Snapped up in a jiffy

Great ideas sometimes start in tiny rooms, like the one Pramod Nair lived in, at Madhapur, in 2012.

Pramod along with friend and business partner Satya Ganni were part of a start-up, Learn Social. Since a part of their business was on the mobile platform, they wanted to take the business to phones; and when they found that there was a serious dearth of mobile e-commerce, they came up with MartMobi.

That was in 2012, fast forward to 2015 and within a span of two months, their start-up was recently bought by one of the largest e-commerce companies in India, SnapDeal. “It all happened so fast that we didn’t even have time to process anything,” say the duo. After their first firm, Learn Social, an instructor-led online learning platform, was bought within just six months of its establishment, the two friends decided to do something else.

“After exiting a company within just six months, people assumed that it would be an easy ride for us, but in the start-up community, every time you start something new, you start from scratch and that was what happened with MartMobi as well,” says Pramod, 28, who was brought up in Mancherial (near Adilabad) as his father worked in the Singareni mines.

Pramod and Satya still can’t believe that all this isn’t a dream. “But,” Pramod says, suddenly turning serious, “No one knows about the struggle and the low periods we went through and not many talk about it, but budding entrepreneurs need to know this. There will be low periods, just like we had, but you have to hold on to that dream and work forward.”

While the two love their work, they do accept that if their families weren’t there to support them, they couldn’t have achieved what they did.

“There are days when I don’t talk to them or meet them, including my fiancé, but they know I care for them,” says Pramod. While Satya says that the only thing apart from technology and entrepreneurship that keeps him motivated is family. “My three-year-old baby girl and my wife are my source of strength, they keep me going,” says Satya.

Out of the hundreds of start-ups that come up, SnapDeal decided to acquire MartMobi and the reason was simple, says Pramod, “They were very impressed with our vision. We knew that the future of e-commerce was through the mobile at a time when no one paid attention to it and SnapDeal thought that it was fantastic that we could think so far.”