I want to create life-changing experiences for 1 mn small businesses

Snapdeal is India’s one of the largest online marketplace, that started in February 2010 as a daily deals platform inspired by Groupon.com but expanded in September 2011 to become an online marketplace. Founded by childhood friends Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Snapdeal is now being built with a world class team. The company recently got a huge boost from Softbank, which decided to lay bets on this new generation retailer, and announced investments worth $627 mn. This is the largest investment so far in the Indian e-commerce space.

After not being able to make it to the IITs, Kunal did his engineering from University of Pennsylvania. Later, he went on to get business management specialization from the Kellog School and the Wharton School. After studies, his short job stints at Microsoft and consulting at Deloitte in the US, gave him an idea about entrepreneurship, and an exposure to product management and business development skills in emerging markets. But young Kunal had other dreams, gave up his job, and decided to move back to India.

Kunals’ mother, though a bit apprehensive initially, was later supportive of the idea of giving up employment, and choosing to start a business. The dream of conceptualizing and building Snapdeal was not an easy thing to do, but Kunal and his co-founder and IIT Delhi alumnus Rohit Bansal, were continuously working towards it. Meanwhile his mom kept thinking if her son was just building castles in the air, or if anything fruitful would come out of it.

All that is history now. Kunal’s inspiration was Alibaba. In China, the two founders of Snapdeal had seen how the giant Chinese online marketplace Alibaba.com worked and wanted to recreate the model. They had many options but chose to become a marketplace. After having started, there was no looking back for Kunal.

Today the company has more than 50,000 merchants, 5 mn products, and 30 mn users. Snapdeal is now also entering into new categories like DNA testing, automobiles, and real estate, and targeting $2 bn in sales by year-end.

What the 31-year-old, along with his co-founder Rohit, have achieved is to position Snapdeal as the biggest competitor to market leaders not just in terms of geographical reach but also in fundraising. In less than three years, Kunal’s online marketplace has exploded to become India’s largest. The company is now targeting having 100,000 merchants on its site within the next two years. The entrepreneur says now his focus is on innovation in consumer products, technologies, and marketing services.

The fulfilling moment in the journey for Kunal was how Snapdeal was able to create social impact. Kunal wanted to do something with his company’s growing profit. The CEO found the opportunity in supplying drinking water. Shivnagar, a distant village in Uttar Pradesh was chosen for this, and 20 handpumps were installed. This now saves the villagers from walking nearly 2 kms just to get clean water. The villagers voted to re-name their hamlet “Snapdeal.com Nagar” to express their gratitude.

It would not be wrong to say Kunal is today an inspiration for all the young entrepreneurs in India. He gave the young blood of our nation a new motivation, and a new dream. He now wants to work harder to keep the success show going on, no matter if it requires him to choose the odds and take tough decisions. He believes that money is not everything and beyond a certain point money is just a numeric by-product of what you are doing. He feels that a business has a great opportunity and responsibility to actually create significant change for society. He was just 25, when he started off with Snapdeal and his achievement at such a small age says all about him.

He doesn’t consider Snapdeal to be an e-commerce player. In a conversation with Dataquest, he says the firm is “really a technology company. We enable others to do e-commerce.”