How to Build an ONDC Startup - Gogappi Founder Interview

Millionaire Mondays by Backstage with Millionaires

In this episode of Backstage With Millionaires, Caleb discusses ONDC with founders of Gogappi, Arvind Sekhar and Samhitha Kotaamasu, one of India's first ONDC buyer apps. Gogappi is one of the first startups on ONDC. ONDC is short for Open Network for Digital Commerce, it is an initiative by the government of India to promote an open network for exchange of goods and services over the Internet. This basically means that the government is trying to create a level playing field for all the small business owners in India. ONDC is promising same power and features to these small owners that big e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon have. ONDC can be a game changer for these small businesses as now you won’t have to pay anything to reach all these customers. All you have to do is list yourself with ONDC and customers across the country can find you from any application of their choice. The government has compared this with ‘hypertext transfer protocol for information exchange over the internet’ where you could reach millions of customers without spending anything. Next big issue right now for D2C brands is efficient inventory management. ONDC promises to solve this by standardizing operations like cataloging, inventory management, order management and order fulfillment. This would mean that as a small seller, you could use any ONDC compatible application and you don’t have to worry about managing everything on your own. It will be interesting to see how ONDC unfolds in India. An open network for doing business will certainly give confidence to millions of retailers and small brand owners to come online and do business and we could see thousands of unicorns in the future just from taking this direct-to-customer approach. However, we as buyers have become very comfortable and spoiled with the services provided by these e-commerce giants, from order tracking to return and refund, we tend to get aggrieved with every small issue we face. And this would be a challenge for ONDC to solve.