4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the new idea?

Kashyap Deorah: On-demand commerce was called hyperlocal. I was fascinated with the Stripe and Twilio API businesses. In retail and e-commerce, what shovels can I build? What became clear was on-demand commerce is about the ability to fulfill things right here right now. The proposition is ingrained in logistics.

The logistics model relies on some heavy location and mapping infrastructure that only a few companies have. Backed with a theme of democratizing disaggregated markets, how about democratizing this location and mapping infrastructure for all the e-commerce players in the world. It became the logistics API for on-demand commerce.

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Sramana Mitra: We will start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

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Sramana Mitra: Did you have the same marketing strategy?

Jonathan Foltz: Yes. Our expertise was definitely Facebook and Instagram. You can do this with influencer marketing. We can go from $10,000 a day to over $300,000 in less than a week. The scalability is unparalleled with Facebook and Instagram.

Sramana Mitra: I guess there are two questions that come from that. Did you have to do buy-one-get-two-free with this new product?

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4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the name of this project?

Kashyap Deorah: Chalo.

Sramana Mitra: How long was that?

Kashyap Deorah: We sold the company in less than a year. After the acquisition, some of us stayed at OpenTable. I left after two years. One important moment there was that OpenTable was a public company. That’s what made it attractive for us to sell that soon.

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Sramana Mitra: What product were you selling?

Jonathan Foltz: We were selling LED shoes. We could have kept on going. Then we had a problem in China. They didn’t do the proper paper work and they had batteries. They had to recall them and send them back. It was a huge problem. We could have probably made a million to $1.5 million if we didn’t have any of those problems.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting the customers?

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

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