When we founded Instamojo back in 2012, the focus was on enabling digital payments through our pioneer product, the “payment link”.
And on September 20, 2022, we completed 10 years. 10 years of resilience, strength and our laser focus on enabling micro and small businesses.
Here’s a small twitter thread I penned for this occasion:
Yesterday @instamojo completed it’s first decade!
10 yrs has been intense struggle but proud of where we stand today after 10 yrs 🙌🏼
Immensely grateful to my co-founders, ex employees, current mojoites, investors & all well wishers. super stoked about our future than ever 💪🏽
— sampad swain 🦇🔊 (@sampad) September 20, 2022
In 2018, we as a company came to the realisation that a model based on standalone payments will not survive and that we need to look for new avenues of growth via a diversified commerce platform.
We needed a sustainable model with characteristics like brand affinity, cascading network effects, higher margins, etc., and this we found in e-commerce.
We already had a free online store feature since inception. In early 2020, we acquired the Times group-backed company GET ME A Shop (GMAS), a SaaS-based model of starting online stores for businesses that are homegrown and aspirational in nature.
Putting together the expertise of GMAS and our learning from serving millions of MSMEs, Instamojo ventured full-fledged into the space of eCommerce.
We are relentlessly working on redefining online store businesses, and are possibly one of the first to build a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) SaaS business for small businesses and DTC brands in India.
As entrepreneurs and small businesses increasingly learn the benefits of selling independently online, we can expect the DTC model to catalyse business growth significantly in the coming quarters.
In the last couple of years, both digitisation and changing consumer behaviours have made it imperative for small businesses to move and/or expand online. On this front, in the post-pandemic world, the DTC model has proven to be an effective solution to accelerate business recovery.
It is heartening to see the digital growth of this sector which has mostly been defined by traditional business models. As we witness the shift of DTC businesses to the online medium, we aim to support the growth journey of more than 250,000 small business owners as they strive toward becoming digitally independent.
-Sampad Swain
P.s. Our mission has always been to arm small businesses with the knowledge they need to grow and thrive. One of these attempts has been through our recent release of The eCommerce trust report 2022: The impact of trust on eCommerce businesses where we help new independent online sellers acquire customers. You can read it here.
