HOW I GOT ACCEL PARTNERS TO INVEST IN MY STARTUP – THE TEABOX STORY

The previous day they were declared as the winners of eSparks 2013 – India’s largest e-commerce showcase platform. During our conversation, Kaushal shared how difficult it was to do business from north-east India (Teabox is based in Siliguri, West Bengal) and how they struggled initially, but have managed to grow their customer base and revenue month-on-month. That was more than a year ago. Enter 2014 – they have shipped over five million cups of tea, have exported Indian tea to 65+ countries and are maintaining a steady growth in customer base and revenue – 99% of which comes from outside India. Perhaps one of the first truly global e-commerce businesses from India, its entire revenue base is from outside India. With the global tea industry pegged at $40 billion and growing in double digits, Teabox seems to be sitting in a sweet spot for accelerated growth. Teabox recently announced that it has raised around $1million funding from Accel Partners and Horizen Ventures. So how did they manage to pull this off and convince Accel Partners to fund their startup – a niche e-commerce business selling tea online and that too to customers outside India? Here’s the Teabox story till now, as shared by Kaushal Dugar. The challenge Running an e-commerce business from Siliguri was never going to be an easy task, shares Kaushal. Selling a known product online such as a smartphone is an easier task since customers already know what the product entails. But in their case, it was selling tea — a consumable product which is more associated with the look, feel and smell. They realized this very early in their startup life and came up with two important things which could make them successful: 1) An exceptional process optimization to manage inventory and logistics. 2) Leveraging technology to do so and deliver excellent customer experience. They started working closely with the tea garden owners in identifying and curating the best tea leaves for their products, setup a robust and efficient processing and packaging mechanism, and tested with various shipment and delivery services like DHL, FedEx, EMS (India Post) and Air Mail to identify the best and efficient service provider for each country to deliver their product to their customers as quickly as possible. Kaushal shares that currently their shipment process is so optimized that they know for each pin code in each country they ship to (65+ countries) which service provider ships the fastest. They have also identified the most reliable payment service for each country – WorldPay, PayPal, PayU and others and have got them on-board as partners so that the customers feel comfortable using the payment service they already know about while ordering tea online from Teabox. This entire process - from curating the best tea leaves to systemized process and packaging combined with optimized shipment and technology helps Teabox deliver fresh tea to its consumers within a week or less from production which otherwise typically takes three to six months. This explains why an ardent tea lover from Russia or Canada would be willing to pay anywhere from $100 to $1500 for a kilogram of the best of tea from India. The fund raising Again the process of fund raising for an online startup based in a small city like Siliguri, outside of the well-known metros, was a challenge. Kaushal shares he spent many days cold calling investors, meeting them at few startup events, followed up with more calls and emails. But not many showed interest in the venture. This hit his confidence a bit. He realized that conversing over phone and email was a hindrance and he needed to have more in-person and face-to-face interactions to showcase and communicate what they were doing and to convince investors about Teabox’s vision and potential growth story.