Here's how Kirana Club is emerging as the LinkedIn for mom-and-pop shops in India

Germinated as the LinkedIn for small mom and pop stores, alias Kiranas, in December 2021, Kirana Club is an AI tech platform that not only detects the numerous products placed on the chaotic store shelves but acts as a platform where brands get a chance to communicate and share business information with the long-tail store owners.

In the past near to two years, the startup headquartered out of Bangalore has onboarded over 15 lakh Kirana stores, growing 30% QoQ, spanning across 10 states as well as a slew of brands such as Coca-Cola, Santur (Wipro), Reliance, PepsiCo, Daawat, Perfetti, Cycle Pure and others.

Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com about what led to the genesis of Kirana Club, Co-founder Anshul Gupta, stated that during his tenure with FMCG brands, he found out that even though the principle of visibility driving sales is prominent in the FMCG space, and 80-90% sales come from the long tail of kirana stores, only 10% of mom and pop stores are directly served by the FMCG majors.

The rest of the lot purchases the products from wholesalers as they are too small for the FMCG companies’ representatives to go to and talk to the small kirana store owners about their different products and offers amongst other things.

That being said, the Kirana store owners often don’t know what they are selling and in what amount along with what their competitors are placing on their shelves owing to the absence of a billing or cost system and mind you this information or data capture does matter to FMCG companies, he said.

Hence, keeping these things in mind, Kirana Club started as an AI platform which can basically detect more than 15,000 products on a shelf of a kirana store by just a mobile phone image because other technologies such as a CCTV camera or any other device wouldn’t have given such a large scale.

“Once we set up our service of Retail Pulse, it was only a matter of few months that we got Unilever and PepsiCo as our clients and started giving them deeper insights such as share of their products on the kirana shelves, how is the merchandising process working out for them, how many product units are these stores keeping and much more,” he said.

Secondly, when the representatives of the FMCG majors go to different markets, they have very limited time in hand and have to communicate about a product portfolio as large as 500 different products, hence they cannot cover it all in one go and it is only 10-20 SKUs which are the top products of the brand that they explain about to the store owners while the remaining products are ignored.

“To solve this, when we started onboarding businesses on our platform, we also gave them the option to run campaigns and show a list of their different SKUs along with other details so that the Kirana store owners can also make themselves aware of the same and make informed decisions about what all products can they place on their shelves. This way, the brands can

directly reach and also influence the purchase decision of a Kirana store owner,” he said.

Having built the platform not just for FMCG brands to connect with the mom-and-pop store owners, but also for the store owners to connect and communicate amongst themselves, soon kirana store owners also began creating content about their business, which are the products that they buy and at what prices along with product reviews and sharing business tips with each other.

“Although our app has a feed similar to other social media platforms which users can access once they register with us as a kirana store owner and their KYC goes through, the focus for us is on Bharat users which is why every piece of content on the app is vernacular. Users post 2-3 minute videos on our app which are then shown on the screen of other Kirana store owners in a personalised format based on geography,” he added.

He then went on to add that owing to the content creation by the kirana store owners who have now amassed a legitimate follower base of 20,000, 30,000 and so on and so forth, brands also get an opportunity to tap into their follower base via collaborations for new product launches amongst other things that Kirana Club provides them with, given that the kirana store owner must have been selling the product in question in his/her locality.

Broadly, as per Gupta, it is the issue of ‘information asymmetry’ that Kirana Club basically aims to solve as almost every kirana store owner or retailer in India is a sole proprietor and therefore operates in silos when it comes to decision making. But with Kirana Club, what they get is a chance to discuss these things with their fellow store owners and understand what is working for them and what can be done for further improvement.

Commenting on how the B2B AI tech platform began onboarding kirana stores, Aishwarya Jain, Co-Founder, Kirana Club, stated that owing to the internet revolution that came into play post the introduction of Jio, even the retailers started using social media platforms such as Facebook.

“Many of the Kirana store owners, if not all, are a part of various groups today and that is why we started leveraging these Facebook groups for pitching our platform as a value proposition which can help one improve their business or even understand the trade practices and get more information before the individual store owner actually makes a purchase. This really worked for us in getting kirana store owners aboard because they saw value in our content platform and therefore we acquired a lot of kirana store owners for Kirana Club organically and following this, word of mouth also came into play because being a content platform, it was content creation that became a growth driver for us,” she said.

But having said that, like any other frugal organisation, Kirana Club also tried to optimise maximum output and minimum resources by seeding a lot of content on different WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram groups in addition to YouTube which added to the virality factor and drove installations. It was only when they amassed a sizable base, that they started running performance ads.

Furthermore, Jain also pointed out that as of now, more than 70% kirana store owners on the platform are from Tier III cities and beyond and because the one language that a Kirana store owner understands is the language of business, which is why the focus was to choose either Hindi or regional language as the dialect. Of this, it was Hindi which worked quite well since Kirana Club’s presence is also strong in the Hindi-speaking states and the ads that brands run on the platform are also in the same.

Throwing light on the revenue model for the business, Gupta also elaborated that just like any other social media platform, the revenue for Kirana Club also comes from brands who come onboard the platform and it is free for the users.

“We monetise from brands on different aspects such as impressions on promoted content, communication via social media channels and push notifications, banner ads, engagement posts help them in conducting both qualitative and quantitative market surveys and driving visibility,” he added.

At the moment, 90% of the brands present on Kirana Club are the FMCG majors, as opposed to regional players, since the goal of Kirana Club as per the co-founders is to not run after brands but actually involve in limited number of partnerships and grow with these MNCs.

Commenting on the further growth plan for Kirana Club, Gupta added that while the platform has already raised two rounds of funding so far, the idea is to work on R&D and scale AI capabilities of the platform such as recommendation engine.

Moreover, because Kirana stores drive 600 billion dollars in India's economy, despite being fragmented or unorganised, not just in the country but also across Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. the vision, in his views, is to not just create India's largest community of Kiranas but also the world's largest community of retailers and help them increase their business alongside partnering with brands to solve their problem of reaching out to these businesses.

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