig.
ExploreX is the great example of build the solution rather than product. I really love the way they providing a complete solution to restaurant. 😀😀
Great video. I was building a QR code based ordering system myself as a side project, so it's actually cool to see the different components that go into it.
Nice interview Caleb. I do think ONDC should be popularised as its such a loosely coupled architecture and free infrastructure. Onboarding businesses and customers is totally absteacted away for a startup which is access to a huge market for free!
Just amazing journey!
bring more founders outside of IIT who made it big.
Whatever this guy did had nothing to with IIT I guess
@@BishakhGhosh my comment has nothing to do with this guy. He was also inspirational.
Loved it!
Glad to hear than Ivannah! -Caleb
@@backstagewithmillionaireswhen are you going to come to front stage with millionaires🤔
If it's fine can you provide the YC interview link of Explorex’s
29:41 one has to manually enter
Finally, a startup that doesn't deliver something 😂 but solves a real problem with a great idea and business model, which makes sense compared to all those useless delivery startups
Delivery is useful, but as a non-Indian I have always found the dine-in experience in India is not great. Poorly trained staff, menus which have items that aren't available, and slow ordering experience at peak hours was also a struggle, so it's nice to see a startup trying to solve these issues. -Caleb
@@backstagewithmillionairesyou need to dine only at good branded restaurants.
for the algo
Idk why but I can smell that "bharatpe-like" predatory loan shark model to moat the customer/restaurants with your system, become the primary payment system for them, and then give them loans in predatory rates because the customer will have no option but to let the company deduct EMIs.
I hope that's not the case, but seems to be.
Great point, happy to clarify. Unlike Bharatpe, we don't have only one revenue model. The beauty of an ecosystem business is that you get multiple good revenue sources and you can undercut every independent service provider to provide better rates to your customers along with a great service through the product. Hope this helps.😊😊
Pronouncing Mainack as Moinack tells me you care about the small details.
It comes from hearing people pronounce my name (Caleb) as Kahleb instead of Kayleb 😅 so I am hyper aware of the importance of name pronunciation. -Caleb
58:15 Yeah! Just sold the house 😂😂
You should have asked him the elusive question on everyone's minds now if Rameshwaram cafe has a monthly rent of 5 crores or not 😂😂😂
You are in other languages brother
As in? -Caleb
Please summarize the entire video in 10 minutes from all chapters, as we don't have the time or patience to watch an hour-long video.
Hi Sanjanind, best advice I can give to you is watch the video at 2X speed, or read the video description which has the summary of conversation. Hope this helps! -Caleb
@@backstagewithmillionaireshey Caleb, keep the podcast format. If anything, I usually want them to last longer, especially when they talk shop. 👍
Name and logo Sounds like a crypto coin