Gaurav Sinha, CEO and Co-Founder, FirstHandle
Gaurav Sinha, the Co-founder and CEO of FirstHandle, is at the forefront of the mobileapp firms’ expanding business horizons. He brings with him a wide range of managerial expertise in a fourteen year career thus providing the necessary competitive edge to FirstHandle. Gaurav established FirstHandle with like-minded software engineers in his peer group with the sole purpose being one of the first movers in the O2O space. The FirstHandle’s application connects consumers to find all the discounts/offers around in real time, bridging the gap between consumer and the merchant retailer. In conversation with Dominic Rebello he explains how throughout his career, Gaurav has been dynamically focused on building business, demonstrating an outstanding commitment to innovating new business models to raise the revenues of business enterprises he was associated with.
What drives you?
I am passionate about FirstHandle because I believe that I have a chance to redefine the future of local retail and in process we make peoples life easier and enriching. Sheer thought of potential disruption this business may cause is exciting enough for me to hit the office every morning.
How big is the potential for a business like yours? Any major customers that you now cater to? What kind of numbers do you expect from a business like yours? Any statistics to compare with international standards?
We are catering to $625 bn opportunity from offline retail. Some of the major customers on our platform are Raymonds, Dabur, Jack n Jones, Veromoda and Reliance Trends. We aim to facilitate more than $1 bn transaction in next couple of year. We have already impaneled more than 20,000 retailers across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and we have about 150,000 consumers.
How do you plan to scale up; raise funds through seed or venture capital or simply grow the old fashioned way through rising turnovers?
Currently we are at hyper-growth stage and focused on creating world class product. So far we have bootstrapped but we are looking to raise Venture capital to support our growth metrics.
Who would primarily be your consumer audience?
28 year old housewives, shopaholics living in Cat A town would be our centre of universe.
Where do you see yourself five years down the road?
We have bifocal vision for consumers and retailers where we expect consumers to login to FirstHandle before they step out to shop from physical retail and simultaneously we would like to be seen as data guy for physical retailers. 5 years down the line we expect our vision a reality.