This Gift-Portal Startup Talks About The Merits Of Having A Four-Member Founding Team Founders belonging to different backgrounds add value to the overall team

What's the probability of clashes in a startup that has more than one founder? This startup has a four member founding team, and they seem to have no complaints!

Manoj Agarwal, co-founder of Giftxoxo talks about the merits of having a four member co-founding team and the situation of the e-commerce situation.

"Giftxoxo started when Sumit and I discussed some ideas which were shaping well in early 2012. I was handling gifting category as part of my marketing role at Flipkart. I found some good ideas working well in gifting internationally," Manoj said.

To that, Sumit Khandelwal, another co-founder added, "Two of us iterated on couple of these ideas and finally started with Giftxoxo as a social gifting company. We pivoted and iterated as per market needs. Later in 3-4 months, Abhishek and Kushal joined along in our journey,"

It helps a lot to have multiple co-founders. In uncertain times of startups it helps to motivate each other and stay afloat. It helps a lot to play according to one's strength and brings lot of focus. Luckily each one of us come from diverse backgrounds and skill sets and together we form a formidable team to tackle overall functional domains of business ranging from product, technology, sales, marketing, finance, HR, and operations.

We discuss things in details before any decisions. We agree to disagree with logic and also seek advice from our mentors on crucial things.

Started with an office in Bangalore, Giftxoxo expanded to Delhi and Mumbai after it received an undisclosed amount in angel funding in May 2013 from Kshtriya Ventures.

Tackling the ecommerce downturn

"This has been bit of a disappointment that many e-commerce players in India got carried away with discounting as one of their key strategic business fundamentals. Instead of creating real value for a consumer with a long term focus on building a profitable brand, many companies started focusing on short term scalability which was unsustainable." Manoj said.

He further added that most of the new age e-commerce start-ups talk about funding before talking about business models. "We feel that a business has to run on profits and funding can just help fuel the growth if used rightly. Companies selling on margins of 1-2 % or may be negative margins due to deep discounting can't sustain and hence require regular funding injections which are not viable. Good businesses need to have healthy profits which are 10% and above to really create a profitable business," Manoj said.

Marketing mantra

The startup kicked-off as a gifting company. However, over last 4 years they have branched into other territories, much more beyond gifting. The company claims to have 500 corporate clients and 1,00,000 individual customers.

"The mantra to retain clients is to ensure high levels of customer focus in everything you do. We are obsessed with consumer satisfaction and we take every feedback very seriously to ensure it's dealt in such a way that it does not repeat. Technology plays a big role to innovate and bring long term solutions for simple issues which consumers might face," Manoj said.