KhaaliJeb UPI App Is Helping Broke Students Transfer Money And Earn Discounts

While people say life was simpler as students, only students truly understand the hardships and struggles when it comes to choosing the right career path and doing whatever it takes to be successful. The life of a student is hard, and the life¡¯s harder for those students who stay away from home while living an independent life where managing expenses adds to the existing stress.

Representational Image: Reuters

However, a startup by IIIT Allahabad alums is trying to reduce the pain of the students with their app KhaaliJeb. Essentially it¡¯s a UPI app targeted straight to students. The app offers tools like cost splitting as well as discounts for restaurants, salons to students to help them manage their expenses in the best way possible.

We got to speak to the founders of KhaaliJeb - Prakash Kumar, Aman, Sudhanshu and Wilson, where they shared what motivated them to create this app and their experience surrounding it.

Khaalijeb

Getting inspired on the journey back home

Prakash shared how the inspiration to start Khaalijeb started from his Ola journey back home from college, ¡°It was early 2015. During one of the college holidays, I was heading to my hometown. Ola Cabs recently launched in Patna then. I booked an Ola from the station to my home. I reached home and the money got deducted from Ola Money. The whole payment experience was so smooth and seamless, it made me question ¨C why can¡¯t this be everywhere? It seemed more fascinating, perhaps because I was completely ignorant of the digital payment developments around the world during that time.¡±

He added, ¡°That whole night, I couldn¡¯t sleep. I started researching different payment systems all around the world. And I woke up with the decision to give the placements a miss and made up my mind to startup. When I returned to college, I discussed the idea with Aman, Wilson, and Sudhanshu and they joined in as co-founders.¡±

Three years to finally push out a product

Getting the idea in mind and bringing his college friends onboard as co-founders were just the beginning, but several challenges lay ahead in front of them. Prakash shared, ¡°We took more than 3 years to take the first step. We started working on KhaaliJeb from January 2015. We got the company registered in March 2016. Being novices, just of college; we failed at things and we made a lot of mistakes. We made pivots. The idea kept on evolving. We launched the app on Play Store in October 2018.¡±

The problem KhaaliJeb is trying to solve

Sudhanshu, one of the co-founders who¡¯s responsible for the tech at play in Khaalijeb, explains how students are so vastly disconnected from banking services. He explains, ¡°We are solving the needs of the Indian youth, belonging to the age group of 16 to 29 years, which is around 30 percent of our country's population, and around 60-70 percent of them are online shoppers. If we talk about banking, youths are mostly disconnected to the way banking works.¡±

He added, ¡°UPI has helped the payments market to grow at enormous speed, but the market is still at a nascent stage. The awareness created amongst consumers by big payment platforms helps players like us to an extent. It¡¯s extremely difficult to acquire new customers for a new player like us.¡±

Google Play Store

¡°Even if a payment platform provides value and the user experience is top-notch, downloads are still hard to come by without well researched and properly implemented go-to-market strategies. We are trying to solve some of the above challenges by finding out the gaps in the industry and focusing on that. Getting customers on-board by building great value-added services and by being quirky.¡±

Designing a solution for the Indian youth

Wilson, one of the co-founders responsible for sales and operations of Khaalijeb shared the challenges they came across for developing an India-centric solution. He explained, ¡°It¡¯s extremely challenging to build an India-centric solution due to its diverse demographics. One marketing plan might work exceptionally well in a segment or a region and fail abysmally in another segment or a region. Some of the challenges are localized, and some are pervasive. ¡°

He added, ¡°One of the most challenging aspects is to personalize a product or a solution as per the different demography. Scaling is another challenge. You can¡¯t replicate a model which worked in particular demography to other demography.¡±

Motivation and satisfaction to work on Khaalijeb

Aman shared what motivates him to push harder in a market that¡¯s currently dominated by tech giants and why they love doing it every day, ¡°Multiple things motivate us. UPI Payments space is dominated by tech and payment giants. Though it is extremely challenging, competing with them is a motivating factor. In an early-stage startup, you get to learn new things, you become better every day. You become aware of the skills you thought never existed in you. You always have a goal. All such things are immensely motivating.¡±

He also shared the biggest satisfaction he got through working for KhaaliJeb, ¡°Seeing people using our product in real is one of the most beautiful feelings we have experienced. Multiple times, we have come across people smiling after getting discounts using KhaaliJeb. It has been a spectacle of great satisfaction.¡±

Representational Image: Reuters

If they could redo one thing¡­

While KhaaliJeb is doing incredibly well today, we were curious to know if the founders thought of undoing something that they did in the past to put the brand at an even better position today.

Aman shared, ¡°We were novices; just out of college. We made a lot of mistakes. Perhaps, we waited too long to launch. We tried to perfect the product way too much before launching. It¡¯s better to launch early and rectify the mistakes than delaying the launch. We waited for too long to find a banking partner.¡±

He added, ¡°We should have launched the app with other features while the UPI integration was going on with a bank. We took things for granted at times. Also, we didn¡¯t market the product properly. We relied too much on ¡°word of mouth¡± and hence we struggled to scale.¡±