Interview with Arpit Khandelwal & Ankit Kumar Agarwal | NeoBiz
The entrepreneurial journey is full of highs and lows. Sometimes hearing other people’s accounts on how they built their business from a start-up to a company of many employees is just what one needs to initiate their journey.
To have the vision to become an entrepreneur is great, but making it a reality is another story.
In that frame, we had the pleasure to interview Arpit Khandelwal, ex-Ola and IIT Bombay alumnus, and Ankit Kumar Agrawal, ex-CarDekho and ex-Cvent. They are the co-founders of NeoDove, a startup that is soon launching its new product NeoBiz, a sales management app for SMBs.
In India, there are over 60 million SMBs, but only a fraction of them have adopted the digital way of doing business. NeoBiz aims to help businesses increase their efficiency by offering them a simple and easy-to-use mobile app to manage their day-to-day sales activities. Eventually, their goal is to move on to solving other business problems as well.
The NeoBiz app streamlines the sales and customer engagement processes by storing and managing customer information in one place, classifying data, setting reminders, scheduling messages, communicating with customers on multiple channels with just one touch, and giving clear insights on the business’ performance.
With so many features already in and so many in the pipeline, NeoBiz is ready to create a positive impact on the growth of millions of businesses.
1. What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e what’s your source of motivation?
To live and work each day and grow one step closer to your goals, it’s thrilling, to say the least. It involves a lot of passion and excitement. Also, the team at NeoDove is very hard-working and committed, which further instills confidence and motivation.
2. Why should people choose your product/services?
One of the best aspects of NeoBiz is its simplicity. One doesn’t have to be extremely technically sound to use it. And it is not just about the ease with which you can use it, but the results that it helps you achieve in the end. Also, it’s free and very easy to set up.
3. What’s your competitive advantage and why can’t it be copied?
So far, no significant player is solving similar sales problems for our target market and we have been in this business for quite a while now. We are in a better state of understanding and anticipating customer needs, given our experience helping businesses solve their sales growth problems through NeoDove. This experience, I believe, is NeoBiz’s biggest competitive advantage.
4. Have you considered any alliance/partnership?
It’s not part of our plan yet.
5. What comes first for you, money or emotions?
For us, there’s no either-or when it comes to choosing between money and emotions. Money is an absolute necessity to achieve the goals that we have. And emotions are always there. The passion for running a start-up, the thrill of it, the stress, the happiness, etc. are emotions that are always there.
6. What does success mean to your company?
We aim to contribute to the growth of millions of businesses, once we’ve done that we’ll know we have succeeded.
7. How do you handle the pressure?
The pressure is always going to be there. But, it gets easier to handle when you have your team’s unflinching support at all times. Luckily, our team is understanding and stands in support no matter what.
8. What inspired you to start NeoBiz?
In the time we spent helping businesses through NeoDove, we realized that something similar could benefit smaller businesses, too. So, we came up with NeoBiz to help businesses manage their daily sales and customer engagement processes with the utmost ease and precision.
9. How do you plan on getting funded?
Our company NeoDove, of which NeoBiz is a product, earlier this year raised $1.5M in a seed funding round led by India Quotient.
NeoBiz is currently in its pre-launch stage and will go live by the end of this month. You can sign up for early access here to be one of the first ones to use NeoBiz.
