Meet The Gang Of Techies That Narrates Struggles Of Its Startup Journey Like ¡®Pushpa Raj¡¯!

Their story started in 2015 when ¡®KhaaliJeb¡¯ was born. As the name suggests, it is a payment and banking app for students and youth. It makes payment and banking for them ¨C simple, fast, and extra rewarding. And, they used the trending dialogue from the movie 'Pushpa' to depict it.

"It is exactly what we feel like with all the difficulties and struggle. We could relate a lot with the dialogue ¡°Main Jhukega Nhi," one of the founding members Pratham Kumar told India Times.

khaalijeb-team

What is it exactly?

Their idea was to have UPI on KhaaliJeb through which one could make payments directly from their bank account to their friends or any merchants accepting UPI. And simply, scan UPI QR at nearby outlets to make payments.

When asked how is it extra-rewarding, Pratham Kumar told Indiatimes that KhaaliJeb runs a membership-based discount Program, where students and youths enjoy special discounts & deals from 100 + brands across categories.

He further added: ¡°It¡¯s a member only platform for students & youths below 29. To become a member of the discount program, they need to upload an ID and the verification happens within minutes. It¡¯s a one-time process,¡± Pratham said.

khaalijeb-team

Their story

It all began when in early 2015 one of the co-founders during his college holidays was heading to his hometown Patna. He said he booked an Ola from Railway Station to his home and the money got deducted from Ola Money.

¡°The whole payment experience was so smooth and seamless, it made me question ¨C why this can¡¯t be everywhere? After a long time, something had intrigued me. Something evoked a sense of purpose in my life,¡± said Pratham.

He then started researching about different payment systems all around the world and woke up the next day with the decision to give the placements a miss and made up his mind to start his own venture.

khaalijeb-team

He then discussed the idea with his friends and now co-founders Aman, Wilson, and Sudhanshu, all BTech graduates from IIT Allahabad. In 3 years time, they took the first step and launched the app on Play Store in October, 2018.

What about the ¡®Pushpa¡¯ movie dialogue and their video?

¡°Our journey has been full of failures and struggles, but we kept fighting like the main character in Pushpa" he added, ¡°We could connect with it so much and also wanted to inspire others to make videos depicting their journeys."

The struggle

Narrating their startup journey he said that they did a lot of rookie mistakes.

¡°We kept waiting for UPI integration to get completed and kept delaying our launch thinking it will get completed in a month or a two. And it took around 18 months for the UPI integration. We could have launched the app with some other features in the meantime, but it was silly of us that we didn¡¯t.¡±

khaalijeb-team

¡°We started marketing the app with founders talking to students, youth, and early corporates, telling them about the app on the streets of Bengaluru. We personally spoke to 40,000 youths and distributed over 1 lakh stickers,¡± he said.

He said they reached out to more than 6000 youtubers and spok¦¸z5;xe to more than 2000 over call. ¡°We tried convincing them to make videos about our app. With no money in hand and nothing in our pockets, we kept going with one idea and one aim. Today, we might succeed, if we don¡¯t, at least we can always say we tried.¡±