Nalin SalujaCo-Founder at Supplified Published On: Wednesday, March 16, 2016 Views 3514

Supplified.com is taking this $150-billion market of construction materials and home décor appliances and fittings online. It is a B2B-focussed online marketplace for construction materials. The value creation at its heart is to make the buying experience of construction materials and machinery easy, convenient and efficient- by perfecting their JIT inventory model for an industry where the standard inventory period is about 3 months.

The idea of Supplified, a B2B marketplace wherein there are two ecosystems playing in –

• The sharing economy of the developer/contractor community – wherein they have large inventory stocks for materials and equipments that can be shared and a revenue model can be worked upon it.
• Buying and selling of the materials involved was a brainchild of Mohit Goel. While working closely on the Purchase Department of his Real Estate firm, Mohit realized that there is a massive opportunity to optimize the system not just for his own company but also for the whole industry. The opportunity lied in making the process more tech dependent and driven rather than relying on Human intervention.

It’s quite simple really – We just do what we are passionate about. If you put your heart & soul into something, chances are you end up doing things much better than most others.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was of attracting good talent. Most of the ‘creamy layer’ of talent available out there is looking for more secure roles than what a start-up can promise.

We personally got involved in each & every recruitment and ensured we share our vision & inspire leadership in the candidates that we liked & wanted to bring on board. I think in hindsight, it helped that we realized this challenge very early on, because today, I would argue that our team is now our strength.

We bootstrapped Supplified with our collective funds of approx $1 million. We look at raising VC funding later this year.

Building a strong team is any entrepreneur’s biggest challenge. We have been able to overcome this by recognizing the issue early on and taking steps to ensure we get involved in recruitment process. Once we have someone as part of our team, the biggest motivator for them is the independence in their work, their involvement in every decision that impacts their work, lots of feedback & tons of respect. So far, this has worked very well for us and hardly any person has left us.

As I said earlier, passion is the most important quality needed to be successful. When doing a start-up, another very important quality needed is patience & resilience. And another very important aspect is to have a vision while still staying nimble.

Currently, we are using Sendgrid (e-mail marketing tool), Connecto (website engagement tool), Zoopim (customer chat), Buffer (social media posting platform). We are also using Canva (a web graphic tool), Inspectlet (a tool to record and watch everything your visitors do) and a few more. We understand the need of digital marketing in this era.

One habit for enhancing productivity is to manage your time. Do what you need to, delegate what you can, weed out distractions and just ensure you stay on top of your work.

The one thing I think I need to do less of is multitasking. While there is always a big attraction in getting more done at once, I feel you do each task better when you do them one at a time. So I have been trying to change that.

• One tip to success:

Be passionate about what you do & have conviction in your beliefs.

• One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

As an entrepreneur, you need vision with adaptability & resilience. One mistake that can be easy to make early on is to chase a misleading success. You need to understand your market and see through successes that will be short-lived and maybe drive you off-road.

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

The most important lesson has been to understand the market & its dynamics in such depth that few others have achieved.

Over the next 3 years, our plans are to scale up Supplified.com as India’s largest B2B online marketplace for construction products and to bring transparency & convenience to this market.

Put some blinders on to ensure our competitor’s mistakes (or misleading successes) don’t distract us from our goals.

All places serene are high on the list. New York & Barcelona are perhaps the exceptions to the rule.

“Always deliver more than expected.” —Larry Page, co-founder of Google.