During our Entrepreneurial Mindset and Action course in term-3 at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, my team and I chose to work with RedGorillas, an innovative startup operating in the intersection of retail technology and social commerce. The company’s founder, Rahul Chauhan, generously mentored us during the project and provided us with an inside look into the world of entrepreneurship and how to excel in it.

RedGorillas is a groundbreaking platform that empowers consumers to benefit from the power of communities by finding better products at better prices. At the same time, the platform helps retailers improve their online presence with a comprehensive platform while also tackling their primary issue of demand uncertainty.

To validate our hypotheses regarding the existence of problems for both consumers and retailers, as well as the viability and incremental value of the proposed solution compared to existing alternatives, we adopted a lean startup methodology.

Our first step involved conducting over 30 customer interviews to understand both sides of the platform users. We conducted the interviews with great care to ensure that we eliminated any potential biases. By understanding the users first, we were able to validate the existence of the problems and then assess the attractiveness of the proposed solution. This helped us validate our hypotheses and offered us additional insights into crucial pain points we could address for the users and how the proposed solution could be improved further.

The insights from the interviews were quite surprising as they showed us that the problem was much more widespread than we expected, and the proposed solution was significantly more attractive to the users than we anticipated. We then moved on to MVP testing to further validate our hypotheses and conducted a market size analysis to determine the product-market fit.

Our experience with RedGorillas was more than just an opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship. We fell in love with the venture during our journey, as it had enormous growth potential, as demonstrated by our customer interviews and MVP testing. We thank Rahul Chauhan for his invaluable guidance, and we wish both him and RedGorillas all the best for the future!