The Inside Story of BharatPe ft CEO Suhail Sameer and Founder Shashvat Nakrani

The Neon Show

The number of retail grocery retailers across India in 2022 amounted to about 13 million.

Grocery retail account for about 65% of India's overall retailers.

And the most common problems faced by these retailers on a financial front up until a few years back were -

1. Accepting digital payments such as UPI or Cards
2. Easy & Quick access to loans for expanding business or in the form of working capital for buying new stock.

In 2018, BharatPe was started to cater to these problems faced by every day retailers in India.

Since then the company has grown to enable 10 million merchants in 400+ cities, processing US$ 20 bn of annualized TPV in payments.

During the peak of Covid, they also joined hands with ICICI Lombard to launch Coronavirus insurance cover for shopkeepers. To enable hands-free checking of transactions they also launched Speaker.

To know how digital payments turned out as a big break for them, we’ve got BharatPe founder Shashvat Nakrani & CEO Suhail Sameer on our guest seats this time.

In this episode we discuss-

• How they’ve scaled BharatPe over the past 4 years?
• Does the age gap between them affect the decision-making at the top level?
• What do they keep in mind while building or scaling any new product?
• And much more

Notes -

01:35 - Expectations with BharatPe’s current scale

03:17 - Joining a Rocket Ship as a CEO

05:10 - Changes in culture and customer offerings in the last 2 years

12:19 - Very less attachment to a particular role amongst founders & CEOs

16:30 - Dealing and coming out the challenging times at BharatPe

18:17 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

19:33 - Helping the team innovate faster and plan Go-To-Market strategy

25:37 - Strengths & Weakness of Shashvat

29:33 - Strengths & Weakness of Suhail

31:03 - Handling the firing decisions

35:17 - What are the things they bond over?

36:38 - Processes v/s Hustle in 0 to 1 and 1 to 10 journey

40:49 - Secret recipe behind success at 0 to 1 on a product-level

44:02 - Idea behind building distribution network

47:33 - Suhail’s top priorities while joining BharatPe

49:29 - Biases and things Suhail had to unlearn

55:21 - Listening to Younger v/s Older Team members while decision making

58:39 - Next Chapter of BharatPe

01:01:00 - What is being IPO-ready?

01:07:39 - Things which they could have explored outside of Fintech?

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