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How to Write a Case Study: Bookmarkable Guide & Template

Published: November 30, 2023

Earning the trust of prospective customers can be a struggle. Before you can even begin to expect to earn their business, you need to demonstrate your ability to deliver on what your product or service promises.

Sure, you could say that you're great at X or that you're way ahead of the competition when it comes to Y. But at the end of the day, what you really need to win new business is cold, hard proof.

One of the best ways to prove your worth is through a compelling case study. In fact, HubSpot’s 2020 State of Marketing report found that case studies are so compelling that they are the fifth most commonly used type of content used by marketers.

Below, I'll walk you through what a case study is, how to prepare for writing one, what you need to include in it, and how it can be an effective tactic. To jump to different areas of this post, click on the links below to automatically scroll.

Case Study Definition

Case study templates, how to write a case study.

• How to Format a Case Study

Business Case Study Examples

A case study is a specific challenge a business has faced, and the solution they've chosen to solve it. Case studies can vary greatly in length and focus on several details related to the initial challenge and applied solution, and can be presented in various forms like a video, white paper, blog post, etc.

In professional settings, it's common for a case study to tell the story of a successful business partnership between a vendor and a client. Perhaps the success you're highlighting is in the number of leads your client generated, customers closed, or revenue gained. Any one of these key performance indicators (KPIs) are examples of your company's services in action.

When done correctly, these examples of your work can chronicle the positive impact your business has on existing or previous customers and help you attract new clients.

Free Case Study Templates

Showcase your company's success using these three free case study templates.

• Data-Driven Case Study Template
• Product-Specific Case Study Template
• General Case Study Template

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Why write a case study? 

I know, you’re thinking “ Okay, but why do I need to write one of these? ” The truth is that while case studies are a huge undertaking, they are powerful marketing tools that allow you to demonstrate the value of your product to potential customers using real-world examples. Here are a few reasons why you should write case studies. 

1. Explain Complex Topics or Concepts

Case studies give you the space to break down complex concepts, ideas, and strategies and show how they can be applied in a practical way. You can use real-world examples, like an existing client, and use their story to create a compelling narrative that shows how your product solved their issue and how those strategies can be repeated to help other customers get similar successful results.  

2. Show Expertise

Case studies are a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise on a given topic or industry. This is where you get the opportunity to show off your problem-solving skills and how you’ve generated successful outcomes for clients you’ve worked with. 

3. Build Trust and Credibility

In addition to showing off the attributes above, case studies are an excellent way to build credibility. They’re often filled with data and thoroughly researched, which shows readers you’ve done your homework. They can have confidence in the solutions you’ve presented because they’ve read through as you’ve explained the problem and outlined step-by-step what it took to solve it. All of these elements working together enable you to build trust with potential customers.

4. Create Social Proof

Using existing clients that have seen success working with your brand builds social proof . People are more likely to choose your brand if they know that others have found success working with you. Case studies do just that — putting your success on display for potential customers to see. 

All of these attributes work together to help you gain more clients. Plus you can even use quotes from customers featured in these studies and repurpose them in other marketing content. Now that you know more about the benefits of producing a case study, let’s check out how long these documents should be. 

How long should a case study be?

The length of a case study will vary depending on the complexity of the project or topic discussed. However, as a general guideline, case studies typically range from 500 to 1,500 words. 

Whatever length you choose, it should provide a clear understanding of the challenge, the solution you implemented, and the results achieved. This may be easier said than done, but it's important to strike a balance between providing enough detail to make the case study informative and concise enough to keep the reader's interest.

The primary goal here is to effectively communicate the key points and takeaways of the case study. It’s worth noting that this shouldn’t be a wall of text. Use headings, subheadings, bullet points, charts, and other graphics to break up the content and make it more scannable for readers. We’ve also seen brands incorporate video elements into case studies listed on their site for a more engaging experience. 

Ultimately, the length of your case study should be determined by the amount of information necessary to convey the story and its impact without becoming too long. Next, let’s look at some templates to take the guesswork out of creating one. 

To help you arm your prospects with information they can trust, we've put together a step-by-step guide on how to create effective case studies for your business with free case study templates for creating your own.

Tell us a little about yourself below to gain access today:

And to give you more options, we’ll highlight some useful templates that serve different needs. But remember, there are endless possibilities when it comes to demonstrating the work your business has done.

1. General Case Study Template

Do you have a specific product or service that you’re trying to sell, but not enough reviews or success stories? This Product Specific case study template will help.

This template relies less on metrics, and more on highlighting the customer’s experience and satisfaction. As you follow the template instructions, you’ll be prompted to speak more about the benefits of the specific product, rather than your team’s process for working with the customer.

4. Bold Social Media Business Case Study Template

You can find templates that represent different niches, industries, or strategies that your business has found success in — like a bold social media business case study template.

In this template, you can tell the story of how your social media marketing strategy has helped you or your client through collaboration or sale of your service. Customize it to reflect the different marketing channels used in your business and show off how well your business has been able to boost traffic, engagement, follows, and more.

5. Lead Generation Business Case Study Template

It’s important to note that not every case study has to be the product of a sale or customer story, sometimes they can be informative lessons that your own business has experienced. A great example of this is the Lead Generation Business case study template.

If you’re looking to share operational successes regarding how your team has improved processes or content, you should include the stories of different team members involved, how the solution was found, and how it has made a difference in the work your business does.

Now that we’ve discussed different templates and ideas for how to use them, let’s break down how to create your own case study with one.

• Get started with case study templates.
• Determine the case study's objective.
• Establish a case study medium.
• Find the right case study candidate.
• Contact your candidate for permission to write about them.
• Ensure you have all the resources you need to proceed once you get a response.
• Download a case study email template.
• Define the process you want to follow with the client.
• Ensure you're asking the right questions.
• Layout your case study format.
• Publish and promote your case study.

1. Get started with case study templates.

Telling your customer's story is a delicate process — you need to highlight their success while naturally incorporating your business into their story.

If you're just getting started with case studies, we recommend you download HubSpot's Case Study Templates we mentioned before to kickstart the process.

2. Determine the case study's objective.

All business case studies are designed to demonstrate the value of your services, but they can focus on several different client objectives.

Your first step when writing a case study is to determine the objective or goal of the subject you're featuring. In other words, what will the client have succeeded in doing by the end of the piece?

The client objective you focus on will depend on what you want to prove to your future customers as a result of publishing this case study.

Your case study can focus on one of the following client objectives:

• Complying with government regulation
• Lowering business costs
• Becoming profitable
• Generating more leads
• Closing on more customers
• Generating more revenue
• Expanding into a new market
• Becoming more sustainable or energy-efficient

3. Establish a case study medium.

Next, you'll determine the medium in which you'll create the case study. In other words, how will you tell this story?

Case studies don't have to be simple, written one-pagers. Using different media in your case study can allow you to promote your final piece on different channels. For example, while a written case study might just live on your website and get featured in a Facebook post, you can post an infographic case study on Pinterest and a video case study on your YouTube channel.

Here are some different case study mediums to consider:

Written Case Study

Consider writing this case study in the form of an ebook and converting it to a downloadable PDF. Then, gate the PDF behind a landing page and form for readers to fill out before downloading the piece, allowing this case study to generate leads for your business.

Video Case Study

Plan on meeting with the client and shooting an interview. Seeing the subject, in person, talk about the service you provided them can go a long way in the eyes of your potential customers.

Infographic Case Study

Use the long, vertical format of an infographic to tell your success story from top to bottom. As you progress down the infographic, emphasize major KPIs using bigger text and charts that show the successes your client has had since working with you.

Podcast Case Study

Podcasts are a platform for you to have a candid conversation with your client. This type of case study can sound more real and human to your audience — they'll know the partnership between you and your client was a genuine success.

4. Find the right case study candidate.

Writing about your previous projects requires more than picking a client and telling a story. You need permission, quotes, and a plan. To start, here are a few things to look for in potential candidates.

Product Knowledge

It helps to select a customer who's well-versed in the logistics of your product or service. That way, he or she can better speak to the value of what you offer in a way that makes sense for future customers.

Remarkable Results

Clients that have seen the best results are going to make the strongest case studies. If their own businesses have seen an exemplary ROI from your product or service, they're more likely to convey the enthusiasm that you want prospects to feel, too.

One part of this step is to choose clients who have experienced unexpected success from your product or service. When you've provided non-traditional customers — in industries that you don't usually work with, for example — with positive results, it can help to remove doubts from prospects.

Recognizable Names

While small companies can have powerful stories, bigger or more notable brands tend to lend credibility to your own. In fact, 89% of consumers say they'll buy from a brand they already recognize over a competitor, especially if they already follow them on social media.

Customers that came to you after working with a competitor help highlight your competitive advantage and might even sway decisions in your favor.

5. Contact your candidate for permission to write about them.

To get the case study candidate involved, you have to set the stage for clear and open communication. That means outlining expectations and a timeline right away — not having those is one of the biggest culprits in delayed case study creation.

Most importantly at this point, however, is getting your subject's approval. When first reaching out to your case study candidate, provide them with the case study's objective and format — both of which you will have come up with in the first two steps above.

To get this initial permission from your subject, put yourself in their shoes — what would they want out of this case study? Although you're writing this for your own company's benefit, your subject is far more interested in the benefit it has for them.

Benefits to Offer Your Case Study Candidate

Here are four potential benefits you can promise your case study candidate to gain their approval.

Brand Exposure

Explain to your subject to whom this case study will be exposed, and how this exposure can help increase their brand awareness both in and beyond their own industry. In the B2B sector, brand awareness can be hard to collect outside one's own market, making case studies particularly useful to a client looking to expand their name's reach.

Employee Exposure

Allow your subject to provide quotes with credits back to specific employees. When this is an option for them, their brand isn't the only thing expanding its reach — their employees can get their name out there, too. This presents your subject with networking and career development opportunities they might not have otherwise.

Product Discount

This is a more tangible incentive you can offer your case study candidate, especially if they're a current customer of yours. If they agree to be your subject, offer them a product discount — or a free trial of another product — as a thank-you for their help creating your case study.

Backlinks and Website Traffic

Here's a benefit that is sure to resonate with your subject's marketing team: If you publish your case study on your website, and your study links back to your subject's website — known as a "backlink" — this small gesture can give them website traffic from visitors who click through to your subject's website.

Additionally, a backlink from you increases your subject's page authority in the eyes of Google. This helps them rank more highly in search engine results and collect traffic from readers who are already looking for information about their industry.

6. Ensure you have all the resources you need to proceed once you get a response.

So you know what you’re going to offer your candidate, it’s time that you prepare the resources needed for if and when they agree to participate, like a case study release form and success story letter.

Let's break those two down.

Case Study Release Form

This document can vary, depending on factors like the size of your business, the nature of your work, and what you intend to do with the case studies once they are completed. That said, you should typically aim to include the following in the Case Study Release Form:

• A clear explanation of why you are creating this case study and how it will be used.
• A statement defining the information and potentially trademarked information you expect to include about the company — things like names, logos, job titles, and pictures.
• An explanation of what you expect from the participant, beyond the completion of the case study. For example, is this customer willing to act as a reference or share feedback, and do you have permission to pass contact information along for these purposes?
• A note about compensation.

Success Story Letter

As noted in the sample email, this document serves as an outline for the entire case study process. Other than a brief explanation of how the customer will benefit from case study participation, you'll want to be sure to define the following steps in the Success Story Letter.

7. Download a case study email template.

While you gathered your resources, your candidate has gotten time to read over the proposal. When your candidate approves of your case study, it's time to send them a release form.

A case study release form tells you what you'll need from your chosen subject, like permission to use any brand names and share the project information publicly. Kick-off this process with an email that runs through exactly what they can expect from you, as well as what you need from them. To give you an idea of what that might look like, check out this sample email:

8. Define the process you want to follow with the client.

Before you can begin the case study, you have to have a clear outline of the case study process with your client. An example of an effective outline would include the following information.

The Acceptance

First, you'll need to receive internal approval from the company's marketing team. Once approved, the Release Form should be signed and returned to you. It's also a good time to determine a timeline that meets the needs and capabilities of both teams.

The Questionnaire

To ensure that you have a productive interview — which is one of the best ways to collect information for the case study — you'll want to ask the participant to complete a questionnaire before this conversation. That will provide your team with the necessary foundation to organize the interview, and get the most out of it.

The Interview

Once the questionnaire is completed, someone on your team should reach out to the participant to schedule a 30- to 60-minute interview, which should include a series of custom questions related to the customer's experience with your product or service.

The Draft Review

After the case study is composed, you'll want to send a draft to the customer, allowing an opportunity to give you feedback and edits.

The Final Approval

Once any necessary edits are completed, send a revised copy of the case study to the customer for final approval.

Once the case study goes live — on your website or elsewhere — it's best to contact the customer with a link to the page where the case study lives. Don't be afraid to ask your participants to share these links with their own networks, as it not only demonstrates your ability to deliver positive results and impressive growth, as well.

9. Ensure you're asking the right questions.

Before you execute the questionnaire and actual interview, make sure you're setting yourself up for success. A strong case study results from being prepared to ask the right questions. What do those look like? Here are a few examples to get you started:

• What are your goals?
• What challenges were you experiencing before purchasing our product or service?
• What made our product or service stand out against our competitors?
• What did your decision-making process look like?
• How have you benefited from using our product or service? (Where applicable, always ask for data.)

Keep in mind that the questionnaire is designed to help you gain insights into what sort of strong, success-focused questions to ask during the actual interview. And once you get to that stage, we recommend that you follow the "Golden Rule of Interviewing." Sounds fancy, right? It's actually quite simple — ask open-ended questions.

If you're looking to craft a compelling story, "yes" or "no" answers won't provide the details you need. Focus on questions that invite elaboration, such as, "Can you describe ...?" or, "Tell me about ..."

In terms of the interview structure, we recommend categorizing the questions and flowing them into six specific sections that will mirror a successful case study format. Combined, they'll allow you to gather enough information to put together a rich, comprehensive study.

Open with the customer's business.

The goal of this section is to generate a better understanding of the company's current challenges and goals, and how they fit into the landscape of their industry. Sample questions might include:

• How long have you been in business?
• How many employees do you have?
• What are some of the objectives of your department at this time?

Cite a problem or pain point.

To tell a compelling story, you need context. That helps match the customer's need with your solution. Sample questions might include:

• What challenges and objectives led you to look for a solution?
• What might have happened if you did not identify a solution?
• Did you explore other solutions before this that did not work out? If so, what happened?

Discuss the decision process.

Exploring how the customer decided to work with you helps to guide potential customers through their own decision-making processes. Sample questions might include:

• How did you hear about our product or service?
• Who was involved in the selection process?
• What was most important to you when evaluating your options?

Explain how a solution was implemented.

The focus here should be placed on the customer's experience during the onboarding process. Sample questions might include:

• How long did it take to get up and running?
• Did that meet your expectations?
• Who was involved in the process?

Explain how the solution works.

The goal of this section is to better understand how the customer is using your product or service. Sample questions might include:

• Is there a particular aspect of the product or service that you rely on most?
• Who is using the product or service?

End with the results.

In this section, you want to uncover impressive measurable outcomes — the more numbers, the better. Sample questions might include:

• How is the product or service helping you save time and increase productivity?
• In what ways does that enhance your competitive advantage?
• How much have you increased metrics X, Y, and Z?

10. Lay out your case study format.

When it comes time to take all of the information you've collected and actually turn it into something, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Where should you start? What should you include? What's the best way to structure it?

To help you get a handle on this step, it's important to first understand that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the ways you can present a case study. They can be very visual, which you'll see in some of the examples we've included below, and can sometimes be communicated mostly through video or photos, with a bit of accompanying text.

Here are the sections we suggest, which we'll cover in more detail down below:

• Title: Keep it short. Develop a succinct but interesting project name you can give the work you did with your subject.
• Subtitle: Use this copy to briefly elaborate on the accomplishment. What was done? The case study itself will explain how you got there.
• Executive Summary : A 2-4 sentence summary of the entire story. You'll want to follow it with 2-3 bullet points that display metrics showcasing success.
• About the Subject: An introduction to the person or company you served, which can be pulled from a LinkedIn Business profile or client website.
• Challenges and Objectives: A 2-3 paragraph description of the customer's challenges, before using your product or service. This section should also include the goals or objectives the customer set out to achieve.
• How Product/Service Helped: A 2-3 paragraph section that describes how your product or service provided a solution to their problem.
• Results: A 2-3 paragraph testimonial that proves how your product or service specifically benefited the person or company and helped achieve its goals. Include numbers to quantify your contributions.
• Supporting Visuals or Quotes: Pick one or two powerful quotes that you would feature at the bottom of the sections above, as well as a visual that supports the story you are telling.
• Future Plans: Everyone likes an epilogue. Comment on what's ahead for your case study subject, whether or not those plans involve you.
• Call to Action (CTA): Not every case study needs a CTA, but putting a passive one at the end of your case study can encourage your readers to take an action on your website after learning about the work you've done.

When laying out your case study, focus on conveying the information you've gathered in the most clear and concise way possible. Make it easy to scan and comprehend, and be sure to provide an attractive call-to-action at the bottom — that should provide readers an opportunity to learn more about your product or service.

11. Publish and promote your case study.

Once you've completed your case study, it's time to publish and promote it. Some case study formats have pretty obvious promotional outlets — a video case study can go on YouTube, just as an infographic case study can go on Pinterest.

But there are still other ways to publish and promote your case study. Here are a couple of ideas:

Lead Gen in a Blog Post

As stated earlier in this article, written case studies make terrific lead-generators if you convert them into a downloadable format, like a PDF. To generate leads from your case study, consider writing a blog post that tells an abbreviated story of your client's success and asking readers to fill out a form with their name and email address if they'd like to read the rest in your PDF.

Then, promote this blog post on social media, through a Facebook post or a tweet.

Published as a Page on Your Website

As a growing business, you might need to display your case study out in the open to gain the trust of your target audience.

Rather than gating it behind a landing page, publish your case study to its own page on your website, and direct people here from your homepage with a "Case Studies" or "Testimonials" button along your homepage's top navigation bar.

Format for a Case Study

The traditional case study format includes the following parts: a title and subtitle, a client profile, a summary of the customer’s challenges and objectives, an account of how your solution helped, and a description of the results. You might also want to include supporting visuals and quotes, future plans, and calls-to-action.

Image Source

The title is one of the most important parts of your case study. It should draw readers in while succinctly describing the potential benefits of working with your company. To that end, your title should:

• State the name of your custome r. Right away, the reader must learn which company used your products and services. This is especially important if your customer has a recognizable brand. If you work with individuals and not companies, you may omit the name and go with professional titles: “A Marketer…”, “A CFO…”, and so forth.
• State which product your customer used . Even if you only offer one product or service, or if your company name is the same as your product name, you should still include the name of your solution. That way, readers who are not familiar with your business can become aware of what you sell.
• Allude to the results achieved . You don’t necessarily need to provide hard numbers, but the title needs to represent the benefits, quickly. That way, if a reader doesn’t stay to read, they can walk away with the most essential information: Your product works.

The example above, “Crunch Fitness Increases Leads and Signups With HubSpot,” achieves all three — without being wordy. Keeping your title short and sweet is also essential.

2. Subtitle

Your subtitle is another essential part of your case study — don’t skip it, even if you think you’ve done the work with the title. In this section, include a brief summary of the challenges your customer was facing before they began to use your products and services. Then, drive the point home by reiterating the benefits your customer experienced by working with you.

The above example reads:

“Crunch Fitness was franchising rapidly when COVID-19 forced fitness clubs around the world to close their doors. But the company stayed agile by using HubSpot to increase leads and free trial signups.”

We like that the case study team expressed the urgency of the problem — opening more locations in the midst of a pandemic — and placed the focus on the customer’s ability to stay agile.

3. Executive Summary

The executive summary should provide a snapshot of your customer, their challenges, and the benefits they enjoyed from working with you. Think it’s too much? Think again — the purpose of the case study is to emphasize, again and again, how well your product works.

The good news is that depending on your design, the executive summary can be mixed with the subtitle or with the “About the Company” section. Many times, this section doesn’t need an explicit “Executive Summary” subheading. You do need, however, to provide a convenient snapshot for readers to scan.

In the above example, ADP included information about its customer in a scannable bullet-point format, then provided two sections: “Business Challenge” and “How ADP Helped.” We love how simple and easy the format is to follow for those who are unfamiliar with ADP or its typical customer.

4. About the Company

Readers need to know and understand who your customer is. This is important for several reasons: It helps your reader potentially relate to your customer, it defines your ideal client profile (which is essential to deter poor-fit prospects who might have reached out without knowing they were a poor fit), and it gives your customer an indirect boon by subtly promoting their products and services.

Feel free to keep this section as simple as possible. You can simply copy and paste information from the company’s LinkedIn, use a quote directly from your customer, or take a more creative storytelling approach.

In the above example, HubSpot included one paragraph of description for Crunch Fitness and a few bullet points. Below, ADP tells the story of its customer using an engaging, personable technique that effectively draws readers in.

5. Challenges and Objectives

The challenges and objectives section of your case study is the place to lay out, in detail, the difficulties your customer faced prior to working with you — and what they hoped to achieve when they enlisted your help.

In this section, you can be as brief or as descriptive as you’d like, but remember: Stress the urgency of the situation. Don’t understate how much your customer needed your solution (but don’t exaggerate and lie, either). Provide contextual information as necessary. For instance, the pandemic and societal factors may have contributed to the urgency of the need.

Take the above example from design consultancy IDEO:

“Educational opportunities for adults have become difficult to access in the United States, just when they’re needed most. To counter this trend, IDEO helped the city of South Bend and the Drucker Institute launch Bendable, a community-powered platform that connects people with opportunities to learn with and from each other.”

We love how IDEO mentions the difficulties the United States faces at large, the efforts its customer is taking to address these issues, and the steps IDEO took to help.

6. How Product/Service Helped

This is where you get your product or service to shine. Cover the specific benefits that your customer enjoyed and the features they gleaned the most use out of. You can also go into detail about how you worked with and for your customer. Maybe you met several times before choosing the right solution, or you consulted with external agencies to create the best package for them.

Whatever the case may be, try to illustrate how easy and pain-free it is to work with the representatives at your company. After all, potential customers aren’t looking to just purchase a product. They’re looking for a dependable provider that will strive to exceed their expectations.

In the above example, IDEO describes how it partnered with research institutes and spoke with learners to create Bendable, a free educational platform. We love how it shows its proactivity and thoroughness. It makes potential customers feel that IDEO might do something similar for them.

The results are essential, and the best part is that you don’t need to write the entirety of the case study before sharing them. Like HubSpot, IDEO, and ADP, you can include the results right below the subtitle or executive summary. Use data and numbers to substantiate the success of your efforts, but if you don’t have numbers, you can provide quotes from your customers.

We can’t overstate the importance of the results. In fact, if you wanted to create a short case study, you could include your title, challenge, solution (how your product helped), and result.

8. Supporting Visuals or Quotes

Let your customer speak for themselves by including quotes from the representatives who directly interfaced with your company.

Visuals can also help, even if they’re stock images. On one side, they can help you convey your customer’s industry, and on the other, they can indirectly convey your successes. For instance, a picture of a happy professional — even if they’re not your customer — will communicate that your product can lead to a happy client.

In this example from IDEO, we see a man standing in a boat. IDEO’s customer is neither the man pictured nor the manufacturer of the boat, but rather Conservation International, an environmental organization. This imagery provides a visually pleasing pattern interrupt to the page, while still conveying what the case study is about.

9. Future Plans

This is optional, but including future plans can help you close on a more positive, personable note than if you were to simply include a quote or the results. In this space, you can show that your product will remain in your customer’s tech stack for years to come, or that your services will continue to be instrumental to your customer’s success.

Alternatively, if you work only on time-bound projects, you can allude to the positive impact your customer will continue to see, even after years of the end of the contract.

10. Call to Action (CTA)

Not every case study needs a CTA, but we’d still encourage it. Putting one at the end of your case study will encourage your readers to take an action on your website after learning about the work you've done.

It will also make it easier for them to reach out, if they’re ready to start immediately. You don’t want to lose business just because they have to scroll all the way back up to reach out to your team.

To help you visualize this case study outline, check out the case study template below, which can also be downloaded here .

You drove the results, made the connection, set the expectations, used the questionnaire to conduct a successful interview, and boiled down your findings into a compelling story. And after all of that, you're left with a little piece of sales enabling gold — a case study.

To show you what a well-executed final product looks like, have a look at some of these marketing case study examples.

1. "Shopify Uses HubSpot CRM to Transform High Volume Sales Organization," by HubSpot

What's interesting about this case study is the way it leads with the customer. This reflects a major HubSpot value, which is to always solve for the customer first. The copy leads with a brief description of why Shopify uses HubSpot and is accompanied by a short video and some basic statistics on the company.

Notice that this case study uses mixed media. Yes, there is a short video, but it's elaborated upon in the additional text on the page. So, while case studies can use one or the other, don't be afraid to combine written copy with visuals to emphasize the project's success.

2. "New England Journal of Medicine," by Corey McPherson Nash

When branding and design studio Corey McPherson Nash showcases its work, it makes sense for it to be visual — after all, that's what they do. So in building the case study for the studio's work on the New England Journal of Medicine's integrated advertising campaign — a project that included the goal of promoting the client's digital presence — Corey McPherson Nash showed its audience what it did, rather than purely telling it.

Notice that the case study does include some light written copy — which includes the major points we've suggested — but lets the visuals do the talking, allowing users to really absorb the studio's services.

3. "Designing the Future of Urban Farming," by IDEO

Here's a design company that knows how to lead with simplicity in its case studies. As soon as the visitor arrives at the page, he or she is greeted with a big, bold photo, and two very simple columns of text — "The Challenge" and "The Outcome."

Immediately, IDEO has communicated two of the case study's major pillars. And while that's great — the company created a solution for vertical farming startup INFARM's challenge — it doesn't stop there. As the user scrolls down, those pillars are elaborated upon with comprehensive (but not overwhelming) copy that outlines what that process looked like, replete with quotes and additional visuals.

4. "Secure Wi-Fi Wins Big for Tournament," by WatchGuard

Then, there are the cases when visuals can tell almost the entire story — when executed correctly. Network security provider WatchGuard can do that through this video, which tells the story of how its services enhanced the attendee and vendor experience at the Windmill Ultimate Frisbee tournament.

5. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Boosts Social Media Engagement and Brand Awareness with HubSpot

In the case study above , HubSpot uses photos, videos, screenshots, and helpful stats to tell the story of how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame used the bot, CRM, and social media tools to gain brand awareness.

6. Small Desk Plant Business Ups Sales by 30% With Trello

This case study from Trello is straightforward and easy to understand. It begins by explaining the background of the company that decided to use it, what its goals were, and how it planned to use Trello to help them.

It then goes on to discuss how the software was implemented and what tasks and teams benefited from it. Towards the end, it explains the sales results that came from implementing the software and includes quotes from decision-makers at the company that implemented it.

7. Facebook's Mercedes Benz Success Story

Facebook's Success Stories page hosts a number of well-designed and easy-to-understand case studies that visually and editorially get to the bottom line quickly.

Each study begins with key stats that draw the reader in. Then it's organized by highlighting a problem or goal in the introduction, the process the company took to reach its goals, and the results. Then, in the end, Facebook notes the tools used in the case study.

Showcasing Your Work

You work hard at what you do. Now, it's time to show it to the world — and, perhaps more important, to potential customers. Before you show off the projects that make you the proudest, we hope you follow these important steps that will help you effectively communicate that work and leave all parties feeling good about it.

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published in February 2017 but was updated for comprehensiveness and freshness in July 2021.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Paytm Case Study: The Journey of India's Leading FinTech Company

Devashish Shrivastava

Paytm is India's one of the biggest fintech startups founded in August 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. The startup offers versatile instalments, e-wallet, and business stages. Even though it began as an energizing stage in 2010, Paytm has changed its plan of action to become a commercial centre and a virtual bank model. It is likewise one of the pioneers of the cashback plan of action.

Paytm has changed itself into an Indian mammoth managing versatile instalments, banking administrations, commercial centre, Paytm gold, energize and charge installments, Paytm wallet and many other provisions which serve around 100 million enlisted clients.

The areas served by Paytm are India, Canada, and Japan, it is also accessible in 11 Indian dialects . It offers online use-cases as versatile energizes, service charge installments, travel, motion pictures, and occasions appointments. In-store instalments at markets, leafy foods shops, cafés, stopping, tolls, drug stores and instructive establishments can be accessed through the Paytm QR code.

One 97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, is all set to raise its capital target of over ₹16,600 crores ($2.2 billion) through an IPO that it had filed earlier in July 2021. Paytm is seeking to raise $25 billion to $30 billion valuation post this IPO.

According to the organization, more than 7 million traders crosswise over India utilize its QR code to acknowledge instalments straightforwardly into their bank account. The organization uses commercials and pays a special substance to produce income. Let's look at this detailed case study on Paytm to know more about its growth and future plans.

Paytm - Latest News Origin of Paytm Business Model of Paytm Business Growth of Paytm Expected Future Growth of Paytm Why was Paytm Removed from Google Play Store?

Paytm - Latest News

1st November 2021 - The much-awaited Paytm IPO was launched with a price band of ₹ ₹2,080-2,150 per share.

13th October 2021 - Paytm users can now store Aadhaar, driving license, vehicle RC, insurance via Digilocker. Digilocker Mini App on Paytm offers access to these documents to users even when they're offline or in a low connectivity zone.

8th October 2021 - Paytm is looking forward to bringing in sovereign wealth funds as anchor investors in the company's pre-IPO placement.

5th October 2021 - Switzerland-based insurance giant, Swiss RE might join Paytm's insurance business' board.

3rd October 2021 - Paytm has acquired 100% stakes in CreditMate, a Mumbai-based digital lending startup.

Origin of Paytm

The saga and the emergence of Paytm are discussed in this section of the case study of Paytm. It was established in August 2010 with underlying speculation of $2 million by its originator Vijay Shekhar Sharma in Noida, an area nearby India's capital New Delhi .

It began as a prepaid portable and DTH energize stage, and later included information card, postpaid versatile and landline charge installments in 2013. By January 2014, the organization propelled the Paytm pocketbook, and the Indian Railways and Uber included it as an installment option.

It propelled into web-based business with online arrangements and transport ticketing.

In 2015, it disclosed more use-cases like instruction expenses, metro energizes power, gas, and water charge installments. Paytm likewise began driving the installment passage for the Indian Railways.

In 2016, Paytm propelled motion pictures, occasions, and entertainment meccas ticketing just as flight ticket appointments and Paytm QR. Later that year, it propelled rail bookings and gift vouchers . Paytm's enrolled client base developed from 11.8 million in August 2014 to 104 million in August 2015. Its movement business crossed $500 million in annualized GMV run rate, booking two million tickets for each month.

In 2017, Paytm became India's first installment application to traverse 100 million application downloads. That year, it propelled Paytm Gold, an item that enables clients to purchase as meagre as ₹1 of unadulterated gold on the web . It additionally propelled the Paytm Payments Bank and 'Inbox', and informing stage with in-talk installments among other products.

By 2018, it began enabling dealers to acknowledge Paytm UPI and card installments straightforwardly into their financial balances at 0% charge. It likewise propelled the 'Paytm for Business' application, enabling traders to follow their installments and everyday settlements instantly. This drove Paytm's shopper base to more than 7 million by March 2018.

The organization propelled two new riches—Paytm Gold Savings Plan and Gold Gifting—to rearrange long haul savings. It propelled into diversion and speculations, and stripe alongside AGTech to dispatch the stage of a transportable game Gamepind, and putting in Paytm cash with a venture of ₹9 large integers to bring venture and riches as board items for Indians. In May 2019, Paytm joined forces with Citibank to dispatch credit cards .

Business Model of Paytm

Paytm or "Payment Through Mobile" is India's biggest installment, trade, and e-wallet undertaking. It began in 2010 and is a brand of the parent organization One97 Communications, established by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. It was propelled as an online portable energize site and proceeded to change its plan of action to a virtual and commercial centre bank model.

The organization stands today as one of India's biggest online portable administrations that incorporates banking administrations, commercial centres, versatile installments, charge installments, and energize. It has so far given administrations to more than 100 million clients.

Paytm's enhancement has built a solid reputation and has turned out to be praiseworthy for some in the online installment industry. One of its increasingly vital accomplishments is in its joint effort with the Chinese web-based business Goliath, Alibaba for immense measures of subsidizing.

Aside from being a pioneer of the cashback plan of action, the organization has been commended for its introduction as a new business able to build huge partnerships in a limited time period.

Clients of Paytm Business

Paytm's core focus is on serving its Indian client base, especially the cell phone clients. Numerous Indian clients saw the computerized world as an opportunity to open a financial balance. Accessing simple online installments missed the mark, and clients wound up with only poor experience. Paytm presented itself as a superior option to deal with such situations.

Paytm Offers

A portion of Paytm's increasingly conspicuous suggestions was reviving the business which was the organization's underlying administration recommendation.

At that point, it proceeded to differentiate and progressed to creating more current administrations from any semblance of Paytm Wallet, E-business vertical to Digital Gold.

These improvements were appreciated in the form of the Chinese mammoth Alibaba's favours. Immense totals of cash were pumped into Paytm by Alibaba, expanding Paytm's speculation potential. Paytm used cricket and TV promotion to capture more clients.

Relationship with Clients

Paytm has a 24*7 client care focus to interface with its clients. Simultaneously, the vast majority of Paytm administrations are self-served in nature and are open through their foundation straightforward.

Paytm's Channel for Business

Paytm utilizes numerous channels to draw in clients. Aside from its very own site which drives clicks, Paytm has shaped associations with numerous customers and seller destinations that support its endeavour. Demonetization in India enabled the organization to succeed altogether and arrive at new clients too. Disconnected advertising is likewise a piece of their client procurement process.

Distinct Advantages

The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) permit fills in as Paytm's fundamental asset. It should be explicit to Paytm. Different assets like the plan/programming society make it simpler for lower-pay Indians to use Paytm.

Paytm, being an innovation stage, dangers perils, for example, security and misrepresentation which is the reason it needs to take viable measures in ensuring its buyer's cash by improving its security. It is likewise rolling out new improvements inside its foundation to draw in new clients and access their computerized wallets.

Partners of Paytm

Paytm accomplices with the banks that give it installment excursions into the financial framework just as escrow administrations. It works together with a heap of associations that accumulate bills and installments from its customers for its administration.

Structure of Costing

Paytm serves numerous clients which is the motivation behind why it is so cost-driven. The vast majority of its costs are identified with its foundation and client obtaining. It's a typical cost-shared by numerous organizations over the reality where client securing cost is significant.

The cash utilized in this procedure is higher than the income it makes in its underlying buys. Most of its financial limit is to put resources into sloping up of its security and stay away from the danger of misrepresentation, particularly when it needs to deal with more than 65 million clients in its foundation. It incorporates a framework that empowers clients to avoid any tax evasion hazard .

Revenue Model of Paytm

The Paytm revenue models come in two structures. Paytm makes commissions from the client exchanges through their utilization of its foundation. Escrow Accounts are the accounts from where it creates their income. Inferable from the non-appearance of its hidden capital, it offers clients no intrigue. Starting in 2018 Paytm has aggregated 3314.8 crore INR in income.

Paytm Wallet

Paytm wallet is one of Paytm's best benefits that structures a connection between the bank and the retailers. This semi-shut wallet empowers you to take care of your tabs, pay for your tickets, or pay anyone concerned.

Paytm wallet separated from its profit, as approved by the RBI, has the advantage of accepting enthusiasm for a purchaser store, much the same as some other Payment Gateways .

When you store a specific measure of cash in your Paytm wallet, it will at that point set aside that cash in another bank from which it will win enthusiasm eventually.

It is the Paytm wallet's fundamental capacity. For instance, suppose you make an installment of Rs. 1000  to a merchant and the vendor makes 10 exchanges to increase Rs. 10,000. If the installment of that sum is made through the Paytm wallet, the Paytm wallet will take a portion of about 1% of the aggregate sum. So the merchant will get around Rs. 9715.

Mobile Recharge Business

Since its origin in 2010, Paytm's underlying intention was to give online portable energizing administrations. Its capacity to create income was constantly shortsighted. Paytm's administration guidelines are as praiseworthy and proficient as those of other telecom specialist co-ops running from Vodafone to Telecom.

The administrations are without shortcomings and give solace to their clients. As of now, Paytm increases a commission of 2-3% per energize. It is because Paytm, attributable to its support to its client to keep reviving through its foundation, has more grounded power in dealing than different merchants. That is the reason the commission it obtains is so high. This commission from its revive administration fills in as its income.

These administrations have supported the organization essentially in extending its base and thus, developing exponentially. When the client is fulfilled by the administration or item, he makes an arrival to a similar undertaking in this manner. This way Paytm does client maintenance and produces more traffic . Paytm has used this methodology to further its potential benefit and keeps on reaping positive results.

Paytm Digital Gold Paytm Digital Gold

Inferable from its organization with MMTC-PAMP, the outstanding gold purifier, Paytm has propelled "Computerized Gold". This model enables clients to sell, purchase, or store gold in an advanced stage. Presently, clients need to pay at a rate just to get their gold conveyed to their families.

Paytm is very much aware of how much gold is put as a resource in India and is completely arranged to develop from this chance. The organization has made eminent arrangements to urge its clients to get their own Gold Bank Accounts individually. This record separated from empowering clients to purchase their gold will likewise furnish clients with simple access to other Paytm administrations.

In February 2017, Paytm propelled its Paytm Mall application which enables purchasers to shop from 1.4 lakh enrolled sellers. Paytm Mall is a B2C model enlivened by the model of China's biggest B2C retail stage, TMall. For 1.4 lakh merchants enlisted, items need to go through Paytm-guaranteed stockrooms and channels to guarantee buyer trust.

Paytm Mall has set up 17 satisfaction focuses crosswise over India and joined forces with 40+ messengers. Paytm Mall raised $200 million from Alibaba Cluster and SAIF Partners in March 2018. In May 2018, it posted losses of roughly Rs 1,800 crore with an income of Rs 774 crore for money related to the year 2018. Moreover, the piece of the pie in Paytm Mall dropped to 3% in 2018 from 5.6% in 2017.

Business Growth of Paytm

Advanced installments organization Paytm has professed to arrive at gross exchange esteem (GTV) of over $50 billion, while checking 5.5 billion exchanges in FY19. The Delhi NCR-based organization credited this development to the rising appropriation of Paytm over numerous utilization cases, for example, retail installments, expenses, utility installments, travel booking , excitement, games among others. It has as of late propelled membership-based prizes program (Paytm First) to aid development alongside expanding the client maintenance.

Discussing the feasible arrangements, senior VP of Paytm, Deepak Abbot stated, "We are centred around creating tech-driven arrangements, incorporated client lifecycle the board, upgrading the client experience and growing to Tier 4-5 urban communities. We are certain to accomplish 12 Bn exchanges before the part of the bargain year." Before a month ago, the Ministry Of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had solicited Paytm to help its objective of encouraging 40 Bn advanced exchanges in FY20.

The organization shared designs to incorporate man-made brainpower in its model and achieve 2x development this year. Paytm professed to possess half piece of the installment entryway industry in India, with 400 Mn month to month exchanges on the stage.

Established by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2010, Paytm furnishes various new companies and huge organizations with arrangements running from a shareable PaytmQR code to profound coordination.

It empowers clients to process computerized installments through any favoured installment mode including credit and check cards, net banking, Paytm wallet, and UPI (bound together installment interface). Paytm had likewise propelled its very own installments bank in 2017.

Paytm Payments Bank is versatile first keep money with zero charges on every online exchange, (for example, IMPS, NEFT, RTGS) and no base equalization prerequisite. For investment accounts, the bank right now offers a loan cost of 4% per annum.

Expected Future Growth of Paytm

Computerized installments organization Paytm said it is looking to dramatically increase its exchange volume to 12 billion by part of the arrangement, from 5.5 billion out of 2018-19.

Paytm checked 2.5 billion exchanges in 2017-18. Paytm said it accomplished gross exchange esteem (GTV) of $50 billion out of 2018-19, as contrasted and $25 billion every year prior. GTV is the estimation of all-out exchanges done on the stage.

"This expansion is a consequence of the fast development in the reception of Paytm's computerized installments arrangements crosswise over on the web and disconnected for different use cases including retail installments, charges, utility installments, travel booking, amusement, games and that's only the tip of the iceberg,"

The organization said in an announcement. Its membership-based program Paytm First was propelled in March has pulled into equal parts a million supporters, the organization added.

Paytm has 350 million enrolled clients starting on 5 June, an organization authority said. Paytm offers a variety of installment alternatives that incorporate installment through portable wallets, just like ongoing installment framework Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and web banking.

The organization has been centred around structure instruments for dealers to streamline their everyday business needs. This has brought about enormous dealers obtaining who are very much furnished with innovation to acknowledge all installment modes (cards, wallet, and UPI). Paytm now intends to concentrate on embracing computerized reasoning and improving the UI .

Why was Paytm Removed from Google Play Store?

Paytm India app was removed from Google Play Store because it violated Google guidelines. While other apps like Paytm for Business, Paytm mall , Paytm Money, and a few more were still available. But after a few hours of being taken down, the Paytm app was back on Google Play Store.

#Paytm out of Google Play Store. Google: We don’t allow online casinos/support any unregulated gambling apps that facilitate sports betting. It includes if app leads consumers to an external website that allows them to participate in paid tournaments to win real money/cash prizes pic.twitter.com/poeZzXw5nA — CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) September 18, 2020

“We have these policies to protect users from potential harm. When an app violates these policies, we notify the developer of the violation and remove the app from Google Play until the developer brings the app into compliance. And in the case where there are repeated policy violations, we may take more serious action which may include terminating Google Play Developer accounts. Our policies are applied and enforced on all developers consistently,” Google Added.

Is Paytm a fintech company?

Yes, Paytm is India's leading and one of the most valued fintech startups founded by Vijay Shekar Sharma in 2010.

What are the areas served by Paytm?

Paytm is a leading fintech startup that not only operates in India but it also serves Canada and Japan.

When was Paytm established?

Paytm was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekar Sharma.

What is Paytm and how does it work?

Paytm is a leading financial service and bill payments app that offers financial solutions to its customers, offline merchants and online platforms. All you need to do is open the Paytm app on your phone, click on 'Pay', and select 'QR code'. Scan the QR code of the receiver and enter the amount to be paid. The money will be transferred in a few seconds.

How much does Vijay Shekhar Sharma own in Paytm?

Vijay Shekhar Sharma currently owns 14.61% of the company.

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6 Brilliant Small Business Case Study Examples For Marketers

Explore case study examples for small businesses. Additionally, find strategies for handling common challenges and solutions for growing your business.

Every business starts small.

The success of a business lies in its strategy to overcome any challenge during its journey.

If you are trying to take your business to new heights, start identifying challenges and create solutions.

The best way is to learn from sundry success stories.

There are several case studies of different businesses that can teach you which strategy to take for selling your product and attracting the target audience.

In this article, we will discuss some of the top case study examples that can assist in upscaling small businesses.

Let’s begin.

Challenges Faced by Small Businesses

As far as businesses go, there are always hurdles that need to be defeated. Starting a business is itself a big achievement for entrepreneurs, but the main challenge is maintaining one.

There are three common challenges businesses need to overcome. These include managing the expenses, hiring people, and following new trends to develop a customer base.

1. Increased Expenses

Every business revolves around money. There are different areas where businesses have to spend their money. But the issue is handling the financial hurdles. With an unplanned budget and financial advice, businesses will be spending more than they need to.

Keeping an eye on expenses is important because the expenses determine the profit the business will make.

However, it is not easy to reduce the expense. It’s affected by demand and supply. If businesses need to keep up with the market’s demands, then the chance of increasing expenses is 100%.

2. More and Skilled Manpower Required

Businesses don’t run themselves. They need manpower with skills to handle different departments. Generally, the number of employees in a small business ranges from 1 to 500 people. Getting this manpower is easy but getting a skilled one is difficult and time-consuming.

Whenever looking for manpower, businesses need to decide what skills they want in their candidate. The problem is candidates can’t always fulfill all the requirements. Besides, hiring manpower also increases the expenses.

3. Keeping Up With the Latest Trends

The market is fluid. It changes and introduces new trends. Small businesses need to keep up with changing trends to keep their business growing. But this is where many businesses start to fall apart.

The thing about new trends is that businesses need to sell their products at the right time. It means they have to keep on studying the market to speculate their next products. If a small business fails to deliver during the peak of the trend, then it will suffer a heavy loss.

Solutions to Grow a Small Business

The best thing about businesses is that there is an attempt to find a solution for every challenge. It brings out the competition in the market, which is huge for surfacing different kinds of solutions a business can adopt.

1. Reduce the Expenses

When it comes to expenses, businesses are focused on spending huge sums on communication because communication is the key element of increasing customers and revenue. It’s not a big problem for big companies, but it is expensive for small businesses. Thus, finding innovative and cost-effective marketing strategies becomes essential for maximizing outreach and impact without straining financial resources.

Fortunately, the cloud telephony system has removed the dilemma while making business budgets because cloud phone services are cheaper than plain old telephone services.

It reduces the initial cost of new businesses up to 90%. Recent surveys suggest that over 74% of businesses prioritize cloud phone systems as their urgent investment.

The same goes for marketing which is necessary to attract potential customers. Small businesses don’t have enough budget to advertise their products.

The best solution for this is using social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to promote and sell their products.

Case Study: Coffman Engineers

Coffman Engineers clearly states that although the cost of using a virtual phone number adhered to cloud phone is 50% more per employee, it still provides overall 25% more savings than plain old telephone service (POTS).

Coffman Engineers have been relying on cloud phones ever since their one office location faced a disaster. Now they have a disaster recovery feature built into their cloud phone system. It helped them to be ready for any disasters without losing communication with employees.

Not just that, they found all the necessary features bundled into one subscription package in a VoIP phone system. Such a facility enabled them to handle all their business communication using only one platform.

Key Takeaways

• Small businesses must invest in cloud telephony for business communication.
• Extensive use of social media to promote and sell your products/service.

2. Improve Employee Productivity

As we discussed earlier, manpower is a big challenge for small businesses. Hiring more employees doesn’t mean higher productivity. It’s about smart task allocation through a streamlined workload management strategy . Businesses also need to hire the right candidates to keep their expenses in check and improve productivity.

There are different tools available that can monitor what the employees are doing. Time tracking tools and workforce management tools are key components every business needs.

Especially in remote working scenarios, these tools are crucial to getting the full effort for the employees. Companies have seen a 35%-40% rise in productivity in employees working remotely with the use of tracking tools.

Case study: On The Map Marketing

On The Map Marketing , a digital marketing agency, used time tracking tools that showed that remote working employees tend to work more hours since they can work at flexible hours.

On The Map Marketing first started using the time tracking tool when they were opening their office in Riga, Latvia. The CTO of the company wanted the time spent on different tasks on his computer as well as managing the remote working employees.

Using a time tracking tool, they were able to track their productivity with a detailed report of their daily activities during office hours. It helped them calculate salary bonuses. They also found the productivity level of each employee to determine their value for the company.

• Small businesses should use a time tracking tool to make sure employees focus on their office work.
• Small businesses can track the performance of each employee at office locations or remote working locations.

3. Reward Your Customers

A business becomes successful when it can keep its customers happy. In efforts to upscale a small business quickly, the marketplace has seen a decline in the quality of products and services. It is a primary reason for customer dissatisfaction.

About 45% of business professionals rate customer experience as their top priority for growing a business.

Survey says more than 85% of buyers are willing to spend more for a better customer experience . Therefore, small businesses need to focus on improving their quality of products and services, which is a powerful indicator of customer experience.

Case study: Starbucks

Starbucks introduced a Reward Loyalty Program in which customers collect stars to get exciting rewards. This program drives 40% of Starbucks’s total sales .

By adapting the gamification method, Starbucks added a reward loyalty program to their already established app. This move drastically increased sales and digital traffic. They brought mobile payment, customer loyalty, and content partnership in one powerful app.

Customers started registering for My Reward via their app. They are given stars(points) in exchange for their interaction in the app or purchase made. The higher the number of stars a customer gets, the better rewards they get.

• Small businesses can give different forms of rewards for more customer engagement.
• Improvement in customer service can drive more sales and attract more customers.

4. Build Your Brand

Small businesses should learn to build their brand image on social media. While marketing any product or service, the brand image is a key factor for understanding how people view your business.

A brand image must first include mission, vision, and values. It also requires a brand positioning statement that can set your business apart from the competitors.

It’s important to create a unique brand personality. For this, businesses need to design a good logo because customers are most likely to recognize a business looking at a logo. They will have to identify their target audience to craft a good brand image.

According to a study, around 89% of users stay loyal to a business with a good brand image .

Case study: Apple

Apple logo is a well-recognized design that reflects the brand value. Over the years, the Apple logo has gone through several design changes.

The most important rebranding of the company came when Steve Jobs changed the logo which impacted the overall personality of the company. Now, this logo is the most recognized logo in the world.

Looking at the Apple logo, customers can feel a sense of trust, reliability, and innovation . It is the main reason for the huge sales of all Apple products across the globe.

• Branding helps a business build strong relationships with prospects and attract them to be loyal customers.
• Small businesses need to create a strong brand image to sell their products efficiently.

5. Prioritize on Partnerships

Partnerships and collaboration can lift the businesses to maximize their cost savings. It allows businesses to strengthen their programs using available resources and tools.

This has a direct effect on improving the efficiency of their operations. It improves the credibility of the business in the marketplace.

Case study: RENAULT & NISSAN

Renault and Nissan have a strong partnership in automobiles. Their partnership made a remarkable achievement of making up 10% of new car sales worldwide .

Renault and Nissan chose to make an alliance rather than a merger because an alliance has many stronger benefits than a merger would give.

With an alliance, they can access more geographical areas where foreign investments are restricted. These companies got better chances to enter each other’s territory where they were already established companies because of the alliance.

Although they faced numerous challenges including fluctuation in price share, they managed to resolve issues and succeed.

• Small businesses can collaborate with other businesses to increase their chances of higher product sales and profit for everyone.
• Partnership with other businesses allows all parties to benefit from each other’s strong areas.

6. The Right Marketing Strategy

Every business requires to sell its product and services to the market. Without the right social media marketing strategy , a business cannot compete in the marketplace. The first thing about marketing is knowing your target audience and competitors.

When small businesses know who they are competing against, it will help them to see how the competitors are executing their business and attracting their customers.

One such way is to grow your website traffic which can bring you more leads and eventually customers. And how do you increase your website traffic? SEO. If done right, Search Engine Optimization can drive huge traffic to your website to reach your marketing goals.

Case study: Zapier

Zapier used an SEO strategy revolving around long-tail keywords for generating organic traffic to their website. They created 25,000 unique landing pages for unique keywords.

Zapier had a structure and layout for each page including well-optimized human written content. They outsourced SEO content and focused on a playbook for the onboarding process and launched new apps so that they can get partners to write content for them.

On top of that, they also outsourced link building to their partners. These partners wrote valuable guest post content of Zapier on their site and gave a backlink to Zapier. It helped Zapier to get new users as well as drive their website traffic.

• Small Businesses should improve their website traffic by adding more landing pages with relevant content.
• Backlinks through guest posts on other websites can drive more website traffic and attract more prospects.

Now that we have discussed these examples, let’s see how you can create these studies.

Now that you have a fair idea of the business challenges and solutions, there is a good chance of delivering a good strategy for growing your small business.

On top of that, the case study examples above will help you view how other businesses overcome their situation to take their business to new heights.

The most important aspect of upscaling a small business is understanding the customer’s needs. Therefore, you should design a persuasive marketing strategy to attract customers and compete with other businesses in the market.

And a good marketing strategy for any business must include social media. And to make the most of your social media marketing efforts try SocialPilot for free today.

Frequently Asked Questions

🌟 How do you upscale a small business?

Upscaling a small business is a very challenging process. Whether it's making a budget or hiring employees, you have to focus on things that are best for your business. Planning, targeting prospects, marketing strategy, etc. are crucial steps for upscaling businesses and competing with big companies.

🌟 What is a small scale business?

Small scale businesses or Small scale industries (SSI) provide products and services on a small level. Normally in the US, a small business consists of less than 250 employees. Also, it has small capital investments and less office space.

🌟 Why do entrepreneurs find it difficult to scale up?

New entrepreneurs find difficulty in scaling up their businesses because they don’t know what to do. Even if they know, they have to face many challenges like market research, finding loans, allocating space, etc. Also, legal matters are always a major concern for making changes.

🌟 Why is scalability important in business?

Scalability is important because it directly impacts business competition, profitability, brand image, and product quality. Since small businesses have huge growth potential and high return on investment (ROI), they have to properly focus on scalability.

🌟 When should you scale a business?

A small business should look for upscaling its business if it has achieved a minimum annual growth of 20% over 2-3 years with only 10 or more active employees.

About the Author

Anwesha Ghatak

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• Startup of the week

Cred Case Study: The Successful Story of a Fintech Startup

| 4 minutes read

An Indian Fintech Startup, Cred, entered the unicorn club on April 6 th, 2021. CRED had shown a strong footprint and became one of the most successful startups in recent times. Bengaluru, India Based Startup, made its name big, but it has its true story starting from Zero to billions. Although the road was not easy, they made the impossible possible and showed the strength of the Indian startup .

The company was established in 2018 and had a valuation of approximately $2.2 billion. Many other startups like Flipkart and OYO took more than ten years to reach a similar valuation level. 

What is their Business model?

The startup is based on the “Hole and hook model”. It is a common problem that many credit card users don’t pay their credit card bill on time. So the business model of Cred encourages holders to complete payments on time by providing some exclusive rewards including 100% cashback.

The company found the ‘hole’ (flaw) in the credit card payment system and provided a ‘hook’ in rewards. They offer attractive rewards to their customers, which makes their product a brag-worthy proposition.

About the founder

Kunal Shah was also the co-founder of ‘freecharge’. Coming from a Gujarati family and a non-tech background, he is currently the founder of two big tech companies. He was motivated to start CRED after research and understanding the loophole in the overall credit card payment system. He is also the current CEO of the company Cred.

Also Read: Startup Case Study: How Byju’s is Disruption the Indian Edu-tech Sector?

What is their marketing strategy.

The marketing campaign of CRED is universal. They have implemented an aggressive marketing strategy to improve the value of their product. Surabhi Capoor is the brand and product marketing head at CRED.

The company’s marketing department came up with unique advertising ideas that made the brand larger than life. For example, the latest ad featured Kapil Dev (Former Cricketer) acting like a Ranveer Singh that pulled viewers because no one had seen him in this avatar before. Apart from this, during IPL (Indian Premier League), Cred starts to increase its awareness before the beginning of the IPL like the way Vodafone used to do by introducing Zoozoo (character).

Further, the company was marketed through various other celebrities on social media platforms . Meme marketing also worked for the company, and thus the awareness of the brand is on the rise.

What services do they provide?

The company started with just credit card payment services, but now it is expanding its reach in different sectors. The CRED app has more than 60 lakh users, and the number is increasing. 

Listing the services provided in the app.

• It allows you to manage all your credit card payments in one place.
• The app notifies your regular payment details and due dates.
• It offers rewards and cashback for new users.
• The company provides CRED points on the completion of payment, and these points can be used to avail various vouchers and cashback.
• The payment method is hassle-free.
• They have started providing services for rent, loans, and insurance.

How Credible are they?

The company assures total privacy to the customers (claimed by the company). They deal with the valuable financial data of the customers, and they offer complete privacy on it. With such attractive rewards and enhanced security, it is trusted by its users. In just 2 years, they have successfully reached a million consumer base, and their number is ever increasing. 

What is their Mission?

The mission of the company is understood by everyone. They want to improve and enhance the credit card payment system. Despite not making any profit in 2019 and 2020, they have eventually gained the trust of their users. They used the “reward and punishment tendency” effectively to attract and establish the customers base.

CRED & their Vision

CRED’s business model is futuristic. They want to develop themselves in diversified sectors like insurance, rent, shopping, loans, and realty payments. The company also focuses on a futuristic revenue model. 

It aims to generate revenue through merchandising, commission and consulting. They can also use this vast customer base for sales pitching and generate good fortune from it.  

How are they Funded?

CRED is one of those legendary startups that got funding right before its execution. This was made possible by the brilliant execution of the founder Kunal Shah. The company has made a loss of 63.90 crores and 378.89 crores in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Despite these losses, the company is trusted by its investors.

The company has around 28 investors and 7 lead investors. The lead investors are listed below:

•         Dragoneer Investment Group.
•         Tiger Global Management.
•         Sofina.
•         DST Global.
•         Coatue.
•         Falcon Edge Capital.
•         Insight Partners.

The company has raised funding of around $471.3 million from investors. The company’s other investors are Ribbit Capital, Gemini investments, Sequoia Capital India, and Rainmatter Capital.

Who are the Brand Partners?

The company offers different rewards and vouchers for customers. It has successfully bagged many reputed brands as its partner. Some of the esteemed brand partners are:

The story behind their Struggle and Success

Kunal Shah faced a serious dilemma before starting the company. He was offered to become an investing partner in Sequoia Capital of India. But the entrepreneur chose to start a company rather than become an investor. 

The company has also registered itself as an IPL sponsor and has started building some revenue. Despite making losses in the first two years, it has continued to provide valuable services to its users. The company has a futuristic revenue model, and thus it is trusted by its investors.

Born in the family of entrepreneurs and have inherited the same. Started building applications in order to pay for my tuition. Later founded a tech company, marketing agency , and media outlets.

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4 Entrepreneur Success Stories to Learn From

• 20 Jan 2022

Entrepreneurship is a risky but potentially rewarding endeavor. According to the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials , 50 percent of startups last five years, and just 25 percent survive 15.

“For every Amazon.com or Uber, there are scores of companies few can remember,” says Harvard Business School Professor William Sahlman in Entrepreneurship Essentials.

So, what separates successful ventures from those that fail?

“When a company succeeds, it’s because it has discovered and made the right moves along the way,” Sahlman says. “It has found out how to create and capture customer value.”

If you’re exploring entrepreneurship or in the early stages of launching a venture, it’s important to learn from others to avoid common pitfalls and discover which decisions impacted a company’s survival. Here are four stories of successful entrepreneurs to inspire your entrepreneurial journey.

Access your free e-book today.

4 Successful Entrepreneur Stories

1. adi dassler of adidas.

Some of today’s biggest brands started with humble beginnings, and no one embodies this better than Adidas founder Adolf “Adi” Dassler.

Dassler’s shoemaking career began in his mother’s washroom in a small town in Bavaria, Germany. It was there that Dassler began designing and cobbling shoes and decided he wanted to make the best possible sports shoe for athletes.

While there were plenty of shoemakers at the time, Dassler was committed to standing out in the market by gathering feedback from athletes about what they looked for in a shoe, what pain points could be improved on, and how they felt about his early models.

This feedback allowed Dassler to craft an athletic shoe that was highly valued by his customers and gave him legitimacy when he registered “Adi Dassler Adidas Sportschuhfabrik” in 1949 at 49 years old. It was that same year the first shoe with the soon-to-become-signature Adidas three stripes was registered.

Dassler’s vision to create the best shoe for athletes proved itself in 1954 when the German national football team won the World Cup final against the Hungarians—while wearing the new model of Adidas cleats.

“Their unbelievable victory would be heard around the world for decades to come,” Adidas states on its website , “and it made Adidas and its founder a household name on football pitches everywhere.”

Since then, Adidas has grown into an international brand known for high-quality athleticwear. Dassler’s story sheds light on the importance of listening to target customers about their dreams, needs, and pain points.

“Adi Dassler’s secret to success had an additional personal ingredient: He met with athletes, listened carefully to what they said, and constantly observed what can be improved or even invented to support their needs,” reads Adidas’s website . “The best of the best trusted Adidas and its founder from the beginning.”

Related: 5 Steps to Validate Your Business Idea

2. Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble

After leaving dating app company Tinder and an abusive relationship in 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd was inspired to create an empowering dating experience for women.

“For all the advances women had been making in workplaces and corridors of power, the gender dynamics of dating and romance still seemed so outdated,” Wolfe Herd writes on Bumble’s website . “I thought, ‘What if I could flip that on its head? What if women made the first move and sent the first message?’”

Wolfe Herd, along with dating app Badoo co-founder Andrey Andreev and former Tinder employees Chris Gulzcynski and Sarah Mick, designed a dating app that requires women to make the first move in heterosexual matches.

The brand took off—largely on college campuses—and the app reached 100,000 downloads in its first month.

As its user base grows, Wolfe Herd remains a strong advocate for gender equality and sexual harassment prevention, building in-app features that block hate speech and blur inappropriate images. Wolfe Herd and her team also lobbied the state of Texas—where the company is headquartered—to pass a law prohibiting the sending of unsolicited lewd photos, which passed in 2019 .

“I’m more dedicated than ever to helping advance gender equality—and putting an end to the misogyny that still plagues society,” Wolfe Herd writes in a letter to Bumble users . She later adds, “I want nothing more than for your connections to be both meaningful and healthy.”

Wolfe Herd’s story serves as a reminder to use your own life for business inspiration and use a cause you care about to differentiate your product and brand in a saturated market.

Related: How to Identify an Underserved Need in the Market

3. Melanie Perkins of Canva

In 2007, Melanie Perkins was working a part-time job while studying in Perth, Australia, teaching students how to use desktop design software. The software was expensive, complex, and required a semester’s worth of instruction to learn how to use, prompting Perkins to ask, “Is there a way this could be simpler and less expensive?”

Perkins’s goal to create an affordable, simple, online design tool was originally turned down by over 100 investors—it wasn’t until three years into her pitching process that Canva received its first investment.

Perkins credits this investment to a shift in her pitching strategy: She began leading with the relatable problem Canva aims to solve.

“A lot of people can relate to going into something like Photoshop and being completely overwhelmed," Perkins said in an interview for Inc . "It's important to tell the story, because if your audience doesn't understand the problem, they won't understand the solution."

Today, 60 million customers use Canva to create designs across 190 countries.

Perkins’s story reflects the importance of effectively communicating the value of a business idea , as well as the tenacity and resilience required for entrepreneurial success.

Related: How to Effectively Pitch a Business Idea

4. Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andy Hunt, and Jeff Raider of Warby Parker

One example mentioned in Entrepreneurship Essentials is that of innovative online eyewear company Warby Parker. In 2008, Wharton MBA student Blumenthal lost his prescription eyeglasses. He was reluctant to purchase a new pair because they were so expensive. He also didn’t want to visit an eyeglass store.

The idea came to him in the middle of the night, and he emailed three friends—Gilboa, Hunt, and Raider—immediately: Why not start an online company to sell prescription glasses at an affordable price?

They set to work, and Warby Parker was poised to launch just after the four founders graduated with their MBA degrees in the spring of 2010—that is, until GQ reached out to Blumenthal about writing an article to be published on February 15 of that year. The founders sped up their process and launched Warby Parker’s website the same day the article was printed .

The article called Warby Parker “the Netflix of eyewear,” driving interested customers to the new site in droves. The founders’ one mistake was forgetting to add a “sold out” functionality to the website. The waitlist for Warby Parker eyewear grew to 20,000 people, and the company hit its first-year sales target in three weeks.

"It was this moment of panic but also a great opportunity for us to provide awesome customer service and write personalized emails to apologize and explain," Blumenthal says in an interview for Inc . "That really set the tone for how we would run customer service."

A few things set Warby Parker apart from the eyewear market at the time:

• Its online model : A new way of delivering the product helped it break into a stagnant industry
• Its affordable prices : A pair of Warby Parker frames with prescription lenses cost $95—much less expensive than other brands at the time
• Its home try-on program : This enabled customers to try on five pairs of glasses and send back the pairs they didn’t want to purchase.
• Its commitment to giving back : For every pair of glasses purchased, Warby Parker donated a pair to someone in need

Warby Parker donated its millionth pair of glasses in 2019 and continues to be an example of innovation in an existing market.

Why Learn from Case Studies?

Reading about the trials, tribulations, decisions, and successes of other entrepreneurs is an effective way to gain insight into what your experience could be like. What common threads do you notice in the aforementioned examples? What characteristics do these successful entrepreneurs share ? Use their experiences as blueprints to inform your strategic approach and in-the-moment decision-making.

When building your entrepreneurial skills, seek out courses that incorporate case studies into their teaching method , such as Entrepreneurship Essentials. Not only can you imagine yourself in their situations, but you can take their wisdom with you on your entrepreneurial journey.

Are you interested in honing your entrepreneurial skills and innovation toolkit? Explore our four-week Entrepreneurship Essentials course and other online entrepreneurship and innovation courses to learn to speak the language of the startup world.

About the Author

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Case Study: How Should a Start-Up Cut Its Burn Rate?

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100 Indian Startup Success Stories for the new age entrepreneur [2022 Updated]

Each entrepreneur puts in his 110% effort to make their startup successful. Nevertheless, that’s not the only factor in formulating the perfect recipe for Indian success stories. Successful startups in India are built on persistence, mentorships, disruptiveness & market requirements.

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India has established itself as one of the biggest startup hubs around the world. Every other day a new startup emerges from the ocean of opportunities to make it up to the list of startup success stories in India. However, we must remember that 90% of startups fail in their initial stages.

In this article, we’ll be talking about the successful startup stories in India that have been able to build their empire to become the emperors of their niche marketplace. From food delivery to ecommerce, these 12 inspiring startup stories will encourage you to be a part of startup success stories today.

Fact: According to reports by ET ( 1 ), around 86% of the men continue to dominate the startup space, with women entrepreneurs constituting 14% of the startup share.

100 Inspiring Successful Startup Success Stories in India

These 100 startups have been able to survive amidst the struggling economy of our nation to emerge as the top successful business stories in india:.

• Bombay Shaving Company
• Ecomm Express
• Urban Ladder
• PolicyBazaar.com
• Housing.com
• BankBazaar.com
• EaseMyTrip.com
• Bare Anatomy
• Treebo Hotels
• Clear Car Rental
• KillerLaunch
• AddressHealth
• TravelTriangle
• Bewakoof.com
• GoaBrewing Co
• Skillsmatic
• Avaada Energy
• Skyroot Aerospace

100 Inspiring Startup Stories in India:

Launch: 2013

Founders: Ritesh Agarwal

Industry: Hospitality

Estimated Valuation: $16 billion

Ritesh Agarwal, the founder of the homegrown unicorn Oyo, has established itself as one of the largest hotels and hospitality chains worldwide, with operations in over 800 cities across 80 countries, including India, the US, China, Europe , China, and more.

Airbnb was the biggest source of inspiration for Ritesh, who started on his journey of being one of the best entrepreneur success stories as a teenager.

Fact: Ritesh launched Oravel Stays in 2012, later relaunched as Oyo in 2013.

Visit their website here .

Launch: 2010

Founder: Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Industry: Fintech

Estimated Valuation: $15 billion

Paytm started as a digital wallet in its initial days but has transformed into a completely new payment platform. The fintech service has emerged as the top fintech company even after facing fierce early competition from brands like Freecharge.

Fact: Paytm’s user base grew from 125 million to 185 million three months post demonetization.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who was struggling to make ends meet with Rs 10 in his pocket, tasted victory the hard way, and today, he stands as the founder of the billion-dollar homegrown unicorn.

3. Flipkart

Launch: 2007

Founders: Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal

Industry: Ecommerce

Estimated Valuation: $24 billion

The Walmart acquired ecommerce company Flipkart stands as the largest ecommerce platform in India. Today, the ecommerce platform has expanded its business horizons by foraying into the video streaming industry with Flipkart Originals.

Fact: The first customer of Flipkart was a young engineer from Mahbubnagar, Telangana.

Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal started as an online bookstore that made around 20 successful shipments in its first year of functioning. It was not late before the platform started grabbing people’s attention that making it the top online retail market in history.

Launch: 2014

Founders: Nandan Reddy, Rahul Jaimini, & Sriharsha Majesty

Industry: Foodtech

Estimated Valuation: $3.3 billion

The viral food delivery startup has marked itself as one of the inspirational stories of success that started in its Bengaluru neighborhood, where six delivery executives were covered by only 25 partner restaurants.

Today, the food delivery firm has over 2.1lakh delivery executives across 300+ cities in India. Currently, the company processes over 1.4 million food orders daily across the country.

Note: Swiggy recently received funding of $1 billion from Naspers and Tencent Holdings

Visit their site here .

5. Ola Cabs

Founders: Bhavish Aggarwal, Ankit Bhati

Industry: Mobility

Estimated Valuation: $6.2 billion

Ola Cabs, started by IIT-B graduates Bhavish and Ankit, has emerged as the most prominent Indian mobility service provider in the country. That offers its services across 50 cities in India and is evenly spread across countries, including the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The idea of Ola, a cab aggregation startup, came from Bhavish’s terrible experience. At the same time, he was traveling from Bengaluru to Bandipur, where the driver of his cab stranded him in the middle of nowhere over a failed negotiation deal.

6. BookMyShow

Launch: 1999

Founders: Ashish Hemrajani, Parikshit Dar & Rajesh Balpande

Industry: Online Ticket Booking

Estimated Valuation: $1 billion

We see BookMyShow as a stable platform in the online ticket booking sector. It is considered as a one-stop platform to book online tickets , especially for movies.

Surprisingly, the upheaval of BookMyShow is one of the most motivational success stories that showcase the power of perseverance. The platform currently provides services across five countries with over 30 million customers.

Fact: The initial capital invested in BookMyShow was just Rs 25,000.

7. MakeMyTrip

Launch: 2000

Industry: Travel Agency

Estimated Valuation: $23.5 billion

MakeMyTrip is India’s leading online travel company that provides online services like travel packages, hotels, flights, rail, bus tickets , etc., to its clients. Founded by IIM-A alumni Deep Kalra, the success of MakeMyTrip has been recognized not only nationally but internationally as well. The company was even listed on NASDAQ.

Fact: MakeMyTrip was initially launched to cater to the needs of NRIs for their Indo-American trips back and forth.

Launch: 2008

Founders: Byju Raveendran, Divya Gokulnath

Industry: E-Learning

Estimated Valuation: $5 billion

Byju’s started as a mere e-learning platform but has grown to become one of India's most popular and highly trusted ed-tech brands.

The platform founded by Byju Raveendran & Divya Gokulnath provides online tutoring sessions to students ranging from study material of class VI to material about competitive exams like IAS, CAT , GRE, etc.

Fact: Byju has registered 35 million users on its learning app with 2.4 million paid subscribers.

9. BigBasket

Launch: 2011

Founders: Hari Menon, VS Sudhakar, V S Ramesh, Vipul Parekh, Abhinay Choudhari

Estimated Valuation: $1.2 billion

The online food and grocery buying platform allow users to buy products ranging from food supplies, grocery , beverages, personal care products, bakery supplies, etc. BigBasket has marked its presence in over 25 cities across India, with Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR , Hyderabad, Chennai , Pune, and Ahmedabad being the top cities.

Fact: Hari told a publication that despite being in the business for five years, their core team still works on a 7- to 12:30 am model.

Launch: 2012

Founder: Falguni Nayar

Industry: Ecommerce- Fashion & Beauty

Estimated Valuation: $750 million

The IIM-A alumnus Falguni Nayar left her 9 to 5 job at Kotak at 50 to pursue her dream of establishing Nykaa. The platform was launched to develop a one-stop platform of beauty products in India, making it the first beauty-exclusive ecommerce platform .

Fact: The online beauty & fashion platform opened its first offline store at T3 Terminal, IGI Airport, in November 2015.

Launch: 2015

Founder: Vikram Chopra

Industry: Automotive

Estimated Valuation: $242.6 million

Cars24 is the number 1 used car selling and buying platform in India that Vikram Chopra founded in 2015. Cars24 enables you to sell or buy second-hand cars hassle-free. The platform has over 100 offline stores pan India that enables a person to evaluate the value of his car with direct consultation from the Cars24 employees.

Fact: Cars24 launched an ad campaign #ByeByeDrive, which focussed on the sentimental value connected with ‘your car.’

12. PharmEasy

Founder: Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah, Mikhil Innani

Industry: Ecommerce- Healthcare

Estimated Annual Valuation: $64.7 million

PharmEasy is an online pharmaceuticals delivery platform that assists by delivering the required medicines & diagnostic test reports to its patients. It currently functions across eight cities in India, including Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Jaipur, Delhi, Noida, and Bangalore.

13. Instamojo

Founders:   Sampad Swain, Aditya Sengupta, Akash Gehani, Harshad Sharma

Industry: Fintech Software and Services Industry

Estimated Valuation: $200 Million

Instamojo is an on-demand payment startup success stories that enable entrepreneurs to develop, run, and extend their online business. With transactions becoming a vital part of any industry, Instamojo is developing ‘Payment Links,’ allowing companies to get started with online payment collection quickly.

Instamojo also provides a suite of services and products that allow sellers to create an online store, uncover insights into their store behavior, and further scale up their successful startups in India.

Fact: Instamojo has a customer base of 1200000 plus startup stories.

14. Unacademy

• Founders: Roman Saini, Gaurav Munjal, and Hemesh Singh

Industry: Education

• Estimated Valuation: $510 Million

Unacademy is a digital site that provides material for big competitive exams and delivers brief tutorials in videos on various topics that can be viewed free of charge. It enables prospective students to promote self-learning better through startup stories.

Partnering with the best minds and offering classes on any topic in different languages is the dream of the startup success stories in Unacademy. The entire community will benefit from these classes.

15. Nykaa.com

• Founders: Falguni Nayar

Industry: E-commerce

• Estimated Valuation: $750 Million

Nykaa is among the successful startups in India website with a range of beauty and health items for men and women. They also offer comprehensive content, product reviews, beauty how-to videos, expert articles, and e-beauty magazines. Nykaa goods are authentically purchased directly from startup stories manufacturers to have distribution experience.

From the Sanskrit word ‘Nayaka,’ which means an actress or a spotlight, Nykaa’s primary purpose is to celebrate every woman's star and be her trusty companion.

Fact: Nykaa is an Indian startup success stories brand that sells beauty, wellness, and fashion products.

16. MobiKwik

• Launch: 2009
• Founders: Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku
• Industry: Digital Wallets

Estimated Valuation: $1 Billion

MobiKwik is one of the successful startups in India by being the most significant mobile wallet for the redundancy of personal portfolios. Indian consumers can store money in a virtual wallet and then use it across channels (mobile, desktop, register, text, and IVR). It allows Indian consumers to pay utility bills and shop with registered traders in their wallets.

MobiKwik is an outstanding startup stories. Every penny in your pocket is well taken into consideration. Additional security settings on all mobile devices on which it operates can also be used.

• Founders: Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Agarwal, Dalvir Suri, Mukund Jha
• Industry: Consumer Service
• Estimated Valuation: $56.4 Million

Dunzo is a hyper-local startup stories delivery app that catches anything and everything in a city and delivers everything. Dunzo also runs a bike taxi service in Gurgaon and offers it in Bengaluru, Delhi, Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

These successful startups in India will change how you move things, shop, and never get to your house. The App links you to the closest seller that can order, receive, and deliver supplies from any shop or restaurant in the area.

Fact: The company's headquarters in Bangalore has over 1 million users.

18. RazorPay

• Founders: Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur
• Industry: Microcredit, Mobile payment, Payment system, and Financial Technology
• Estimated Valuation: $450 Million

Razorpay is a platform for successful startups in India to accept, process, and disburse their product suite of payments. It provides access to all modes of payment, including credit card, debit card, net banking, UPI, and popular wallets, including Jiosaw, Mobikwik, Airtel Money, PayZapp, and Ola Money.

Razorpay is the only converged payment system company in India that enables your startup stories to accept, process, and disburse payments through its software suite.

Launch: 2018

• Founders: Riteish malik
• Industry: Collaboration, Coworking, and Real Estate
• Estimated Valuation: $30 Million

Innov8 Coworking is a Y-Combinator-based startup success stories in India that support workspaces and community startups. They provide high-quality workspaces (managed private offices and coworking areas). The first Thought space in India is Innov8 Coworking, a successful startup in India.

They promote the participation of people from all walks of life, whether they be entrepreneurs, employees, freelancers, designers, or just willing to work in a highly competitive environment. They are presently based in Chennai, Noida, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chandigarh, and throughout India.

Fact: The Innov8 Space In DLF Cyber Hub is a fully managed office space startup story with 500 seats.

• Founders: Zishaan Hayath, Hemanth Goteti
• Industry: Education Industry
• Estimated Valuation: $38.3 Million

Toppr is among the first successful startups in India with post-school devices for personalizing learning. They support candidates in training for various colleges, boards, and rigorous exams.

They study student behavior and create adaptive paths with infinite combinations of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. This ensures every student's unique and personalized learning experience of startup stories.

Note: The Toppr startup success stories app is free for its users except for some specific video lectures.

21. Bombay Shaving Company

• Founders: Shantanu Deshpande, Raunak Munot, Deepu Panicker, and Rohit Jaiswal
• Industry: Personal Service
• Estimated Valuation: $494.2 Million

Bombay Shaving is a successful startup in India that focuses on developing a variety of shaving care, beard care, and skincare products. The startup stories brand specializes in men’s grooming, personal care, shampoo, beard care, skincare, and homemade soap.

Bombay Shaving Company started with the idea that shaving should be more than a worldly task for most men. Before, after, and after the shaving process, they installed a rubber device.

22. FirstCry

• Founders: Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha
• Industry: Retail Distributors
• Estimated Valuation: $100 Million

FirstCry is a baby and toy online startup stories website. More than 20000 products are from more than 250 major brands, such as Mattel, Ben10, Pigeon, Funskool, Hotwheels, Nuby, Farlin, Medela, Pampers, Disney, Cinderella, Gerber, Zapak, Mee Mee, etc.

It is among the successful startups in India with a high-quality online shopping experience, fast, reliable delivery service, and prompt customer care. It offers the best products and brands at the best price.

Fact:   FirstCry is Asia’s most extensive online shopping startup success story for kids and baby products.

• Founders: Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah
• Industry: Consumer Services
• Estimated Valuation: $2 Billion

Zomato offers customers web and mobile startup stories for searching, ordering, and discovering restaurants. It provides global information and online ordering about restaurants.

Furthermore, Zomato provides food delivery, table reservations, and premium membership services for restaurants to allow users to search, rate, and review restaurants. This also enables users to create successful startups in India networks for trustworthy recommendations for fellow food lovers.

Fact: The number of monthly users on Zomato is around 20 Million.

24. CarDekho

• Founders: Amit Jain
• Industry: Automotive Industry
• Estimated Valuation: $75 Million

CarDekho.com is India’s leading startup stories search engine for vehicles that allow consumers to purchase decent cars. This startup success stories website and application have great automobile content, including expert reviews of car brands and models that are in Indian hands, detailed information and prices, comparisons, and videos and pictures.

The organization has relations with several successful startups in India car suppliers, including more than 4000 car dealers and a variety of financial companies to promote the purchasing of cars.

Founders: Richa Kar

Industry: E-Commerce

Zivame is an online lingerie startup stories with hundreds of Indian designs. By type, brand, color, and size, customers can easily search the lingerie by identifying what to wear!

Zivame reflects its offline entrepreneur stories shopping experience with detailed pages of products, low-cost, quick shipping, and a customer-friendly trouble-free return policy. Whether you’re an Indian woman or a man, Zivame is about creating a shopping experience online startup success stories.

26. Ecom Express

Founders: K. Satyanarayana, Manju Dhawan, Sanjeev Saxena and A.Krishnan

Industry: Delivery/E-Commerce/Logistics

Ecom Express Private Limited is a startup stories that Indian Express Industry veterans promote. This startup's success stories have over 100 years of diverse and vibrant experience in the Indian Express Industry.

The entrepreneur stories are built to cater to the diverse needs of the rising electronic commerce market through leaps and bounds. There are no startup stories adequately prepared to serve the demands of this rapidly growing sector that are changing daily.

27. Urban Ladder

Founders: Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa

Estimated Valuation: $119 Million

Urban Ladder aims to create well-equipped, beautiful homes in Urban Indians for home solutions on startup stories. The exquisite range of furniture by Urban Ladder is soon becoming popular with shoppers in highway companies with over 1000 items and 25 categories, such as wardrobes, sofas, beds, and so on.

The furniture is carefully curated with design insights from the experienced design team of Urban Ladder and delivered by the proprietary logistics team of Urban Ladder startup success stories for safe door deliveries.

Fact: Urban Ladder is one of the best entrepreneur stories in this field, making furniture buying an enjoyable task.

28. PolicyBazaar.com

Founders: Alok Bansal, Avaneesh Nirjar, Manoj Sharma, Tarun Mathur, Yashish Dahiya

Industry: Auto Insurance/Commercial Insurance/Finance

PolicyBazaar operates an online life assurance startup stories that analyze financial products and compares them to general insurance. PolicyBazaar is a well-known startup success stories for purchasing people.

Its mobile insurance and comparison entrepreneur stories give the user information about products. Users can compare and analyze financial products, such as medical, life, travel, or motor insurance, ULIPs, and other investment products at low prices.

Fact: PolicyBazar accounts for almost 25% of life coverage in India and over 7% of the local health insurance startup stories in India.

29. JustDial

Launch: 1997

Founders: V.S. Mani

Industry: Information Services/Internet/Local/Search Engine

Estimated Valuation: $235 Million

JustDial provides users across India with local search startup stories on multiple platforms such as a website, a motive site, apps (Android, iOS, Windows), phones, and text (SMS). Just Dial Ltd is the number 1 startup success stories local search engine.

Justdial’s user entrepreneur stories have also begun ‘Search Plus.’ These apps are designed to make various daily tasks simple for users to perform and access through an app.

Note: On Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry platforms, Justdial Apps are available and can deliver mobile internet user-based startup stories on location.

30. Limeroad

Founders: Ankush Mehra, Manish Saksena, Prashant Malik, Suchi Mukherjee

Industry: E-Commerce/Fashion/Internet/Shopping

Estimated Valuation: $15 Million

Limeroad is a startup stories that brings you a love of products and gives you the possibility of creating your own space, taping into hidden talents, making your look and collections, and helping you to share this second opinion with friends in your creations.

We wanted to find LimeRoad as the digital startup success stories counterpart of the Grand Trunk Road in the 16th century. This road has changed the trade face of the Indian entrepreneur stories subcontinent.

31. Housing.com

Founders: Abhimanyu Dhamija, Abhishek Anand, Advitiya Sharma, Amrit Raj, Neeraj Bhunwal, Rahul Yadav, Ravish Naresh, Rishabh Agrawal, Sanat Ghosh, Saurabh Goyal, Snehil Buxy, Vaibhav Tolia

Industry: Internet/Online Portals/Real Estate

Estimated Valuation: $105 Million

Housing.com is the fastest-growing online real estate startup stories. They have created a unique property search startup success stories that fill the gaps left in the market due to simplifying the search for a home without fake listings and endless site visits.

Conducted by passionate troubleshooting professionals and backed by the world’s top investors, they are ready to be India’s most trusted entrepreneur stories.

Note: It can provide 3D models for each new project and deliver 360-degree views for each piece of land listed on Housing.com.

32. Epigamia

Founders: Ganesh Krishnamoorthy, Milap Shah, Rahul Jain, Rohan Mirchandani, Rohan Mirchandani, and Uday Thakker

Industry: Consumer/Fast-Moving Consumer Goods/Food and Beverage

Estimated Valuation: $13.9 Million

Epigamia is a premium natural Greek yogurt that promotes one cup of good living startup stories. They love the food at Epigamia and always find ways to get the best out of these startup success stories.

Greek yogurt was launched when Dahi was pressed for higher protein and infused with real fruit to stimulate taste buds. Since then, they have pushed the limits of what they can by creating goods that are tastier and better for their customers.

Note: Epigamia is an all-natural Greek yogurt entrepreneur stories that encourage one cup at a time, a safe way of life.

33. Bira 91

Founders: Ankur Jain

Industry: Brewing/Craft Beer/Food and Beverage/Wine And Spirits

Estimated Valuation: $246 Million

Bira 91 is a modern beer startup stories that provide the new world with flavorful beers. The startup success stories build an extensive product portfolio and push the global shift in products to more color and taste.

The company has five beers, Bira 91 White, Low Bitterness Wheat Beer, Bira 91 Blonde, Bira 91 Light, Bira 91 Low-Calorie Lunchtime, Strong, High Intensity, High Alcohol, and Bira 91 ‘The IPA,’ the first Indian IPA brewed and bottled. The company’s products have been designed to be of high-quality entrepreneur stories.

Fact: The 91 is derived from the country code you dial to India and are named initially after the Punjabi word for brother, Bira.

34. Vedantu

Founders: Anand Prakash, Pulkit Jain, Saurabh Saxena, Vamsi Krishna

Industry: EdTech/Education/Internet/Mobile/Mobile Apps/Tutoring

Estimated Valuation: $24 Million

Vedantu is an e-learning startup stories with an online platform for customized learning in real-time. It offers software startup success stories that connect tutors and students to one lesson for students online in real time.

Through Vedantu, they see how teaching and entrepreneur stories have been happening over the decades to reimagine and develop. Learning and education can change rapidly, and their goal in Vedantu is to speed up these changes.

Fact: The name ‘Vedantu’ also bears witness to its purpose.

Veda = ‘Knowledge’ and Tantu = Network.’

35. NoBroker

Founders: Akhil Gupta and Amit Agarwal

Industry: Commercial Real Estate/Mobile Apps/Property Management

NoBroker creates a peer-to-peer listing network for the efficiency of property transactions. The satellite allows a house to be bought, sold, and leased in the same place without charging brokerage fees.

NoBroker is a troubled real estate platform that allows the purchase/sale/rent of a house without paying any courier. NoBroker was started because we all felt it could not just be the way to find a new home to pay for reliable brokerage.

36. Chaayos

Founders: Nitin Saluja

Industry: Food and Beverage/Restaurants/Tea

Estimated Valuation: $40.8 Million

The chai adda, serving chai made freshly, is a contemporary interpretation of chaayos startup stories. Their focus is on helping your “Meri Wali Chai,” chai made precisely to the taste of their customers the minute they place their order, be it an adrak tulsi kadak chai or a paani Kam elaichi cinnamon chai.

With 12 add-ons startup success stories, its customers can make their chais in Chaayos in over 12,000 ways.

Note: Chaayos entrepreneur stories are currently present in Delhi, Mumbai, Noida, and Gurgaon.

37. BankBazaar.com

Founders: Adhil Shetty, Arjun Shetty, and Rati Shetty

Industry: E-Commerce/Finance/Insurance/Marketplace

Estimated Valuation: $280 Million

BankBazaar.com provides instantly customized online startup stories that offer instant rates on credit, mutual funds, and insurance products. You can search for these products on the Site or mobile app at once and compare and apply for them on this startup success story.

It has been designed with intelligent technology capabilities and integrated into the platform by more than 50 of India’s leading financial and insurance entrepreneur stories.

Fact: Consumers can track their application and troubleshoot problems through various channels such as the BankBazaar application, WhatsApp, Email, or Voice support.

38. Pee Safe

Founders: Srijana Bagaria and Vikas Bagaria

Industry: Fitness/Health Care/Wellness

Estimated Valuation: $20 Million

Pee Safe Toilet Seat Sanitizer startup stories Spray protects against germ-free and unsafe toiletries. It protects women against UTIs by spraying PEE SAFE on their toilets before use.

It should be a matter of no concern when you find a dirty public toilet while traveling or outside your house. Startup success stories Sprinkler on a seat ensures protection against illnesses such as UTI, gastroenteritis, or diarrhea.

Fact: PEE SAFE sanitizer entrepreneur stories are made of a rubbed IPA formulation which sanitizes the area within five seconds of use.

39. EaseMyTrip.com

Founders: Nishant Pitti, Rikant Pitti

Estimated Valuation: $211 Million

Easy Trip Planners Pvt. Ltd. (EaseMyTrip.com) is an online travel startup stories based in Patparganj Industrial Area, New Delhi. It covers flying tickets, reservations for hotels, rental cars, bus reservation,s and vacation packages of startup success stories.

The travel agency uses a Galileo-like computer booking system or sometimes books tickets directly from airlines. This entrepreneur stories offers both offline and online bookings for hotels and cars.

Fact: In places such as Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai, and the Maldives, the startup stories have their branches outside the world.

40. Bare Anatomy

Launch: 2019

Founders: Rohit Chawla and Sifat Khurana

Industry: Beauty/Health Care/Personal Health

Estimated Valuation: $1.15 Billion

Bare Anatomy is a women’s startup stories of next-gen personal care. Bare Anatomy is a perfect balance of heart and mind through innovative startup success stories supported by modern science, design, and creativity.

Starting with hair care products, including hair shampoos, hair oils, serums, and hairstylists, the entrepreneur stories begin with a view to revolutionizing the personal care and beauty industry.

Fact: ‘Bare’ means something basic and straightforward, without addition and ‘anatomy’ means studying something’s structure or internal functioning.

Founders: Aqib Mohammed and Shashwat Diesh

Industry: Consumer Goods

Estimated Valuation: $1 Million

Azah is a premium organic women’s wellness startup story. Azah sanitary pad entrepreneur stories resulted from wide-ranging research from thousands of Indian women with valuable feedback to help us create and develop a pad that solves their problems.

For example, 49 percent of women reported rash during their period in a survey of over 300 women. They have chosen to use organic cotton in their pads that do not irritate breathing.

Note: Azah Pads startup success stories are made of high-quality materials such as organic cotton and superabsorbent biodegradable products.

42. Milkbasket

Founders: Anant Goel, Anurag Jain, Ashish Goel, Ekwe Chiwundu Charles and Yatish Talavdia

Industry: Delivery Service/E-Commerce/Food and Beverage/Internet

Estimated Valuation: $ 50 Million

Milkbasket is a subscription micro delivery startup stories that every morning satisfies customer needs for daily dairy products and households. They deliver milk, bread, eggs, juices, butter, and other everyday items required daily, free of charge, right at the customer’s door.

The startup success stories were built on the unique Indian habit of delivering fresh milk daily at home. These entrepreneur stories are based in Haryana, India, but also provide to Hyderabad, Noida, Dwarka, and Bengaluru.

Launch: 2016

Founders: Sidharth Menda

Industry: Commercial Real Estate/Coworking/Property Management

Estimated Valuation: $350 Million

CoWrks is a first-class home-gathered coworking startup stories supplier built with love on Indian soil, creating spaces for startup success stories of every size.

Their sole objective is to bring together, fuel inspiration, and connect the largest community of working professionals worldwide. Its workspaces enable people to speak freely while they are doing some of the best work of their lives.

Note: With their standard and customized premium workspace solutions, CoWrks entrepreneur stories satisfy the various requirements of its members.

44. ZestMoney

Founders: Ashish Anantharaman, Lizzie Chapman, and Priya Sharma

Industry: Big Data/Consumer Lending/Financial Services/FinTech

Estimated Valuation: $56.9 Million

ZestMoney is a growing FinTech consumer lending startup story that use digital EMI without a credit card or a loan value. The startup success stories believe that everyone who holds a credit card or has a credit score should be able to pay at EMI.

ZestMoney was made available to millions of Indian consumers through mobile technology, digital banking, and AI. These entrepreneur stories receive support from world-leading digital finance investors such as PayU, Ribbit Capital, and Omidyar Networks.

Fact: ZestMoney is a real success stories where you can buy products on EMI from merchant partners without needing a credit card.

45. Treebo Hotels

Founders: Kadam Jeet Jain, Rahul Chaudhary, and Sidharth Gupta

Industry: Hospitality/Hotel/Internet

Estimated Valuation: $81.71 Million

Treebo Hotels are obsessed with offering affordable quality accommodation startup stories. The soothing shade of these trees has allowed many exciting discussions between fellow travelers.

They are too fond of conversation with their guests while serving them diligently in startup success stories. Treebo is the leading tech, cost-effective accommodation brand of Indian asset-light.

Fact: The name of Treebo entrepreneur stories is derived from the fig tree “Bo Tree,” which was used to illuminate Gautam Buddha.

Founders: Jiby Thomas and Pranay Chulet

Industry: Classifieds, E-Commerce, Internet, Marketplace, Rental Property

Estimated Valuation: $1.5 Billion

Quikr is online startup stories and free classifieds that help users sell, buy, rent, or discover anything across India.

Group members may come to their startup success stories and find an apartment and stay in, sell their old car, motorcycle, music device, tablet, or furniture, advertise their small entrepreneur stories, find a tuition class or take a break as a model or artist, attend a salsa party, or get an audience for a local show.

47. CureFit

Founders: Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal

Industry: Apps/Fitness/Health Care/Wellness

Estimated Valuation: $575 Million

CureFit is a health and fitness startup stories that provide fitness, nutrition, and mental well-being to digital and offline experiences to make fitness fun and easy. CureFit startup success stories give training sessions a whole new meaning with a range of group training classes led by trainers.

It enjoys training, everyday food is healthy and tasteful, with yoga and meditation mental fitness accessible and without hassle for medicine and lifestyle.

Note: CureFit is a health and fitness entrepreneur stories that provide fitness, nutrition, and mental well-being to digital and offline experiences.

48. Grofers

Founders: Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar

Industry: Delivery/ E-Commerce/ E-Commerce Platforms/Grocery/Retail

Estimated Valuation: $535.5 Million

Grofers is an online startup stories with low prices that get products across categories such as grocery, beauty and wellness, household care, baby care, and pet care delivered to your door. Grofers startup success stories supply more than 3,000 products every day at prices lower than supermarkets.

Grofers entrepreneur stories currently operate throughout India in a total of 26 cities: Agra, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mumbai, Mysore, Nagpur, Nashik, Pune, Rajkot, Surat, Vadodara, and Visakhapatnam.

49. Xpressbees

Founders: Amitava Saha and Supam Maheshwari

Industry: Delivery Service/E-Commerce/Internet/Logistics/Supply Chain Management

Estimated Valuation: $1.35 Billion

Xpressbees is a logistics e-commerce startup stories that offer its partners reliable logistics solutions. They are the fastest growing supplier of end-to-end supply chain solutions for express logistics startup success stories in India.

The entrepreneur stories offer customers comprehensive last miles, reverse logistics, collection of payments, drop shipping, supplier management, cross-border services, compliance services, and tailored software solutions.

Fact: Xpressbees startup stories deliver 6,00,000 packages in a day.

50. Delhivery

Founders: Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon, Sahil Barua and Suraj Saharan

Industry: E-Commerce/Logistics/Supply Chain Management

Delhivery supply chain services startup stories providing products and services to build confidence and improve consumer lives. Many engineers have started the company, including Bhavesh Manglani, Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon, Sahil Barua, and Suraj Saharan.

It provides a complete suite of startup success stories such as last-mile delivery, third-party and transit warehousing, reverses logistics, payment collection, vendor-to-warehouse shipping, and more. The entrepreneur stories are backed by Times Internet Ltd, which purchased a minority interest in the firm in June last year.

51. ShareChat

Founders: Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh, Bhanu Singh and Farid Ahsan

Industry: Internet/Mobile Apps/Social Network

Estimated Valuation: $460 Million

ShareChat is a social media startup stories in India. It offers only in Indian vernacular languages content consumption and sharing startup success stories to cover over 1.17 billion Indian wireless network users. It is provided in 15 Indian languages.

ShareChat has been designed for accessible content sharing from WhatsApp entrepreneur stories. It has been designed to work on even the worst links-” Wherever WhatsApp works-and, its “users initially sent mostly text updates.

Founders: Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee

Industry: E-Commerce/Food Delivery/Food Processing

Estimated Valuation: $525 Million

Rebel Foods Services (Faasos) is a food supply startup stories that disrupt how people order and get food on the phone. They serve around 10,000 customers every day who order through their mobile app, startup success stories, and this number is growing significantly every month.

An internet connection is all you need to run our mobile app or our website. You can check out “Eat Good, Eat Exciting” in 15 cities in India and over 200 locations. “There’s a wide selection of breakfast options, Indian food boxes, Chinese, South Indians, Biryani and Rice combos, wraps, etc.

Fact: The trick throughout the operation is how Faasos entrepreneur stories work with its many brands in a single ‘cloud kitchen.’

53. Pepperfry

Founders: Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah

Industry: E-Commerce/Furniture/Shopping

Estimated Valuation: $300 Million

Pepperfry is an online shopping startup stories, home, and lifestyle that sells products with cash on delivery facilities. The startup success stories aim to be a one-stop shop for clients looking to spice up their houses.

Pepperfry was founded by Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah in 2012 and is headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Customers can sell their used furniture and, in return, get gift cards from Pepperfry entrepreneur stories that can be redeemed for any purchase made on Pepperfry.

54. Dream11

Founders: Bhavit Sheth and Harsh Jain

Industry: Fantasy Sports/Mobile/Sports

Estimated Valuation: $2.25 Billion

Dream11 is the biggest sports game in India, with over 30 million fantasy cricket, soccer, and kabaddi players and NBA players. Dream11 offers Indian sports fans startup stories to demonstrate their knowledge of sports.

From the next matches, fans can create their real-life team, score points based on their on-the-field performance, and compete against other fans' startup success stories. Dream11 helps sports supporters to increase their participation and get closer to the sport they love as a team owner, not just an audience.

Note: You can access Dream11 entrepreneur stories via the web/mobile site or the Android and iOS apps.

55. redBus.in

Founders: Ashish Kashyap and Phanindra Sama

Industry: Public Transportation/Ticketing/Transportation

Estimated Valuation: $138 Million

RedBus is an online bus ticketing startup story with a presence in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia, and Peru, serving more than 5 million passengers startup success stories worldwide.

It simplifies worldwide travel for men. By creativity, RedBus specializes in finding alternatives. RedBus’ pride lies in the in-house talent of compelling, smart, passionate individual entrepreneur stories from different fields of expertise.

56. Mu Sigma

Launch: 2004

Founders: Dhiraj C Rajaram

Industry: Management consulting

Estimated Valuation: $1.5 billion

Mu Sigma’s startup stories go back to 2004 when it was launched. The Indian decision sciences company primarily offers its data analytics services. Founded by a former strategy consultant at Booz Alten Hamilton & PricewaterhouseCoopers Dhiraj Rajaram in 2004, Mu is an Indian privately owned firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Mu Sigma is among the fastest-growing companies globally and has raised a cumulative sum of 163m in its funding over the years.

Dhiraj Rajaram’s startup stories of beginning and running Mu Sigma is amongst the most inspiring startup stories of all time. While starting, Dhiraj had no idea that he could get into entrepreneurship. One reason why he entered the entrepreneurship segment is due to his unending urge to learn.

The three factors that made Dhiraj Rajaram’s startup stories successful are:

• His unending urge to learn
• To separate the noise from signals
• The belief that innovation in business is nothing but a chance

You can visit Mu Sigma’s site here .

57. Clear Car Rental

Founders: Sachin Kate

Industry: Car Rental Services

Startup stories play a key role in helping inspire aspiring entrepreneurs by going through the hardships and challenges faced by other entrepreneurs to build a successful startup. Sachin Kate, the founder of Clear Car Rental, started his journey of hustling by selling newspapers at a young age since money was a big challenge for him.

Later, when he was in class 11th, he got a job as an office boy at a computer institute. Steadily, Sachin’s interest in computer science started increasing, and he pursued B Sc in Computers. He later worked on various website-building projects for the travel and hospitality industry.

He went on to launch the Clear Car Rental site in July 2010, when competitors like Meru Radio cab service had already settled in the market for a couple of years. Step by step, Clear Car Rental established its place in the market and offers its services across 210+ cities in India today. It has marked its place in providing unique local and outstation travel solutions to its users.

Check the Clear Car Rental site here .

Founders: Bhupinder Singh

Industry: Financial Services

Valuation : $187.5 m

InCred is an online credit provider for personal & business loans. It relies on data analytics to ease and accelerate lending and provides various financial products, including home loans, car 95 vehicle loans, education loans, and loans for SMEs. The startup stories of InCred talk about how Bhupinder Singh formed the company. Singh used to head the Corporate Finance division of Deutsche Bank before founding InCred.

The InCred platform initially received Rs 500-600 crore funding from Rajan Pai, MD & CEO at Manipal Group, and Gaurav Dalmia, Founder & Chairman at Landmark Holdings, IDFC PE, & Alpha Capital. The platform’s startup stories continued with InCred Finance’s acquiring InstaPaisa.com, a fintech platform, in 2015. Paragon Partners later invested Rs 25 crore in the company in March 2017.

Note: InCred aims to solve the credit problems of all its consumers with a focus on Consumer loans, Home loans, Education loans, and SME Lending.

Founders: Vidit Aatrey & Sanjeev Barnwal

Industry: Social e-commerce

Meesho is an Indian social e-commerce platform founded by IIT Delhi alumni Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal. The startup stories of Meesho are as unique as the concept of Meesho itself. Based in Bengaluru, Meesho enables small businesses and individuals to start their online stores via social channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Autrey and Barnwal initially created FashNear and later pivoted to Meesho, a short-term meri shop, in 2015 end.

The startup stories for Meesho started when Aatrey and Barnwal met Anu, a Bengaluru housewife running her offline boutique by her name. Anu was passionate about her business and used the most readily available technique to expand her business- WhatsApp. She would buy her inventory and stock from suppliers through WhatsApp, who would send her pictures if a new collection on WhatsApp. Meesho’s startup stories adopted the entire strategy to build their platform for local businesses.

Note: Meesho already has over one crore resellers earning over Rs 25k per month by reselling on its platform.

Check Meesho’s site here .

60. ShareChat

Founders:  Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan

Industry: Social Media

ShareChat is an Indian social media platform developed by Mohalla Tech Private Limited and founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh, and Farid Ahsan. The social media platform has over 60 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages.

While the startup stories for such platforms have a usual curve, ShareChat’s popularity increased massively in India after the ban of Chinese products and apps, including ShareChat’s biggest competitor- TikTok.

ShareChat is a regional content platform allowing Indians to use the power of the internet without going through the English language barrier. It aims at bringing local, relevant content to smartphone users across India in Indian languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, and Malayalam. The platform now has over 160 million registered users and is on its way to becoming the most preferred social media platform in India.

You can visit ShareChat here .

61. KillerLaunch

Founder: Heena Vinayak

Industry: Information Technology, Internet

Estimated Valuation:

KillerLaunch.com is a platform aimed at launching careers in top startups in India. It allows recruiters to list job/internship openings, which job-seekers can explore and use to submit their applications.

As a user, you can use their perfectly designed filters to find a job you’ve looking for accurately. You can set filters according to the salary/stipend you wish to work for.

Fact: KillerLaunch allows you to work with leading startups in India. Find a job or an internship with the startup you’ve been dreaming of!

As long as you are looking for startup jobs, KillerLaunch will never fail you. Either find or start your own, KillerLaunch has it all!

62. Wow! Momo

Founders: Sagar J. Daryani, Binod K. Homgai

Industry: Food and beverage/ Fast food restaurant

Estimated Valuation: $120 million

Wow! Momo, India’s fastest growing momo chain started by classmates Sagar and Binod, began selling steamed momos from their six by six kiosk in Springdale Spencer in 2008. The food chain started from a garage in Kolkata, India.

Wow! Momo, an Indian chain of fast-food restaurants, started with a meager investment of Rs. 30,000 INR to Rs.860 Crore INR.

The company has expanded to Kolkata, Noida, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Chennai, Lucknow, Delhi, Bengaluru, Cuttack, Puri, Kochi, Bhubaneshwar, and Kanpur. Pam-fried momos became their USP. Serving delicious momos is their agenda.

Fact: Wow! Momo offers 16 different varieties of momos for vegetarians and non-vegetarians. For vegetarians, Wow! Momo offerings include corn and cheese, among others. They offer chocolate momos as well!

63. AddressHealth

Founders: Anand Laxman, Anoop Radhakrishnan

Industry: Healthcare

Estimated Valuation: $1.5 Million

AddressHealth is India’s first one-stop-shop pediatric primary healthcare service provider. The company is a pioneer in this field. Today, the company became the largest school health provider with its School Health program. Also, they run several Child Speciality Clinics. Recently, the company completed ten years of excellent healthcare service.

However, it is conducting several projects to complete medical examinations of students from head to toe.

Fact: Grand College Canada awards AdressHealth as “The Stars in Global Health-7”.

64. Flyrobe

Founders: Shreya Mishra, Pranay Surana, Tushar Saxena

Industry: Fashion

Estimated Valuation:   $2 million

Flyrobe is an on-demand wardrobe service that lets consumers rent clothes at a fraction of the retail price. Its service includes three-hour local deliveries and pickups. Flyrobe has been endorsed by 20 Bollywood celebrities on social media, which has helped to remove the stigma of used clothing.

The startup has raised $7 million from IDG Ventures, Sequoia Capital , and several angel investors.

Fact: Flyrobe also offers a brand new men’s collection, including jackets from international; brands, suits, and tuxedos traditional kurta pajamas and sherwanis sets from the best Indian designers.

65. Jumbotail

Founders: Ashish Jhina

Industry: Marketplace and business

Estimated Valuation: $12.7 million

Jumbotail was founded in 2015 by Standford University batchmates Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina. Jumbotail connects Kirana stores with brands and producers via its marketplace. It claims to serve 30,00 Kirana stores via its full-stack e-commerce model consisting of its B2B marketplace platform, warehouses, last-mile delivery supply chain network, and a fintech platform for payment credit solutions to Kirana store owners.

66. DocTalk

Founders: Krishna Chaitanya Aluru, Akshat Goenka, Vamsee Chamakura

Estimated Valuation: $5 million

DocTalk is a doctor-patient engagement platform. This company mainly gifts doctors to develop better relationships with their patients, which causes a better quality of care.

67. SmallCase

Founders: Vasanth Kamath, Rohan Gupta, Anugrah Shrivastava

Industry: Stocks and exchange-traded funds

Estimated Valuation: $8 million

This fast-growing business in India is bringing a simplified investing approach to the growing middle class in India. In retrospect, they are very similar to other investment companies growing fast, such as Acrons and Stash.

Fact: The Bengaluru-based startup provides users with a professionally built basket of stocks called ‘small cases,’ allowing them to invest in portfolios of broker-partner stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs)

68. InstaVans

Founders: Vinay Goyal

Industry: Transport and Vehicle

Estimated Valuation: $2 million

InstaVans model transforms the conventional model of shippers spending hours calling up various truck operators to find trucks with free capacity while truckers struggle to market their availability. By offering a model that shippers an on-demand platform for shippers and truckers alike.

Fact: Instavan’s addressable market is estimated at $15 billion, or about Rs 97,000 crore a year, with an average cost of Rs 1,800 per trip. More than two million registered small trucks transport more than 1.5 million tonnes of goods.

Founders: Prashant Tandon

Industry: Pharmacy

Estimated Valuation: $36 million

1mg is an online pharmacy network and generic medicine engine. It allows users to find information about medicines prescribed by doctors and buy them. Users can discover drugs by categories under ailments, classes, companies, and brands. Its mission is to make healthcare accessible, understandable, and affordable for a billion Indians.

Founders: Anupam Agarwal, Karan Jain

Industry: Car rental

Estimated Valuation: $23.3 million

Revv is an Indian car-rental startup that offers multiple options to meet all your self-drive needs. The company was founded in 2015 and currently operates in 11 cities in India: Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi NCR, Chandigarh , Jaipur, Vizag, Mysore, and Coimbatore.

To date, Revv has a fleet of around 1,000 vehicles and claims to have served around 300,000 users. It has its main office located in Gurgaon, India.

71. TravelTriangle

Founders: Sankalp Agarwal, Sanchit Garg, Prabhat Gupta

Industry: Travel and Tourism

Estimated Valuation: $34.9 Million

TravelTriangle is an exciting new way of buying trips online in India. One of India’s best-growing companies, TravelTriangle, promotes local travel agents and gets you the best flights from them. They have created a marketplace where travelers can interact with local travel agents. That same marketplace also empowers local travel agents to compete online with big fishes…

Fact: According to the VCCEdge report, Venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) funds invested $115.69 million across 13 deals in the travel segment in 2014. In 2013, there were nine transactions of $8.2 million.

72. BiggBang

Launch: 2020

Founder: Applancer Services Pvt Ltd

Industry: Coworking spaces and office spaces

Estimated Annual Valuation:

BiggBang provides perfect coworking spaces and office spaces for rent. The coworking space is located in three cities: Chandigarh, Mohali, and Panchkula. BiggBang has many top-level facilities, which make it one of the best coworking spaces to work!

Recently BiggBang has also launched a young startup program to provide free spaces to startups in return for a small share in their revenue.

BiggBang also provides hot-desking facilities and private office spaces.

Visit their website here.

73. Lenskart

Founder: Peyush Bansal

Industry: Opticals, eyewear retail chain

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 310.9 crore

Lenskart was founded by Peyush Bansal, who launched Lenskart in 2010, and Amit Chaudhary and Sumeet Kapahi in 2010. Peyush, a former Microsoft employee, also founded Valyoo Technologies, a parent company of Lenskart.

Lenskart offers more than 5,000 styles of frames and 45 unique types of high-quality lenses. The latest eyewear trends are an homage to a group of interior designers and styles that keep tabs on the latest trends.

Founder: Naveen Tewari

Industry: Mobile Ad network

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 384.21 crore

The founder and CEO of InMobi mobile advertising network giant, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is a trained engineer, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked for McKinsey’s information company.

Today, InMobi can strike a chord with itself and call itself a global company. Besides India, it has offices and operations in Australia, Taiwan, the US, UK, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, China, and more. Although it only launched in China in late 2011, Naveen described InMobi as “one of China’s largest advertising networks.”

75. Zerodha

Founder: Nitin Kamath

Industry: Stock brokerage company

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 850 crores

The founder of Zerodha, “Nithin Kamath,” before founding Zerodha, worked at the call center at night and traded in the morning hours. At the age of 17, he was introduced to the stock market by his friend and has since started trading.

The firm did not spend money on advertising or marketing its company. They do not make ads.

They make money by charging a lump sum of Rs. Twenty futures, options, and internal trade. In contrast, some competitors charge more than this based on the percentage of sales sold. Its business model in which it operates is ‘low margin – high volume’.

76. Gradeup

Founder: Shobhit Bhatnagar, Vibhu Bhushan, and Sanjeev Kumar

Industry: The education sector

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 30 crore

Split distance is a freemium platform. Anyone preparing for the competitive exams can download the app and visit the website to prepare for the appropriate exams – they can join the community – share with peers and mentors to answer their doubts, and access the preparation like previous years' papers, etc.

Additionally, some paid services on the platform such as)) Green card – Purchase Test series and b) Classroom – Live classrooms, aspirants who can add extra value to their preparation.

77. OkCredit

Launch: 2017

Founder: Aditya Prasad

Industry: Online payment merchant

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 654.4 million

OkCredit is a solution based on small business owners and their customers to record credit/payment transactions nationwide. Using a computer, OkCredit reduces the merchant’s burden of keeping and counting paper accounts. It also allows them to send group notifications to customers during delays or missed payments.

78. NinjaCart

Founder: Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK, Ashutosh Vikram

Industry: Fresh farm supply chain

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 66.27 crore

Ninjacart was discovered in 2015 as a B2C hyperlocal food delivery organization. Their main goal is to help retailers take their items online and deliver quality food to consumers less than 60 minutes from ordering scales. This was still a novel concept back then.

Initially, about 7,000 farmers were on its platform, but on average, 2,000 transactions every month. The production arrives daily between 4.00 pm and 6.00 pm, with some farmers traveling up to 400 km to make the drop.

79. Bewakoof.com

Founder: Prabhkiran Singh

Industry: Ecommerce clothing

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 400 crore

Bewakoof is a fashion brand that lives to create creative and high-quality clothing for a fashionable, modern Indian. Bewakoof was introduced to the goal of creating impact by innovation, honesty, and thinking.

Bewakoof.com started with an investment of Rs 30,000 and received a seed subsidy after six months of work.

80. GoaBrewing Co.

Founder: Suraj Shenai

Industry: Brewery, beverages

Estimated Annual Valuation: Rs. 125 crore

From choosing the most sophisticated styles to presenting them to the entire quirkier packaging, they had my heart from the moment I set my eyes on the Eight Finger Eddie IPA. Pineapple Saison follows next, and to me, these two are bees made with great skill. Sensitivity is only available in Goa at the moment. The good – is there is no need to finish the beach kings on the beach.

81. BulkMRO

Founders: Devang Shah, Gaurang Shah

Estimated Valuation: $12.7mn/year

Bulk MRO is a Mumbai-based startup that provides a one-stop-shop industrial product solution to the marketplace. This business has a B2B model. Launched in 2015, it has already raised revenue of 25 crores from seed funding.

Devang claims that Bulk MRO acts as a ‘big seller’ to large corporate customers and controls the entire MRO pool or indirect retailers through their platform. It eliminates several customer inefficiencies, including decreased order durability, GST compliance, and malfunction.

Founders: Naveen Tewari

Industry: AI

Glance, a major marketing component of InMobi Group, uses AI to provide personal information to its users. The service replaces the blank screen with relevant local news, news, and unusual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon startup, which enabled it to launch short-form videos on the platform. Google also invests in Roposo.

It has 33 million active users working every month. The users can spend about 20 minutes consuming content in many forms in more than ten languages ​​in the app daily.

Founders: Vijay Arisetty

Industry: Mobile application

Estimated Valuation: $170 million

MyGate has allowed users to opt out of data-sharing agreements with applications such as Swiggy and Dunzo with the “pre-approval” of delivery staff. The app no ​​longer authorizes visitors to bring their cell phone numbers to the gate if they are permitted to enter.

MyGate has voluntarily implemented the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards, considered the most comprehensive data privacy laws. Compliance with the GDPR is not required for companies operating within India.

Founders: Amit Gupta

Industry: E-vehicles

Estimated Valuation: $14million

Yulu was founded to tackle traffic congestion and its product – the air pollution it causes. “One-third of the air pollution in the city is caused by cars. In Yulu, our aim is not only to reduce traffic congestion but also to do something about road pollution,” said Amit Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Yulu Bicycles.

85. CleverTap

Founders: Suresh Kondamudi

Estimated Valuation: $35million

CleverTap has served over 8,000 customers globally. It helps the websites to grow and maintain their users for a lifetime by several. Engaging and retention programs are offered by various means.

Many renowned companies like Vodafone, Star, Sony, Domino’s Pizza, Gojek, Cleartrip, and BookMyShow have been known to use CleverTap to engage and retain customers on several sites. The startup has opened its headquarters in Singapore and planning to expand further.

Founders: Akshay Joshi

Industry: Environmental Intelligence

Estimated Valuation: $6 billion

Ambee is an Indian-based startup that provides real-time environmental status regarding the weather, humidity, temperature, UV, and all such parameters. It provides all such information to the businesses that work depending on weather parameters like the agricultural sector.

According to WHO, there should be a weather sensor every square kilometer to measure the weather accurately, but that can’t be seen in India. Hence the company has come up to help such startups by providing open data sources.

87. Doubtnut

Founders: Aditya Shankar

Industry: Educational app

Estimated Valuation: $ 50 million

Doubnut is an online platform to help students with their academic doubts and classes. Students facing any problem while solving any question have .to upload the photograph of their problem simply, and they will get the answer to their doubts within 10 seconds with a full video explanation.

88. Skillsmatic

Founders: Dhvanil Sheth

Estimated Valuation: Rs. 60 crore

Skillsmatic develops new educational products to build basic skills in young children aged 3 to 9 through fun learning techniques. The firm delivers products such as writing and erasing work mats, educational games, and STEM toys. Their main aim is to help the kids learn and apply key concepts throughout the play. It is one of the 17th launches from Surge’s first team.

Founders: Krishna Kumar

Industry: Agribusiness

CropIn has merged the agriculture sector with technology and generates AI-based data to provide SaaS solutions to various Agri-business worldwide.

Using the latest AI, Machine Learning, and Satellite Imaging, CropIn creates a network of all these stakeholders, empowering clients such as banks, insurance companies, government, development agencies, agricultural companies, agricultural enterprises, farm machinery companies, food processors, and vendors to analyze and interpret data to get real-time insights on static plants.

90. Avaada Energy

Founders: Vineet Mittal

Industry: Energy production

Estimated Valuation: USD 15 million

Avaada Energy is a startup with an independent energy producer (IPP) for renewable energy projects. It is a Mumbai-based firm and a green energy company that promotes sustainable energy through its use and open access solutions in the solar, wind, roof, and hybrid markets. The company works with various businesses, supporting them in realizing business objectives through environmental sustainability programs and social commitments, producing beneficial results.

Founders: Sachin Bhatia

Industry: Shopping Network

BulBul is an online shopping app, and customers can use the video feature for shopping purposes. It is based in Gurugram and has a motive to make online shopping convenient and social-friendly by helping the customers make shopping easy.

The customers don’t have to read the product description and can simply see the video of it in several languages. It serves to help the women of the country with easy and convenient shopping.

92. Skyroot Aerospace

Founders: Pawan Kumar Chandana

Industry: Aeronautics

Estimated Valuation: $15 million

Skyroot aerospace is an India-based startup that has successfully launched its missile in the sky. It has now become the first private company to build an indigenous rocket engine on its own!

The Hyderabad-based startup aims to make India independent by building homemade missiles. It was founded by two former ISRO scientists, Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka. It also builds small satellite launch vehicles.

93. Hansel.io

Founders: Varun Ramamurthy Dinakar

Industry: Deep tech

Estimated Valuation: $5.4million

Hansel.io is a B2B startup that helps resolve issue like app hanging without updating the app. It provides a convenient speed for an app to work to have a seamlessly fast experience.

The developers can fix any crash using various advanced tools like hotfix and diagnosis from a single point.

94. Streak AI

Founders: Harsha M

Estimated Valuation: $1.3 million

Now traders can create algorithms with Streak AI to generate trading signals without coding! Streak AI has claimed to be one of the few sites worldwide where users can generate unique algorithms to create trading signals. Hence buying and selling stocks have become easy with Streak AI!

95. Terraview

Founders: Prateek M Srivastava

Industry: Image processing

Estimated Valuation: $815,000

A SaaS-based startup, Terraview helps by providing drones and AI-based image-building solutions that help maintain vineyards across the country.

Terraview’s advanced tools help farmers to detect and analyze areas of canopy cover, soil hydration, weather prognosis, pruning, and detection of bacteria and fungus, and pest infestations, which can’t be done normally without such tools.

Founders: Nikhil Tripathi

Industry: B2B agriculture

Estimated Valuation: $200billion

Bijak is a B2B agribusiness platform that offers buyers and sellers better prices, more operating costs, and better performance. The Gurgaon-based company ensures immediate loan disbursement, reduces costs, eliminates waste of resources and a convenient payment channel, and operates as a bookkeeping app.

Bijak aims to bring accountability and transparency to agricultural prices through a buyer/seller rating system based on real-time transaction data. Speaker users can use those standards to identify and trade with trusted partners.

Founders: Heshan Fernando

Estimated Valuation: Not disclosed.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has been stuck in their homes. This has made hospital consultations for people a bit difficult as people are hesitant to visit hospitals due to fear of catching the virus. oDoc is a new telemedicine app that conveniently helps people consult a doctor over audio, video, or texts in their homes’ safe environment.

Download the oDoc app and consult the doctor about your health problems.

98. Epigamia

Founders: Rohan Mirchandani

Industry: Food; Greek-yogurt

Estimated Valuation: INR 110 Crore

Who doesn’t loves yogurt? Epigamia was launched in 2008, and since then, the startup has acted as a game-changer for the industry. The firm has launched yogurt in many flavors and variants, ensuring everyone falls in love with it!

The Mumbai-based firm has also been endorsed by popular celebrities like Deepika Padukone and has generated many funds in several rounds.

99. Nemocare

Founders: Pratyusha Pareddy

Estimated Valuation: $1 million

NemoCare is a startup with the main motive to prevent infant and maternal mortality due to various underlying conditions. From a planned blueprint, device, and performance, NemoCare smart baby monitor has embedded technology in its pocket and is supported by a team of user experience and designers of a user interface (UX / UI), software developers, and embedded engineers.

This device also provides comfort in the form of haptic vibrations in a child’s foot, as a first step towards controlling stress when an apneic episode is detected, assisting physicians in emergency emergencies.

Founders: Srinivas (Vasu) Sriramdas

Industry: Online training

Estimated Valuation: $4billion

Edyst helps college students and working professionals by providing them training via online video classes. The site currently has two popular and high-demand courses that ensure selection in MNCs like TCS and Infosys.

The other courses aim to help the student for companies like Amazon and Uber that can help them make at least $126 million a month.

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions about Startup Success Stories

1. do you need to study business to have startup success stories.

No, you do not need to study business as a subject to build a successful startup. However, that doesn’t mean you can start a business without any knowledge of the market. While starting a startup, it is imperative to study the market trends to build strong startup success stories .

2. Is starting a YouTube channel a startup?

If this question had been asked ten years ago, some would have laughed. But today, with advancing technology and digitalization, many individuals are starting YouTube channels with the only aim of earning money. Yes, a YouTube channel can be considered as a startup, especially one started by internet entrepreneurs. YouTube channels with successful startup stories are usually the ones that function as a whole company and produce content for their YouTube channel .

3. Are their startup success stories about YouTube channels?

Many YouTubers have contributed to building a strong digital community in our countries. Their YouTube channels are startup success stories for many and have been able to accumulate a following of millions.

Some of the startup success stories of YouTube channels are of:

• BB Ki Vines
• Sandeep Maheshwari
• Technical Guruji
• Mostly Sane
• Flying Beast
• Mumbiker Nikhil

4. How does yourstory contribute to making your startup stories?

Successful startup stories are not made in a day. They are yourstory of the highs and lows you faced in your entrepreneurial journey that make startup success stories. These are the startup success stories of inspiring entrepreneurs who paved the way of innovation and dreams to build an empire.

Startups are taking over the world with their innovation and improved convenience, and these 12 Indian startups have succeeded in the cut-throat competition in the market amongst different brands. The greatest lesson from these startup success stories is to have the strong willpower to give up.

BurgerGPT: Redefining the Burger Experience in India with Founder Pavas Ahuja

Sharechat: india's own social media giant - a comprehensive walkthrough, prescription for disruption: practo's controversial encounter with india's healthcare sector, charging up a revolution: ather energy - the indian startup that's electrifying the two-wheeler industry, unlocking startup & business success by rahu with astrologer sahil kohli, ftc chair lina khan: a new approach to big techs, apple’s new venture: on its way towards an icon for ai, meta halts ai training in europe amid regulatory scrutiny.

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Crafting Compelling Narratives: How to Write a Business Case Study

June 13th, 2024 by JWU

Working in the business world, there is a lot that you need to know. It is not just about the technical aspects of running a business and handling finances, but marketing and beyond. One of the most versatile and useful skills you can develop as a business professional is that of being able to write a simple business case study. These can be powerful marketing tools that can help you build your brand’s reputation, increase customer loyalty, and demonstrate your brand’s unique value proposition.

So, what is a case study in business and why does it matter? We are covering all of this, as well as tips on how to write a business case study, below.

What Is a Business Case Study?

Specifically, a  business case study  refers to a publication that covers how a company or brand responded to a specific problem or situation in a successful way. For example, a case study might explain how a company’s services helped a client solve a problem or achieve a desired outcome. These case studies can then be published on business websites, blogs, and even shared on social media as a form of effective marketing.

In many ways, a business case study is a cohesive combination of brand information and customer testimonials that can help promote a company’s products/services in a positive light.

Why Are Business Case Studies Important?

Business case studies are important for businesses of all sizes. When they are well written, these publications can help showcase a brand’s unique expertise while building trust with clients. Likewise, these case studies can demonstrate the potential real-world results that clients can expect when they work with your business. This is often more persuasive than making simple claims alone.

Common Elements:

The exact elements of a business case study can vary based on the exact scenario and products/services being covered. However, most successful business case studies will include most or all these components:

• A compelling storyline
• Client testimonials or interviews
• A clear call to action
• Visuals or other presentations of data

Why Writing Business Case Studies Is Important for Your Organization

There are several reasons as to why business professionals should be able to write compelling case studies as part of their everyday jobs. Let’s dive into why writing is so crucial here:

Showcase Your Value Proposition

First, business case studies can be extremely effective when it comes to showcasing your brand’s unique value proposition. Case studies can help demonstrate how your brand has successfully addressed specific pain points with examples and tangible results.

Build Credibility

Meanwhile, business case studies can also be an excellent way to build credibility for your brand in a way that is more compelling and persuasive than more “traditional” marketing strategies. This is because with a business case study, you can use real-world examples to show potential clients first-hand what your company’s products/services can do for them.

Differentiate Yourself

Writing and publishing business case studies can also help your company set itself apart from its competitors in any space. This is because a professionally written business case study will showcase the real value of your brand, proving that you are not just another company making promises. Instead, a case study provides real-world examples and applications that demonstrate your brand’s history of success.

Multiple Use Cases

When it comes to marketing tools, a business case study is also one of the most versatile options out there. Even once a business case study is written and published, it can be repurposed for any number of applications and content types. From a single case study, for example, you might be able to reuse the content for your company’s website, social media page, sales presentations, and much more.

Steps for Writing an Effective Business Case Study

Now that you have a better understanding of what a business case study entails and why these are such crucial tools for your business, you may be wondering where to start when it comes to writing one. Writing effective business case studies is something that will take some time and practice on your part. Still, there are some tips and best practices you can follow to write better case studies today.

Client Selection

First, understand the importance of selecting the right client to highlight for your case study. You will want to make sure that you choose a case with a clear problem, a compelling solution you offered, and quantifiable results. From there, you will need to reach out to the client personally and make sure they are willing to participate in any interviews or write a testimonial as needed.

Get Client Buy-In

Of course, it is not enough to get a client to agree to participate. Ideally, you will want a client enthusiastic about being part of the case study. This will ensure that you get the best content possible when it comes to quotes, data approval, and the like. Not sure where to begin with client buy-in? Refer to some of your happiest clients, including those who have left your company positive reviews online, and go from there.

The Storytelling Approach

Another critical component of an effective business study is storytelling. With great storytelling, your finished case study will be more of a narrative and not just a list of facts. As you craft the storyline for your narrative, try to include the following components:

• The Challenge – What pain point did the client face?
• The Solution – How did your company’s product or service address it? This section should be as specific and in-depth as possible.
• The Results – What was the outcome of your company working with the client? This section should contain quantifiable metrics and the impact your involvement had on the client’s business.
• Testimonials – Being able to incorporate direct client quotes can add a lot of authenticity to your case study.

Keep It Focused

When writing a business case study, it is also essential to keep your document as focused as possible. At the same time, be careful not to overpromise or include absolutes that could mislead potential clients.

Visual Appeal

A business case study is not compelling if nobody is reading it. This is why it is key to break up larger blocks of text with plenty of eye-catching visuals. This adds visual interest and is more likely to keep readers engaged. Whenever possible, be sure to incorporate relevant images, infographics, and other visuals to break up chunks of text.

Have a Strong Call to Action

Finally, do not forget the clear call to action. Do not assume that readers will be able to read your mind and take the next step on their own. Instead, clearly guide readers on what you want them to do after reading your case study, whether it is reaching out to you, requesting a quote, or signing up for an email list.

Beyond the Basics: Tips for Excellence

In addition to the above best practices for crafting a compelling business case study, there are a few additional tips you can follow to take your writing to the next level.

Tailor to Your Target Audience

Whenever possible, try to write in a way that targets the most specific audience in your case study. Of course, this requires you to have a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what their specific pain points are. From there, you can speak their language and address their most pressing concerns to yield results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Business case studies can also be an excellent opportunity to improve your company’s  SEO . As you write your case study, try to naturally incorporate target keywords as much as possible. This way, when it comes time to publish your case study on your website or blog, you will also have the potential to improve your search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your site.

Promote Your Case Studies

Finally, understand that even once your case study is published, your work is not done. Take time to promote and share your case studies as much as possible, even going as far as to repurpose them into different content mediums from time to time. By including business case studies in your toolkit and sharing them actively, you can get as much mileage as possible out of them.

Sharpen Your Business Acumen at JWU

Now you know what is a case study in business. So, when carefully crafted and thoughtfully executed, a business case study can work wonders when it comes to increasing customer loyalty and building a positive reputation for your brand among stakeholders and potential clients. Of course, writing a business case study can be easier said than done. This is why it is so important to gain practice in business writing.

A formal education in business can help you gain the practical skills you need to write compelling cast studies and take your career to the next level. At Johnson & Wales University, we’re proud to offer both an  online bachelor’s in Business Administration  and an  online MBA program  to help you take your education in the right direction. For more information about completing your degree online, complete the  Request Info form , call 855-JWU-1881 , or email  [email protected] .

By clicking Get Started below, I consent to receive recurring marketing/promotional e-mails, phone calls, and SMS/text messages from Johnson & Wales University (JWU) about any educational/programmatic purpose (which relates to my inquiry of JWU) at the e-mail/phone numbers (landline/mobile) provided, including calls or texts made using an automatic telephone dialing system and/or artificial/prerecorded voice messages. My consent applies regardless of my inclusion on any state, federal, or other do-not-call lists. Consent is not a condition for receipt of any good or service. Carrier charges may apply. Terms and conditions apply .

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Subscribe for exclusive access, what these 4 startup case studies can teach you about failure.

Written by Jonathan Chan | December 6, 2020

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Failure hurts.

Watching something you’ve poured endless amounts of time and energy in, only to see it crumble before you will hurt like hell. It’ll be like a physical punch to the gut, and it will paralyze you. It’s no wonder that entrepreneurs avoid failure like the plague.

A startup can go under for a variety of reasons. While founders can stand around and point fingers at each other, attribute it to forces outside of their control, or just blame bad luck. The reality is that startup failure is from a refusal to acknowledge problems until the ship is already sinking.

The reality of the situation is you are more likely to fail than you are to succeed. If you’re defining startup failure as the inability to deliver on the projected return of investment, then 95% of startups are failures.

But there is no greater teacher than failure.

If you’re going to be an entrepreneur then you better get used to failing, it will become an inevitable part of your life. Don’t run from it, embrace it, and see what lessons you can learn from it.

By analyzing the post-mortems of various failed startups here are the expected and not-so-expected reasons why they failed and what you can learn from their mistakes. Watch out for those icebergs.

Be Wary of the Pivot

Fab was once known as ‘ the world’s fastest-growing startup ’ and was valued at over at $1 billion before it ultimately crashed.

Fab underwent a variety of changes from an LGBT social network, to a daily flash sales site, to ‘the world’s design store’, before finally being sold off to PCH, for a reported $15 million in cash and stock .

Fab is both a success story and a cautionary tale to entrepreneurs about the risks of pivoting. A pivot generally means that a business is looking to find a fresh perspective and vision to prevent itself from growing stagnant.

Hypothetically a startup should constantly be evaluating data: measuring the market, contemplating new strategies, testing new products. A pivot allows a business to forge ahead in a new direction when either the opportunity is clear, or the current strategy is failing.

“Once we made the decision to pivot, we committed to doing one thing and doing it well. No distractions.” – Jason Goldberg, cofounder and CEO of Fab.

Fab was originally known as Fabulis an LGBT social networking site before pivoting wonderfully into a daily flash sales site for independent artists. Cofounders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer admitted to themselves that Fabulis wasn’t turning out to be the success that they hoped, being stuck at 150,000 users for the last few months. It was time to pivot.

The data they had gathered from Fabulis illuminated a real hole in the design market. People were looking for an easy and accessible way to purchase unique and interesting designerwear.

So, they pivoted and became a daily flash sales site for designer housewares, accessories, clothing, and jewelry. The move paid off with Fab growing to over 10 million users and reportedly generating more than $200,000 every day.

Two years later after the initial pivot, despite a shaky business model, Fab decided to pivot again. This time looking to become a designer alternative to Amazon and IKEA. Coupled with a failed attempt to expand into the European market, Fab began its spectacular fall.

READ MORE: Is Your Business Not Making Enough Money? Here’s How to Fix It

The first and foremost requirement for a pivot to truly succeed is it must solve a major problem. At the time Fab was a hugely successful company, despite the fact that the daily flash sales model wasn’t sustainable in the long-term, choosing to drastically scale down their product offerings moved too far from their identity as a designer store. Fab ultimately created another problem while prematurely trying to solve another.

It’s only natural for a struggling startup to pivot, especially when the alternative is to remain stagnant and unprofitable. However as Fab demonstrated, pivoting for the sake of pivoting, or to expand on a shaky business model will almost always guarantee disaster for any entrepreneur out there. No matter how much money you’ve raised.

READ MORE: How Competitive Collaboration Can Boost Your Business

Too Ambitious, Too Fast

At its peak, in 1999, it was valued at $1.2 billion. Two years later they filed for bankruptcy, laid off 2000 employees, and closed up shop. Webvan could potentially be considered a startup ahead of its time, their vision was a home-delivery service for groceries, where customers could order their groceries online, but that’s not where the problem lies.

15 years later it’s still being studied by business schools around the world as a forewarning against excess and ambition.

Webvan can also be considered a product of its time, the result was that it followed the ‘Get Big Fast’ (GBF) business model that every other startup was religiously following at the time. In 1999 Webvan announced they would expand to 26 major cities.

The following two years became a logistical nightmare with Webvan ultimately losing a total of $830 million before filing for bankruptcy.

“Webvan committed the cardinal sin of retail, which is to expand into new territory before we had demonstrated success in the first market. In fact, we were busy demonstrating failure in the Bay Area market while we expanded into other regions,” said Mike Moritz, former Webvan board member, and partner at Sequoia Capital.

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At some point, every successful startup will have to start scaling up and expanding their business. It seems like common sense, but expansion should only be undertaken when a business model has first proven to be successful.

A few rules of thumb are that a scalable business model should be flexible to be able to adapt to different market conditions, core users and customers are evaluated and understood, and the business model should be able to operate without your direct supervision. Common sense right?

Yet according to the Startup Genome Project’s survey of over 3200 startups , 74% of startup failures can be attributed to premature scaling. Another key finding was that startups, on average, need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than the founders expect. This underestimation of appropriate timelines applies unnecessary pressure on founders to scale prematurely.

Despite early validation, Webvan failed to consistently evaluate the data. If they had paid closer attention then they would’ve seen that their business model was shaky and could not possibly support their desired plans for expansion.

It’s only natural for entrepreneurs to want to grow their business. But as Webvan learned, it’s important to grow your business for the right reasons. To pay attention to the data at hand, and never grow for the sake of growth.

Be Wary of Who You Get in Bed With

Pretty Young Professional was founded by four colleagues at McKinsey, a global consultancy firm, who noticed the lack of resources for young women in the world of entrepreneurship.

It had a simple vision, to provide a weekly newsletter and cultivate a community for young female entrepreneurs. All four were coworkers, friends even, who shared a similar passion and vision. A meeting was held; positions and equity were decided amongst themselves and written on a notepad. And that’s when the trouble began.

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Kathryn Minshew, co-founder, and CEO of Pretty Young Professional said that “it came down to some pretty fundamental differences of opinion around where the business should be heading. I think, naively, we assumed that if we kicked the can down the road on some of those things, we’d be able to sort them out.”

Despite the years you’ve shared together and the many years of in-jokes you have, conventional wisdom dictates that it’s a bad idea to mix business with friends.

A study by the University of Auckland Business School found that while maintaining strong friendships with co-workers generally improves work productivity and morale it also creates a dilemma when trying to reconcile personal relationships with professional decision-making.

In business, it’s required that you have to make the logical and necessary decisions in order to benefit your company, even at the cost of personal friendships.

11 months in, the four founders of Pretty Young Professional had split into two camps due to differences in opinion, and a coup was staged. The legality of the original document was called into question, Minshew was hit with a lawsuit and called to step down as CEO, and the editorial team of Pretty Young Professional had their site and email access cut. The company quickly collapsed despite calls from excited investors and a thriving user base.

While it is possible to work with friends and family, it requires completely honest communication, both parties must understand that it really is nothing personal, and, perhaps most importantly, vest your ownership. It’s always best practice to ensure that you legally protect yourself and your assets, a promise between friends rarely holds up in the court of law.

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The Double-Edged Sword of SEO

The premise was simple, to help parents find tutors for their kids online. By 2013 they had over 7000 tutors signed up on their platform and has raised an estimated $1.8 million. Then the rug was swept out from under then and they closed down a few months later, after 3 years in operation.

It appeared that Tutorspree was doing everything right, it had managed to raise an impressive amount of capital from heavyweight investors like Sequoia Capital and Lerer Ventures. They were scaling at a decent pace, albeit not as fast as they wanted, and the business model was proving to be profitable.

However, it fell apart in March of 2013 when Google changed its algorithm and Tutorspree found their traffic reduced by 80% overnight . While this normally wouldn’t cripple a business, it was a catastrophe for Tutorspree. SEO was baked into their business model from the very start and almost all of their customer acquisitions originated from SEO.

“Nor is the largest lesson for me that SEO shouldn’t be part of a startup’s marketing kit. It should be there, but it has to be just one of many tools. SEO cannot be the only channel a company has, nor can any other single-channel serve that purpose.” – Aaron Harris, co-founder, and CEO of Tutorspree.

READ MORE: How to Develop Powerful Business Core Values and Mission Statements

There are many different types of SEO practices, but SEO is essentially improving the visibility and authority of a website by having it rank higher on search engine listings. The entrepreneurial community itself is very divided on the merits of SEO.

The issue with Tutorspree wasn’t whether or not it used SEO effectively or ineffectively. The issue was that due to its effectiveness, the founders became blind to other models of customer acquisition and developed an overreliance on a model they had absolutely no control over.

Google’s algorithm constantly changes and there’s no telling how it will ultimately affect your website’s ranking. Google has consistently proven to burn anyone that chooses to rely on SEO as their main strategy.

It should go without saying that you shouldn’t be putting all your eggs into one basket. Entrepreneurs should invest half their marketing into a high-risk strategy, and the other half in a proven consistent strategy, albeit with a lower return on investment. When it comes to business, you can either live or die by the sword or just be smart and carry a shield.

READ MORE: Building the Perfect Sales Funnel for Your Shopify Store

Failure is difficult to handle, but there is no better teacher. Although every business listed failed spectacularly, all of their founders got back up, dusted themselves off, and forged ahead to eventual success.

While it’s easy to see all the mistakes you made in hindsight, don’t let yourself get to that point. Failure can be seen a mile away if you’re paying close enough attention, even if it means asking yourself some uncomfortable questions. A lot of businesses could have been saved if just the smallest amount of preparation was undertaken, or if founders had just a little bit more patience.

Is there a bigger startup failure that you’ve heard about? We love case studies! Let us know in the comments below.

About Jonathan Chan

Jonathan "JC" Chan is the first Content Crafter at Foundr Magazine. When not writing about anything and everything to do with startups, entrepreneurship, and marketing, JC can be found pretending to be the next MMA star at the gym. He has also contributed to outlets such as  Huffington Post ,  Social Media Examiner ,  MarketingProfs ,  Hubspot  and more. Make sure you  connect with him on LinkedIn !

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A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024

It’s time for a generative AI (gen AI) reset. The initial enthusiasm and flurry of activity in 2023 is giving way to second thoughts and recalibrations as companies realize that capturing gen AI’s enormous potential value is harder than expected .

With 2024 shaping up to be the year for gen AI to prove its value, companies should keep in mind the hard lessons learned with digital and AI transformations: competitive advantage comes from building organizational and technological capabilities to broadly innovate, deploy, and improve solutions at scale—in effect, rewiring the business  for distributed digital and AI innovation.

About QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey

QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.

Companies looking to score early wins with gen AI should move quickly. But those hoping that gen AI offers a shortcut past the tough—and necessary—organizational surgery are likely to meet with disappointing results. Launching pilots is (relatively) easy; getting pilots to scale and create meaningful value is hard because they require a broad set of changes to the way work actually gets done.

Let’s briefly look at what this has meant for one Pacific region telecommunications company. The company hired a chief data and AI officer with a mandate to “enable the organization to create value with data and AI.” The chief data and AI officer worked with the business to develop the strategic vision and implement the road map for the use cases. After a scan of domains (that is, customer journeys or functions) and use case opportunities across the enterprise, leadership prioritized the home-servicing/maintenance domain to pilot and then scale as part of a larger sequencing of initiatives. They targeted, in particular, the development of a gen AI tool to help dispatchers and service operators better predict the types of calls and parts needed when servicing homes.

Leadership put in place cross-functional product teams with shared objectives and incentives to build the gen AI tool. As part of an effort to upskill the entire enterprise to better work with data and gen AI tools, they also set up a data and AI academy, which the dispatchers and service operators enrolled in as part of their training. To provide the technology and data underpinnings for gen AI, the chief data and AI officer also selected a large language model (LLM) and cloud provider that could meet the needs of the domain as well as serve other parts of the enterprise. The chief data and AI officer also oversaw the implementation of a data architecture so that the clean and reliable data (including service histories and inventory databases) needed to build the gen AI tool could be delivered quickly and responsibly.

Creating value beyond the hype

Let’s deliver on the promise of technology from strategy to scale.

Our book Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (Wiley, June 2023) provides a detailed manual on the six capabilities needed to deliver the kind of broad change that harnesses digital and AI technology. In this article, we will explore how to extend each of those capabilities to implement a successful gen AI program at scale. While recognizing that these are still early days and that there is much more to learn, our experience has shown that breaking open the gen AI opportunity requires companies to rewire how they work in the following ways.

Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage

The broad excitement around gen AI and its relative ease of use has led to a burst of experimentation across organizations. Most of these initiatives, however, won’t generate a competitive advantage. One bank, for example, bought tens of thousands of GitHub Copilot licenses, but since it didn’t have a clear sense of how to work with the technology, progress was slow. Another unfocused effort we often see is when companies move to incorporate gen AI into their customer service capabilities. Customer service is a commodity capability, not part of the core business, for most companies. While gen AI might help with productivity in such cases, it won’t create a competitive advantage.

To create competitive advantage, companies should first understand the difference between being a “taker” (a user of available tools, often via APIs and subscription services), a “shaper” (an integrator of available models with proprietary data), and a “maker” (a builder of LLMs). For now, the maker approach is too expensive for most companies, so the sweet spot for businesses is implementing a taker model for productivity improvements while building shaper applications for competitive advantage.

Much of gen AI’s near-term value is closely tied to its ability to help people do their current jobs better. In this way, gen AI tools act as copilots that work side by side with an employee, creating an initial block of code that a developer can adapt, for example, or drafting a requisition order for a new part that a maintenance worker in the field can review and submit (see sidebar “Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes”). This means companies should be focusing on where copilot technology can have the biggest impact on their priority programs.

Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes

• “Taker” copilots help real estate customers sift through property options and find the most promising one, write code for a developer, and summarize investor transcripts.
• “Shaper” copilots provide recommendations to sales reps for upselling customers by connecting generative AI tools to customer relationship management systems, financial systems, and customer behavior histories; create virtual assistants to personalize treatments for patients; and recommend solutions for maintenance workers based on historical data.
• “Maker” copilots are foundation models that lab scientists at pharmaceutical companies can use to find and test new and better drugs more quickly.

Some industrial companies, for example, have identified maintenance as a critical domain for their business. Reviewing maintenance reports and spending time with workers on the front lines can help determine where a gen AI copilot could make a big difference, such as in identifying issues with equipment failures quickly and early on. A gen AI copilot can also help identify root causes of truck breakdowns and recommend resolutions much more quickly than usual, as well as act as an ongoing source for best practices or standard operating procedures.

The challenge with copilots is figuring out how to generate revenue from increased productivity. In the case of customer service centers, for example, companies can stop recruiting new agents and use attrition to potentially achieve real financial gains. Defining the plans for how to generate revenue from the increased productivity up front, therefore, is crucial to capturing the value.

McKinsey Live Event: Unlocking the full value of gen AI

Join our colleagues Jessica Lamb and Gayatri Shenai on April 8, as they discuss how companies can navigate the ever-changing world of gen AI.

Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need

By now, most companies have a decent understanding of the technical gen AI skills they need, such as model fine-tuning, vector database administration, prompt engineering, and context engineering. In many cases, these are skills that you can train your existing workforce to develop. Those with existing AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities have a strong head start. Data engineers, for example, can learn multimodal processing and vector database management, MLOps (ML operations) engineers can extend their skills to LLMOps (LLM operations), and data scientists can develop prompt engineering, bias detection, and fine-tuning skills.

A sample of new generative AI skills needed

The following are examples of new skills needed for the successful deployment of generative AI tools:

• data scientist:
• prompt engineering
• in-context learning
• bias detection
• pattern identification
• reinforcement learning from human feedback
• hyperparameter/large language model fine-tuning; transfer learning
• data engineer:
• data wrangling and data warehousing
• data pipeline construction
• multimodal processing
• vector database management

The learning process can take two to three months to get to a decent level of competence because of the complexities in learning what various LLMs can and can’t do and how best to use them. The coders need to gain experience building software, testing, and validating answers, for example. It took one financial-services company three months to train its best data scientists to a high level of competence. While courses and documentation are available—many LLM providers have boot camps for developers—we have found that the most effective way to build capabilities at scale is through apprenticeship, training people to then train others, and building communities of practitioners. Rotating experts through teams to train others, scheduling regular sessions for people to share learnings, and hosting biweekly documentation review sessions are practices that have proven successful in building communities of practitioners (see sidebar “A sample of new generative AI skills needed”).

It’s important to bear in mind that successful gen AI skills are about more than coding proficiency. Our experience in developing our own gen AI platform, Lilli , showed us that the best gen AI technical talent has design skills to uncover where to focus solutions, contextual understanding to ensure the most relevant and high-quality answers are generated, collaboration skills to work well with knowledge experts (to test and validate answers and develop an appropriate curation approach), strong forensic skills to figure out causes of breakdowns (is the issue the data, the interpretation of the user’s intent, the quality of metadata on embeddings, or something else?), and anticipation skills to conceive of and plan for possible outcomes and to put the right kind of tracking into their code. A pure coder who doesn’t intrinsically have these skills may not be as useful a team member.

While current upskilling is largely based on a “learn on the job” approach, we see a rapid market emerging for people who have learned these skills over the past year. That skill growth is moving quickly. GitHub reported that developers were working on gen AI projects “in big numbers,” and that 65,000 public gen AI projects were created on its platform in 2023—a jump of almost 250 percent over the previous year. If your company is just starting its gen AI journey, you could consider hiring two or three senior engineers who have built a gen AI shaper product for their companies. This could greatly accelerate your efforts.

Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling

To ensure that all parts of the business can scale gen AI capabilities, centralizing competencies is a natural first move. The critical focus for this central team will be to develop and put in place protocols and standards to support scale, ensuring that teams can access models while also minimizing risk and containing costs. The team’s work could include, for example, procuring models and prescribing ways to access them, developing standards for data readiness, setting up approved prompt libraries, and allocating resources.

While developing Lilli, our team had its mind on scale when it created an open plug-in architecture and setting standards for how APIs should function and be built.  They developed standardized tooling and infrastructure where teams could securely experiment and access a GPT LLM , a gateway with preapproved APIs that teams could access, and a self-serve developer portal. Our goal is that this approach, over time, can help shift “Lilli as a product” (that a handful of teams use to build specific solutions) to “Lilli as a platform” (that teams across the enterprise can access to build other products).

For teams developing gen AI solutions, squad composition will be similar to AI teams but with data engineers and data scientists with gen AI experience and more contributors from risk management, compliance, and legal functions. The general idea of staffing squads with resources that are federated from the different expertise areas will not change, but the skill composition of a gen-AI-intensive squad will.

Set up the technology architecture to scale

Building a gen AI model is often relatively straightforward, but making it fully operational at scale is a different matter entirely. We’ve seen engineers build a basic chatbot in a week, but releasing a stable, accurate, and compliant version that scales can take four months. That’s why, our experience shows, the actual model costs may be less than 10 to 15 percent of the total costs of the solution.

Building for scale doesn’t mean building a new technology architecture. But it does mean focusing on a few core decisions that simplify and speed up processes without breaking the bank. Three such decisions stand out:

• Focus on reusing your technology. Reusing code can increase the development speed of gen AI use cases by 30 to 50 percent. One good approach is simply creating a source for approved tools, code, and components. A financial-services company, for example, created a library of production-grade tools, which had been approved by both the security and legal teams, and made them available in a library for teams to use. More important is taking the time to identify and build those capabilities that are common across the most priority use cases. The same financial-services company, for example, identified three components that could be reused for more than 100 identified use cases. By building those first, they were able to generate a significant portion of the code base for all the identified use cases—essentially giving every application a big head start.
• Focus the architecture on enabling efficient connections between gen AI models and internal systems. For gen AI models to work effectively in the shaper archetype, they need access to a business’s data and applications. Advances in integration and orchestration frameworks have significantly reduced the effort required to make those connections. But laying out what those integrations are and how to enable them is critical to ensure these models work efficiently and to avoid the complexity that creates technical debt  (the “tax” a company pays in terms of time and resources needed to redress existing technology issues). Chief information officers and chief technology officers can define reference architectures and integration standards for their organizations. Key elements should include a model hub, which contains trained and approved models that can be provisioned on demand; standard APIs that act as bridges connecting gen AI models to applications or data; and context management and caching, which speed up processing by providing models with relevant information from enterprise data sources.
• Build up your testing and quality assurance capabilities. Our own experience building Lilli taught us to prioritize testing over development. Our team invested in not only developing testing protocols for each stage of development but also aligning the entire team so that, for example, it was clear who specifically needed to sign off on each stage of the process. This slowed down initial development but sped up the overall delivery pace and quality by cutting back on errors and the time needed to fix mistakes.

Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models

The ability of a business to generate and scale value from gen AI models will depend on how well it takes advantage of its own data. As with technology, targeted upgrades to existing data architecture  are needed to maximize the future strategic benefits of gen AI:

• Be targeted in ramping up your data quality and data augmentation efforts. While data quality has always been an important issue, the scale and scope of data that gen AI models can use—especially unstructured data—has made this issue much more consequential. For this reason, it’s critical to get the data foundations right, from clarifying decision rights to defining clear data processes to establishing taxonomies so models can access the data they need. The companies that do this well tie their data quality and augmentation efforts to the specific AI/gen AI application and use case—you don’t need this data foundation to extend to every corner of the enterprise. This could mean, for example, developing a new data repository for all equipment specifications and reported issues to better support maintenance copilot applications.
• Understand what value is locked into your unstructured data. Most organizations have traditionally focused their data efforts on structured data (values that can be organized in tables, such as prices and features). But the real value from LLMs comes from their ability to work with unstructured data (for example, PowerPoint slides, videos, and text). Companies can map out which unstructured data sources are most valuable and establish metadata tagging standards so models can process the data and teams can find what they need (tagging is particularly important to help companies remove data from models as well, if necessary). Be creative in thinking about data opportunities. Some companies, for example, are interviewing senior employees as they retire and feeding that captured institutional knowledge into an LLM to help improve their copilot performance.
• Optimize to lower costs at scale. There is often as much as a tenfold difference between what companies pay for data and what they could be paying if they optimized their data infrastructure and underlying costs. This issue often stems from companies scaling their proofs of concept without optimizing their data approach. Two costs generally stand out. One is storage costs arising from companies uploading terabytes of data into the cloud and wanting that data available 24/7. In practice, companies rarely need more than 10 percent of their data to have that level of availability, and accessing the rest over a 24- or 48-hour period is a much cheaper option. The other costs relate to computation with models that require on-call access to thousands of processors to run. This is especially the case when companies are building their own models (the maker archetype) but also when they are using pretrained models and running them with their own data and use cases (the shaper archetype). Companies could take a close look at how they can optimize computation costs on cloud platforms—for instance, putting some models in a queue to run when processors aren’t being used (such as when Americans go to bed and consumption of computing services like Netflix decreases) is a much cheaper option.

Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale

Because many people have concerns about gen AI, the bar on explaining how these tools work is much higher than for most solutions. People who use the tools want to know how they work, not just what they do. So it’s important to invest extra time and money to build trust by ensuring model accuracy and making it easy to check answers.

One insurance company, for example, created a gen AI tool to help manage claims. As part of the tool, it listed all the guardrails that had been put in place, and for each answer provided a link to the sentence or page of the relevant policy documents. The company also used an LLM to generate many variations of the same question to ensure answer consistency. These steps, among others, were critical to helping end users build trust in the tool.

Part of the training for maintenance teams using a gen AI tool should be to help them understand the limitations of models and how best to get the right answers. That includes teaching workers strategies to get to the best answer as fast as possible by starting with broad questions then narrowing them down. This provides the model with more context, and it also helps remove any bias of the people who might think they know the answer already. Having model interfaces that look and feel the same as existing tools also helps users feel less pressured to learn something new each time a new application is introduced.

Getting to scale means that businesses will need to stop building one-off solutions that are hard to use for other similar use cases. One global energy and materials company, for example, has established ease of reuse as a key requirement for all gen AI models, and has found in early iterations that 50 to 60 percent of its components can be reused. This means setting standards for developing gen AI assets (for example, prompts and context) that can be easily reused for other cases.

While many of the risk issues relating to gen AI are evolutions of discussions that were already brewing—for instance, data privacy, security, bias risk, job displacement, and intellectual property protection—gen AI has greatly expanded that risk landscape. Just 21 percent of companies reporting AI adoption say they have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies.

Similarly, a set of tests for AI/gen AI solutions should be established to demonstrate that data privacy, debiasing, and intellectual property protection are respected. Some organizations, in fact, are proposing to release models accompanied with documentation that details their performance characteristics. Documenting your decisions and rationales can be particularly helpful in conversations with regulators.

In some ways, this article is premature—so much is changing that we’ll likely have a profoundly different understanding of gen AI and its capabilities in a year’s time. But the core truths of finding value and driving change will still apply. How well companies have learned those lessons may largely determine how successful they’ll be in capturing that value.

The authors wish to thank Michael Chui, Juan Couto, Ben Ellencweig, Josh Gartner, Bryce Hall, Holger Harreis, Phil Hudelson, Suzana Iacob, Sid Kamath, Neerav Kingsland, Kitti Lakner, Robert Levin, Matej Macak, Lapo Mori, Alex Peluffo, Aldo Rosales, Erik Roth, Abdul Wahab Shaikh, and Stephen Xu for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Barr Seitz, an editorial director in the New York office.

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The Soul of a Start-Up

• Ranjay Gulati

There’s an essential, intangible something in start-ups—an energy, a soul. It inspires enthusiasm and fosters a sense of deep connection and mutual purpose. While this spirit persists, engagement is high and businesses keep their edge.

But all too often, companies lose their souls as they mature. Firms add new systems and structures and bring in experienced professionals—and in the process somehow crush their original energizing spirit. In research into more than a dozen fast-growth ventures and 200-plus interviews with founders and executives, the author has discovered how firms can overcome this problem. His work shows that there are three crucial dimensions to a start-up’s soul: business intent, or a loftier reason for being; unusually close customer connections; and an employee experience characterized by autonomy and creativity—by “voice” and “choice.” All three provide meaning to stakeholders.

Drawing on the experiences of Netflix, Warby Parker, Study Sapuri, and others, this article describes how sizable companies can still protect and nurture the three elements. Doing that is the secret to staying great as you grow.

Companies can sustain their entrepreneurial energy even as they grow.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

As companies grow, they need new systems and structures to manage their evolving businesses. Too often, however, they lose sight of the original spirit and essence that during their early days attracted and energized stakeholders.

The Research

Interviews with more than 200 founders and executives at a dozen fast-growth ventures show not only that this “start-up soul” is real but that it can be broken down into three key elements: business intent (the company’s reason for being); customer connection (a crystal clear focus on those being served and what they want); and employee experience (allowing people to have voice and choice).

The Solution

If a company follows the lead of Warby Parker, Netflix, and BlackRock and thinks more consciously about what it needs to do to keep the three elements at the forefront of its strategy and daily operations, it can preserve its soul—or revive it.

There’s an essential, intangible something in start-ups—an energy, a soul. Company founders sense its presence. So do early employees and customers. It inspires people to contribute their talent, money, and enthusiasm and fosters a sense of deep connection and mutual purpose. As long as this spirit persists, engagement is high and start-ups remain agile and innovative, spurring growth. But when it vanishes, ventures can falter, and everyone perceives the loss—something special is gone.

• Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the author of Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies (Harper Business, 2022).

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