Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business
SpareIt® : Prashant Kamdar and Romi Chugh are founders of SpareIt.
Prashant has 25 years of experience in this aftermarket industry. Before SpareIt® he ran an online vehicle servicing portal like other aggregators. There were two main problems that needed solving – 1. The problem of spares sourcing and 2. Enabling garages to deliver better customer experience; He approached Romi to debate this idea, and this led to launch SpareIt®.
We are building India’s largest automotive aftermarket full-stack digital platform. We are ushering in the next normal in the automotive aftermarket by reshaping the ecosystem through technology – every garage, every supplier and every process.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by SpareIt
SpareIt® : We are a B2B platform for the automotive aftermarket. We empower neighborhood garages and suppliers on our platform with easy access to sourcing, last-mile logistics, business management solutions and digital credit.
Garages
Every garage matters. Aftermarket Garages or neighborhood mechanics have never had the opportunity to get truly online. We transform aftermarket workshops into modern convenience plug-and-play workshops, owned and operated by entrepreneurs, and powered by our platform, loyalty programs, and consumer payment solutions. We empower garages with easy access to sourcing, last-mile logistics, business management solutions and digital credit.
The platform is about making business easy in India, about making B2B commerce convenient and efficient. It connects workshops with distributors and manufacturers who sell more than 30 lakh spares ranging across categories in the automotive aftermarket.
With integrated logistics on our platform, these garages get the spares delivered to their doorstep in two hours from the time of the order, thus heightening the experience and TATs.
Suppliers
This is a completely fragmented market. We are aggregating the demand on our digital platform thereby making this proposition unavoidable and unignorable to suppliers. Every supplier is verified with a background and due diligence is done to ensure parts quality. Suppliers now a platform to sell their inventory to garages directly. Very soon, we will equip them will tools like inventory optimization and movement, invoicing and digital credit.
With integrated logistics on our platform, we’ve removed the daily pain to find the right logistics partner for every delivery. No more delays in delivery.
Great Companies: What makes SpareIt different from hundreds of other Automotive Platforms?
SpareIt® :
You cannot build a skyscraper without a strong foundation. Similarly, you cannot build the India’s largest digital aftermarket platform without a garages network. We are consolidating the demand on our platform to make the proposition very viable to other stakeholders in the ecosystem
B2C players can use our garages network to scale overnight, or source spares from us (some of them are already sourcing spares)
Spares supplier aggregators can sell spares to our garages on our platform
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
SpareIt® :
We’ve overcome two big challenges –
Bringing a completely offline segment to an online digital platform
Changing the existing credit first policy to a cash first policy
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for SpareIt?
SpareIt® : The company aims to get 150000 garages, 25000 suppliers on this digital platform. We are working on an acquisition strategy that focusses on efficient onboarding, lower CAC, and better usage. Right now, it’s a feet-on-the-street model but have started seeing a lot of word-of-mouth onboards and referrals. Garages are a small and closed community. Obviously, we are doing something right that they’re recommending our app.
We are looking to get into Tier 2 & Tier 3 soon. We’ve already made some inroads into Belgaum, Hubli and Mysore. We’ve seen great traction there. We’ve just entered Delhi NCR and Pune.
Currently we are at 6 garages/sq km in Bangalore and 10 garages/sq km in other smaller cities like Belgaum.
From the supply side, we are already working with the largest suppliers across the country like TVS, Shell. We’re verifying suppliers to ensure there is quality and consistent supply of spares across the country.
As a platform, we are hoping to connect the entire ecosystem of suppliers and garages on a more granular level as quickly as possible
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
SpareIt® : Partnerships are important, choose your partners carefully. Try to get onboard an incubator or accelerator. It will expedite your growth.