Roopa HungundFounder & CEO of Gito.me Published On: Saturday, October 31, 2015 Views 4497

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

There are several stories surrounding women entrepreneurs who faced several hardships but managed to come out with excellence. Roopa Hungund has a similar story behind her success. She grew up in a woman-centric household with four sisters and her mother. She along with her sisters was taught to just be right from the childhood days.

After completing her bachelor’s degree from university of Mysore, she started her illustrious career in the technology industry. She is considered to be very knowledgeable in the various levels of Business Rules systems. She combines technical knowledge with excellent Business Analysis skills to provide a mix of skills that is rare and extremely valuable. After working at top position is several prominent tech companies, she came back to India from US to start her own venture. Gito.me is a hardcore technology company constantly striving to increase the ceiling of technology innovation; A SaaS solution runs on Amazon web services.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Gito.me is a trader-centric e-commerce platform which offers full-fledged capabilities for offline traders to bring their trade online and, more importantly, to grow their trade online. Our differentiating capabilities address the nuanced and deep requirements (omni-channel, hyper-local, operational efficiency.) that offline trade (and traders) require for replicating and scaling their businesses online.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

E-commerce is more a reality than ever before. While we have a couple of e-commerce marketplace behemoths, what is to be noted is the fact that the number of merchants participating on these marketplaces constitute a mere fraction to those traders who continue to remain offline. These offline traders have the wherewithal to not just handle the online demand but scale tremendously. What they need is the right platform/solution that can help bring their trade online and, more importantly, help their trade grow online. This is the very premise that led us to design and define our platform Gito.me.

What is your life mantra?

Equanimity is the biggest asset to own. This trait helps us have complete clarity and control on all facets of our life. Tenuous situations get best addressed when we preprocess this trait.

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

Getting the initial market traction was a challenge we had to address initially.

How did you overcome those challenges?

We held onto our proposition of paid-only sales model instead of following the freemium route. We believed and continue to believe that customer acquisition and revenue generation should not be mutually exclusive.

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

We have the backing of a sound team of investors. A crowd funding platform helmed by the founding team of a premium tech company has backed us. We also have, amongst our investors: partner at McKinsey & Company, CEO of a legacy apparel brand, successful serial entrepreneur and investor.

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

In our geography the statistics of even premium technology enterprises is quite alarming when it comes to year-on-year employee churn. The principle we have consistently followed is to invest in all our employees. By investment, I am referring to the core opportunities for learning and career growth that we constantly create for our team. Being thus constantly enthused ensures that the motivation levels of our team remains high. And, a motivated team member prefers to have a long-term association with us versus evaluating external opportunities.

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

Vision
Complete belief in the vision
Execution proficiency

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

I use a slew of technologies. To be fair, I will name a few rather than just one :

Hubspot CRM
Asana
Evernote

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

Tunneled focus on the task at hand and ability to execute the task at an expedited pace.

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

I believe that we constantly learn and hence, unlearn. To name one habit that could be changed dilutes all the unlearning that I have assimilated over the course of my professional and personal journey.

Answer in less than 50 words

One tip to success:

Conviction in your vision and absolute commitment to execute against the vision.

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Do not be afraid to constantly experiment

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

Never lose focus from the goal.

What are your plans for next 3 years?

We plan to make Gito. to be a global brand. We are committed towards making Gito.me scale within India and expand across multiple geographies.

If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?

I absolutely would like to begin my entrepreneurial journey earlier than I did.

What are your top three getaway destinations?