Founded by Anushka Jain in 2015, Share At Door Step is helping individuals give away their old clothes, toys & furniture with ease and providing rewards in return.
When were you founded & What is the product/service you provide?
Share At Door Step is a tech platform, which allows users to donate goods effortlessly and earn rewards.
Its core lies in turning “preloved” to “re-loved”.
This can involve items like old toys, clothes, electronics, etc. SADS is fundamentally helping people overcome the problem of hoarding old and unwanted goods, in a unique manner through a profit with purpose model.
On one hand, we are helping the underprivileged by giving them access to reusable goods to fulfill their basic needs, and on the other, we are keeping the reusable goods off landfills by extending their life by 1.5 yrs, thus reducing the carbon emissions by up to 27%.
The company started its operations in 2016.
What is the company’s long and short-term vision? Where do you see your industry going in the next five years?
Currently, users get rewards each time they discard their unwanted goods responsibly.
In the future, users would be rewarded for making other sustainable choices such as buying eco-friendly products, shopping from ethical brands, opting for cleaner energy sources, etc.
Our vision is to create a “fit bit” for sustainability, a sustainability gamification app that helps people achieve their sustainable living goals by tracking and incentivising their everyday actions.
Through the app, they would be expanding to the US market and a few parts of Europe focussing on environmentally conscious consumers.
They plan to use blockchain and ML to make the individual sustainability actions transparent, auditable, and quantifiable (in terms of carbon footprint) and connect carbon credits for B2C actions.
How did you get inspiration for the Company? How did you go about researching and validating the idea?
When I was a kid, my mom used to donate clothes on my birthday.
I used to wonder why we do this just once a year. I thought either my mom is lazy or really busy but eventually, I figured out that the real reason was that there was no easy way to donate preloved goods.
I figured out that there is a gap between donors and NGOs as donors were not aware of the requirements of NGOs, had trust issues, or were too busy to drive to the NGO. To fill this gap, ‘Share At Door Step’ was born.
“Share At Door Step” makes it super easy to give a new life to those old toys, clothes, electronics, furniture, etc.
Our mission is to create a world where every re-usable item reaches someone in need.
I started the journey with just one NGO partner by doing the initial 150 pickups myself to understand the nuances of the business, understand the customer mindset and gauge the product-market fit.
Is the company funded? If yes, how many rounds & how much funding, If No, then are you open to funding?
No, Share At Door Step is completely bootstrapped.
How does the product work & What problems does it solve?
Users can just go to our website and schedule a pickup.
Alternatively, users can also use PhonePe Switch and MyGate apps to schedule a pickup. We are listed in these apps in the services section.
We have multiple modes for pickup so that people can choose based on the number of donations.
We help people figure out ‘what, how, and where for the preloved goods that they wish to donate and provide them an easy way to donate the items to the verified matching NGO.
Process: The donations go directly to one of our NGO partners. Once a user raises a request, our NGO mapping algorithm would pick an NGO for the donations depending on various parameters like location, items to be donated, their quantity, urgency, preferred slot, etc.
Then the donations are picked up by our logistics partner and delivered to the matching NGO.
Users are notified of the details of the NGO where the donations went via automated email.
What are your USP and innovation? How are you different from others?
What makes us unique is that we are solving the problem of piling goods and creating a huge impact through a tech platform that works on profit with a purpose model.
The whole process is tech-driven making the model very transparent and scalable.
What are some of your competitors & what advantage do you have over them? & Briefly explain your revenue model?
We are exploring the blue ocean of the used goods market (60% of the pie that contains low-value goods such as clothes, toys, books, etc.).
What makes us different from the other platforms in this market is that our focus is on sustainability and circularity, and we are solving the problem of piling goods for the users who want to get rid of the preloved goods responsibly.
We charge a convenience fee for the pickup and also work with various brands and corporates for their sustainability initiatives
What difficulties did you encounter when you started the company & Were you impacted by the Covid outbreak?
I think when you are working on a model that’s one of its kind, you have to solve the equation for a lot of variables logistics, revenue model, team, etc.
We were fortunate to have mentors and partners who really helped us skip a lot of hits and trials and catalysed our journey.
Bangalore ecosystem is such that you have access to the best talent and mentors/ experts out there as long as you are willing to look for it and know exactly what you are looking for.
During the covid outbreak, we made a lot of changes to cater to the changing needs of users and the beneficiaries.
We added contactless pickup options for users and launched various initiatives focused on the essentials for the covid crisis.
We launched campaigns like #VirtualClassroom (to aid underprivileged kids to continue their education online during the pandemic), #KnotsForCare in partnership with brand partner Nautica (to support underserved communities and provide them essentials during the pandemic), Launched ‘Go Circular 100’ to engage remote employees for corporates.
What are your future plans & launches?
We are currently active in 11 major cities.
Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad. Kolkata, Surat, Chandigarh, Ghaziabad/Noida, Chennai, Pune and have light pickup options in 2000+ cities.
We plan to expand our full operations from 11 to 65 cities in near future.
We are also working with brand partners for their circularity and sustainability initiatives.
We plan to increase touchpoints with our users through more brand and corporate collaborations.
Current company size, work culture, Hiring Funda
We are a team of 12 people and 5 partners for handling logistics.
How did you launch your company when you had just 0 users. Which channels/tools/strategies worked the most for acquiring the first 100 users?
The initial customers were the ones who were looking and searching for options online for donations of goods and came across our website.
We focus a lot on customer support and experience and maintain very high customer satisfaction rates.
This helps us not only understand the focus areas for our company but also gives us a high WOM reach.
We also have an amazing team that helps us leverage the other organic ways to reach out to the customers, fun engaging posts on social media, strong SEO, access to communities, B2B2C campaigns are a few examples.
A piece of advice for the readers.
Start a clutter-free life today by giving away your preloved goods. “Decluttering for good” is fun and you would also be able to make a huge social and environmental impact.