Founded by Ankush Katiyar, TalkCharge is a unique platform that enables users to carry out online recharges and utility bill payments for electricity, gas, landline, etc. It has its own digital wallet and it provides its users a huge variety of E-gift cards along with deals and coupons for more than 500 stores.
Users can earn extra TC (TalkCharge) cashback if they shop via TalkCharge. So, it is not only a safe and secure platform to recharge your phone and make online utility payments but it also offers super saving deals and discount coupons. Here is the story of TalkCharge and its founder.
More about TalkCharge and Its Founder
TalkCharge was founded on 25th August 2015 by Ankush Katiyar. Ankush has an engineering background from the LPU University and is a brilliant coder. At the age of 18, he realized the potentials of online transactions. In fact, he has seen great opportunities, as well as margins with online transactions.
He was intrigued by how the Affiliate Model works. Soon, he became passionate about the Affiliate Model and realized how this model could drive a change and help online shoppers save money and avail regular discounts.
Ankush Katiyar thinks that the Affiliate Model is a win-win situation for all – customers, merchants, and affiliate partners. So, he decided to start a venture of his own in this domain but with some unique features. This is how TalkCharge came into being.
The Industry and the Current Trend
The online payment and recharge segment has many players but TalkCharge has strategized to do it differently. This makes it unique. Instead of confining itself to only providing online payment services, it has incorporated Affiliates in its portal. The other players in the market are not doing this currently.
Challenges and the Takeaways
Starting your own venture is exciting, but at the same time, it is an incredibly arduous task, especially if one has a small budget. The story of TalkCharge is no exception to this. From seeding an idea to building it in reality and finally, continuing it, TalkCharge has done it all being bootstrapped.
With a low budget, it was quite difficult for TalkCharge to get a good office space, hire the right talents, and getting tie-ups and partnerships. But both Ankush Katiyar and Shivani Gupta, the Chief Operating Officer at TalkCharge who joined the company in early 2015, did not get disheartened.
They started handling all departments single-handedly, right from support to marketing, operations, coding, and even hiring. They were totally focused on giving the best and top services to their users.
According to Ankush, “Challenges are the best way to learn and experiencing them bring in the best version of you. Because we were bootstrapped, we learned the best marketing strategy to present ourselves in front of our potential partners.”
He continued, “We created our brand by maintaining the standard of our company’s social media approach. Since we have personally taken care of all the departments, we still know the XYZ of how they work and what steps to be taken to improve their productivity!”
What is Unique about TalkCharge and its Services?
What makes TalkCharge stands apart from other online payment and recharge platforms is that it is serving a unique combination of three totally different fields – recharges, bill payments, and E-gift cards. Moreover, users can avail the benefits of the comprehensive listing of Deals & Coupons from more than 500 online stores.
Apart from these, users can get Extra TC cashback by shopping via TalkCharge. This, according to Ankush, is the USP of the company, which it uses to retain more and more users.
Addressable Market and Opportunities
According to Ankush Katiyar, India has a cloud of affiliate websites that basically rely on a large amount of user traffic they receive to negotiate discounts with e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart. Similarly, there are a large number of wallets that provide recharging and bill payment facilities to their users.
So, TalkCharge, by combining both the services on one platform, is looking for an opportunity to get users who come to their site for utility bill payment or for recharging, drawn in by the various discounts that it offers on a number of third-party services. They are hoping that eventually, these users will start using TalkCharge regularly for availing both the services.
The Funding Scenario
TalkCharge has been a bootstrapped venture since its idea was seeded in 2014. They are also planning to raise funds when they will start populating the first page of google search for all the services, coupons, and deals offered by them.
The Journey So Far and Ahead
In a span of just 3 years, TalkCharge has seen an organic growth. They have recently reached the milestone of 1 million users. The credit for it goes to the unique concept of TalkCharge and also its determination to provide the best services to the customers.
At present, the TalkCharge team comprises 20 talented team members. The startup venture is expecting to expand to 50+ members by 2019.
We hope that this unique platform will keep on weaving more success stories by enabling people to make safe and secure online transactions and by helping them save money and earn discounts while shopping online.
Source: Techstory
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