At group buying site Snapdeal’s Delhi office, it feels like one is in a population statistics department as a television screen beeps with the numbers, 47, 93, 098, then quickly 47, 93, 099, and then 47, 93, 100. This figure—easily more than the total population of many small countries, tells you how many people have signed up with SnapDeal so far.

The 22-inch LCD screen smack in the centre of the office displays how quickly the numbers move. In real time, the company’s 400 employees are instantaneously updated about their growing customer base. Clearly, as far as co-founders and good buddies Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal are concerned, more is definitely the merrier. They had their mission pat down from the  word go—to scale up fast. And speed does seem to be their thing. “Over a cup of tea in January last year we decided to do this. Eight days after that we formerly launched the site,” says Bahl breezily, making it all sound (almost) too easy to be true. Yet, today, within 14 months they are significant market leaders in the group buying space. 

SnapDeal refused to copy-paste the group buying model from the US to India, and are thrilled to be “disrupters” of the template

Their sails caught the best wind right at the beginning. Thanks to their earlier venture, MoneySaver, a mobile-based discount coupons company, suppliers came to them in droves. In fact, it was the mer­chants they worked with at MoneySaver who prompted them to set up SnapDeal. “One of them had recently signed up on a group buying site. He told us we should do something like that,” shares 28-yeard-old Bahl, an alumnus of the Wharton School of Business. “Actually everything was the same, only the medium changed from mobile to the internet.” 

SnapDeal refused to copy-paste the group buying model from the US to India, and are thrilled to be “disrupters” of the template. SnapDeal didn’t want its members to wait for others to buy in before they could check out. “If I like a deal, I want to have it,” says Bahl. So, doesn’t it just become another deal site, we ask? Bahl waves off that criti­cism, saying he defines group as the whole lot of buyers they send to the merchant, and not just the number of people who have bought it online. 

In this new hybrid for SnapDeal, customers don’t  wait and merchants aren’t given minimum guarantees. “Nobody wants to work on minimums anyway,” explains Bansal, an IIT Delhi engineer. An established service, say a spa, is unlikely to rake in gold by ensuring a minimum guarantee of even 10-odd customers on the site. And a bootstrapped, fresh venture is thrilled to gain even a single customer. So, it isn’t about sales. Group buying platforms are essentially used to attract customers, the duo explains. 

“The discount is only the cost of cus­tomer acquisition,” Bansal explains, add­ing that e-commerce is a more efficient and effective way of reaching your cus­tomers. “Of course, we ensure merchants also make money. We figure out price points between fixed and variable costs so nobody is in loss.” Plus, they let their merchants participate in other group buying sites 

Merchants are this model’s oxygen, Bahl adds. “Without them benefitting from this, the entire structure will collapse,” he confesses. To ensure they’re working with the right people, SnapDeal rigorously pre-screens every merchant and even trains them weekly on things like customer feed­back and best practices in service. 

Building bonds with customers is top pri­ority though. On the first Saturday of every month, Bahl sends an e-mail to every trans­acting customer from the previous month. “I reply to all emails in 48 hours. Two weeks ago, I personally sent out 3,000 emails. It’s the best way to get feedback and ideas,” he says, add­ing they’ve included more travel deals after a customer suggested they should. 

Without them(the merchants) benefitting from this, the entire structure will collapse."
-Kunal Bahl 

For now, it’s a mantra that seems built for success. Plus, the speed’s bound to pick up with a recent Rs50 crore investment into the company by NEA IndoUS Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Much of this will be spent on strengthening their IT base and expanding their team to nearly 800 by the end of this year. 

Not patient deal hunters, the duo can barely keep themselves from thinking of the Rs100 crore turnover mark in just a few more months . “That’s nothing. We’ll be a Rs500 crore company by 2014. You just wait and watch,” say the duo.