My genuineness in writings is helping me to gain more confidence each day and get closer to the good and sharing it with the world. Chapters of my entrepreneurial journey are quite clear in my LinkedIn posts itself right from the beginning of my startup. My company - Simbacart has become hub of case studies now as my journey is all challenging like many but may be one difference , me as Chief Smiles Officer carries , in toughest of the toughest times too - choose to stop rather than crawl and find solution , never look back and start crawling again. There  is much more time to run! Have patience - You never know the right time is the very next time!
"Each challenge we solve , it turns as a solutions for many other challenges connected to it directly or indirecty"
This year is a blessing for my company as I am able to accelerate again month on month doubling my business , whereas last year due to many wrong associations with third parties things got mess up which didnt let Simbacart grow more than  its first year in terms of sales. Due to uncertainties , Many payments stuck up out of which one was of Delhivery - My courier partner with which we are doing business from almost 2 years now. To be true , I have worked with almost all the courier companies in North India , Among which I found Blu-dart and Delhivery the top most. Why topmost ? They have strong IT backend and reconciliations has been given a great importance in both.  Whereas all other companies avoid reconciliations bit by bit , I believe due to poor IT back-ends.  Unfortunately due to low ticket size of my product that is shoe , Simbacart could not afford Blu-dart for long. So more than 70% of our business goes to Delhivery and rest 30% to other courier partners.
My project is bootstrapped to a greater extent and  financial crunch was huge in year 2015 and I could not repay my bills timely to Delhivery. I am grateful , they kept calm for nearly 6-8 months and here I was unable to pay even a rupee. There was major shift going on in the company from my old location in Chandigarh to my village Tangra , which further disturbed the sales in Simbacart and I had huge fixed asset cost while shifting and I faced loads of difficulties in repayments.
My team used to alert me number of times that our Delhivery bill is touching 10lac now , atleast start paying the small bills first. I used to feel we have to give 10lac , and paying them just 5000 or 10,000 will hardly make any difference to the 10 lac. I was observing things are improving real fast , we will start paying in bit bigger amounts sooner.
Finally the day came , Delhivery hold our Cash remittance , which was all obvious. I did not mind too. But yes it was a big issue at my end. More sales I will do as my business is growing month on month , more money will stuck up there with Delhivery as 99% of my customers opt for cash on delivery, Courier partner will get their 10lac fast thats sure but my cash cycle will again break , They can keep 10-15% of whatever cash they are holding but if rest of the money they must not be giving , my very small startup at verge of scaling up will break down. I talked to various managers in first go at delivery but nothing much worked out , they were all courteous but I was unable to speak to anyone at top management.
Recently on Linkedin I requested Kapil Bharati - Co founder Delhivery to share his number as I am the client and in a problem that needs immediate resolution. To my good I got to talk on same day by evening , it was hardly 8 minutes call , where I could finally speak about my problem and requested to consider me from startup point of view where I have very very limited funds. He further connected me with his team , Where I said yes to keep my 50% money with them and return rest 50% every-time. But here the logic went wrong , if they will keep 50% then majority of cash will again get hold.Â
On my request to Mr. Nitin Gupta , things materialized further , where I gave post dated cheques for each bill dividing in next 8 months and things got resolved in the best possible manner. Finally giving greater relief to me and I got encouraged to run the show even better for Simbacart.
In above case as a customer , I could have changed my courier partner and got my cash remittance from them immediately. I could have resolved my money issue within days just by changing courier partner. Companies with great gestures gain customers and such is Delhivery. I felt like being very loyal to Delhivery , in-spite of changing the courier partner , I put my best efforts to resolve the whole case and all went so well.Â
In the era of fastest growing startups in India , we need to be very loyal to each other in terms of creating a healthy business environment and we need to put effort to lift one another. Lets choose to gain customers and the real loyal ones. Lets choose to be good to great companies. Lets choose to work on making  women startup ecosystem healthier each day! Lets choose to be a company good at heart..
My Honest Writings
Mandeep - mandeep@simbacart.com