How this startup is helping offline stores become data driven

Small is beautiful. Amar Parkash added a completely new dimension to this statement with his Gurgaon based startup CustTap. They help offline brick and mortar stores become data driven by providing them with a data analytics and a marketing platform to help them understand their data and reach out to their customers in a data driven way.

They say ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ and that is what makes the founding story interesting. Throughout Amar’s 4 years of professional experience, he had been involved in building data-centric products. During his term at Data Platform at Goibibo, he was working with the marketing team and CRM teams helping them with better customer engagement and outreach. While doing that, he realized that there is a lack of products in the market which can help marketers in segmenting the customers and targeting them accordingly.

The case with the offline industry in India is even worse. There is a big technology gap when it comes to brick and mortar stores and they don’t really leverage any form of technology in providing better experience to their customers. All these along with the idea of CustTap made Amar leave his job last year in September to work full time on it and it has been a great journey since then.

He describes his fascination towards the applications of data analytics to daily life as his motivation for CustTap.

“Before starting CustTap, I basically went to the market and met more than 50 store owners to understand their usage of technology in their stores and I was surprised to see the technology gap which exists in the offline segments.“ – says Amar.

With bootstrapping, he single-handedly raised his startup with two basic marketing strategies – offline sales and content.

Amar says that he would have loved to have a co-founder to take care of the business side of things. He has met around 40-50 people in search for a potential co-founder. But after meeting all these people, he realized the fact that one can never have a stranger co-founder.

His simple philosophy for a co-founder is something like this: “A co-founder is someone who you can have beer with, someone who you respect and trust, someone you can call at 3 am in the morning, someone you can have an open conversation with about anything.”

To acquire customers, they go on the road and try to meet as many people as possible and keep publishing blogs, Quora answers around how SMBs can leverage technology to bring more productivity in their business. In fact, CustTap got it’s first few customers through a guest article published by him on YourStory. They are completely focused on the Zero Dollar Marketing approach. Amar has also realized that freemium model doesn’t work well in India and so they started charging after providing 2 weeks of free trial.

CustTap describes itself as a pure B2B player which basically helps local stores with CRM and Data Analytics. The biggest challenge they have faced and are currently facing is in terms of educating potentials customers about the importance of data and why they should leverage it in increasing their business.

With paying customers across Delhi-NCR, Chandigarh, Bangalore, for now their only plan is to reach out to more and more customers.

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