Sudarsan BabuCo Founder & CEO of RiSE Published On: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 Views 2512

RiSE is a B2B social commerce platform that connects retailers with suppliers across different business verticals. We have positioned ourselves to solve major pain points to the stakeholders of the supply chain ecosystem. They are brands – except major brands. Most of the brands don’t have reach to all their retailers. Their reach ends with the distributor. We enable brands to communicate the offers and new launches directly to the retailer; thus, increase the sales to the local distributor of that brand.

Retailers are the first salesman for the consumer for any product. Without their push, no product will sell. But most of the times, retailer are aware of only 6 products out of 10 products a brand carry. So we created a platform for the brands to be interactive with their retailers.

When we were acquiring retailers for our previous startup Orderrabbit (a B2C hyper-local startup that connects retailers with consumers), we came across a common pain point with all of them. There are tons of app trying to create value proposition for B2C business. But there are no such players in B2B part of the business and the market is widely open for us to organize and inject technology into the process.

We can change something only if we know thoroughly what we are trying to change and make sure whether the change is really needed and also creates value.

Usage – We can build sophisticated technologies that user can’t even imagine. But making the end user to use the tech you built is always a challenge.

We were well aware of the aforementioned challenge. So from the beginning we decided that we will go to any extent to make the end user (retailers) use our product. We helped retailers in learning how to use our products and stayed with them until they become habitual of using it. Once the retailer began to use the product, supplier has no problem in joining our portal.

We also found a big mindset block with the supplier that is “Will retailers use the app for placing orders”. After trying different strategies like app only offers, faster deliveries and communication, suppliers accepted our concept and were happy with our progress. We are very fortunate to get highly supportive customers at the beginning of our journey.

Perseverance, Individuality, Execution

We use various online tools for different purpose:

Dropbox: An amazing file sharing and storing tool for SMEs.

Facebook and LinkedIn: Super social media sites for low cost marketing

Asana and Bitrix: Very good low cost, easy to implement online CRM and Task Management tools for SMEs

One tip to success:

Identify your strength, apply it in the right area and persevere

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Trusting others for your work

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

Proof is the best way to convince

Our mission for next 3 years is to on-board one million retailers from across India. Our target is small and less known brands that don’t have access to technology because of cost and awareness. RiSE model makes it so easy for all the players in the supply chain to participate and trade.

Do more mistakes to find out the way that works.

“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” – John D Rockefeller