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Amit MishraCEO & Co-Founder of Quifers Published On: Saturday, March 19, 2016 Views 3304

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"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

An MBA in operations from NITIE and an IIT graduate in Mechanical Engineering, Amit Mishra, has vast experience in varied domains of manufacturing, e-commerce, and healthcare. He has worked with Reliance Industries Limited, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Novartis and has a deep interest in supply chain management.

Having worked with major e-commerce companies, Amit had the first hand experience to see and understand the gap in the intracity logistics market due to the lack of technology and innovation. To address this problem, Amit co-founded Quifers, a technology powered Logistics Company.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Our main target market segments are Organized and Un-organized businesses. We have multiple offerings for both of these market segments.

For organized businesses and corporates we provide full stack technology support through our SaaS platform with great backend technology along with complete operational support in the form of dedicated and on demand vehicles for their transportation needs which helps them maximize their operational efficiency and minimize expenditure by automating all the tasks related to planning, scheduling, routing of the vehicles and accounting. In short, our platform reduces the need for manual resource requirements in day to day operations up to a large extent.

For un-organized businesses, we provide on demand vehicles for transportation of goods. Currently, these are provided for Full Truck load bookings.

However, as of now, there is no tech startup in the market that provides part truck load bookings for intracity logistics. Hence, we have also developed a great product for allowing the users to book part truck load orders (we have named it as “Load sharing”). In this product, our backend technology reroutes vehicles in real time when a new part truck load order comes while fulfilling all the constraints related to vehicle capacity, delivery time windows for different orders and also minimizing the overall Km run for all the vehicles. This is first of its kind product in India and it will be launched soon.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

Having worked with companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal and RIL, I have had a firsthand experience to see and understand the gap in the intracity logistics market due to the lack of technology and innovation. Both large and small businesses as well as individual customers face several roadblocks when it came to planning, scheduling and executing their goods transfers. This realization led to the launch of Quifers and various products and services for intracity logistics market that we provide.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

There are a lot of challenges that a startup has to face in the transportation sector. Drivers and local transporters form the most important part of the whole eco-system. Without proper support from the drivers, no company can expect to expand its operations at a fast pace. Imparting proper training to drivers to use the technology and then observing their performance and adaptability to use the technology poses one of the main challenge and this is the toughest challenge that we faced while setting up the business.

How did you overcome those challenges?

We have focused ourselves on formation of proper driver on boarding and training procedures from the very start so as to make the whole task to be process oriented rather than requiring a lot of manual interventions so now everything has been streamlined.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

Quifers received INR 2 Crore of funding from Indian Angel Network and Smile Group in October 2015. We have used this funding to build a great Operations and technology team. At Quifers, we believe in the power of technology and we have used the funding amount to build great tech products which are capable of removing all the manual interventions in intracity logistics market. We have also used the funding to expand to Pune and Surat apart from Mumbai.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

Building a great work culture is very important to protect any business from the problem of brain drain. If you are able to match the work profiles with the expectations of the employees and make them see the value addition that they are able to get while working then sustaining the employees becomes pretty easy. At Quifers, we believe in hiring the great brains who believe in our company’s vision and future plans.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

I believe following three qualities are must for any individual to achieve success.

  1. An unwavering passion for what you are doing along with self-belief
  2. Persistence through failure and ability to learn from your mistakes and failures
  3. Working hard with clear focus

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

Google keep, Trello and Asana are very helpful for tracking and communication for any team working on a project like development of any tech product.   

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Creating a checklists

Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.

I try to multitask sometimes which probably is not a good habit and distract your focus. I am working on changing this habit.

Answer in less than 50 words

  • One tip to success:

Self-belief and an unwavering passion for what you are doing is the most important quality for any successful entrepreneur and one should always have the same to succeed.

  • One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Losing your focus and trying to do too many things is a big mistake and any entrepreneur should avoid it.

  • One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

Always give yourself more room in your balance sheet than you think it’s going to take.

Most entrepreneurs tend to underestimate how long it takes to bring a product to market, while overestimating revenue. You need to be realistic with your projections and you need to maintain a solid balance sheet to be always ready for surprises.

What are your plans for next 3 years?

In next 3 years, we would like to expand to multiple cities to become the largest intracity logistics player. We would also like to increase our tech products portfolio to enhance our client base so as to be able to cater to companies operating in various different sectors.

What are your top three getaway destinations?

  • Gangtok, Sikkim
  • Goa
  • Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu

Share a quote that inspires you the most.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Inspiring Entrepreneurs

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