Silicon Valley's Hottest Startup Incubator Takes On This Indian Venture

Just one year ago, Indian e-coupon aggregator LafaLafa.com was barely a blip in the mind of, well, anyone. It’s been quite the year though – testament to the booming tech environment in India, they’re one of the privileged few to be on their way to be accelerated by one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startup incubators.

Started by Indian female entrepreneur Yosha Gupta, LafaLafa.com’s premise lies in targeting deal hungry Indians by offering them cash back on coupon-based online purchases, provided they purchase through their website.

With 10 years of experience working in the mobile payments industry, launching products across Asia, Gupta says the idea behind setting up LafaLafa.com was to create a seamless experience for shoppers looking for a platform offering them a range of ways to save money.

Gupta says she wanted “to create the best savings platform for customers in India and later Asia as well, to leverage all my experience across markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Hong Kong, where the scope for this proposition is also huge.”

More pressing right now is an upcoming four-month stint as a part of the fifteenth class of startups with prominent Silicon Valley angel investor Dave McClure’s incubator, 500 Startups, who have offered them an initial investment of $125 thousand.

Each class admitted to the program consists of between 25 and 30 young enterprises looking to be mentored by a group of distinguished advisors that include Google and PayPal alumni, hand-picked from hundreds of applicants.

500 Startups India Partner Pankaj Jain says he was impressed with LafaLafa’s quick execution and growth. The LafaLafa.com website was officially launched in January of this year, and an app followed in April. The app has garnered over 300 thousand downloads since.

“While we first thought of launching with just a web presence, within a month of launch we realized that more than 70 percent of our customers were accessing the mobile optimized version of our website,” says Gupta, “that was a clear indication of the power of mobile in India.”

Facebook has also taken LafaLafa.com under their wing as part of their FBStart program. It’s a tool that in part enables its host of partners, including companies such as backend provider Parse and social media management system Hootsuite, to lend support to young startups.

“For a mobile focused business like ours, direct access to the Parse team, for example, is absolutely brilliant,” says Gupta, “we were having trouble with some image-based push notifications, and we met the Parse team at FBStart in Gurgaon – they helped us work it out really fast.”

But India has challenges that 500 Startups may not be able to help with.

“After having worked in Hong Kong and across Asia for the last six years, I do find the infrastructure challenges in India very hard to deal with,” says Gupta, “especially for a tech business like ours – being able to get reliable internet connectivity and wifi are all pre-requisites, but still not efficient here.”

There are other trials unique to India. “I really struggle with the strange sense of entitlement in the younger generation,” she says, “somehow aspiration and a desire to work hard don’t seem to correlate in India, which makes hiring a challenge.”