How startups like snapdeal have grown overtime using and managing knowledge. Showing business model, fundings, strategies, aquaintencies

1. KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT
VAIBHAV VYAS

2. ABOUT
• Snapdeal, founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, is an online shopping marketplace started in
February 2010
• Started as a daily deals platform inspired by groupon.com but expanded in September 2011 to become
an online marketplace.
• It started as a member only website which gradually kept on growing to become the largest online
marketplace in India
• Now offering an assortment of 12 million+ products across diverse categories from over 150,000 sellers
catering to a user base of 25 million members.
• Snapdeal is now the second-largest e-tailing company after Flipkart in India.

3. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
• Knowledge management is the deliberate and systematic coordination of an organization’s people,
technology, processes, and organizational structure in order to add value through reuse and innovation.
• This coordination is achieved through creating, sharing, and applying knowledge as well as through
feeding the valuable lessons learned and best practices into corporate memory in order to foster
continued organizational learning.

4. TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
Explicit Knowledge Tacit Knowledge
Tangible Intangible
Physical objects, e.g. in documents or databases Mental objects, i.e. it's in people's head's
Context independent Context affects meaning
Easily shared Sharing involves learning
Reproducible Not identically replicated

5. WHY IS KM IMPORTANT TODAY
• The major business drivers behind today’s increased interest in and application of KM lie in four key
areas:
1. Globalization of business.
2. Leaner organizations. We are doing more and we are doing it faster, but we also need to work smarter as
knowledge workers, adopting an increased pace and workload.
3. “Corporate amnesia.” We are more mobile as a workforce, which creates problems of knowledge
continuity for the organization and places continuous learning demands on the knowledge worker. We
no longer expect to spend our entire work life with the same organization.
4. Technological advances.

6. INTEGRATED KM MODEL
• Detect & Discover:
Search for existing knowledge as well as hidden knowledge within information and data.
• Organize & Assess:
Organization and assessment of knowledge assets. Knowledge is categorized, evaluated, and made
easier to access.

7. CONT-
• KM Tactical initiatives:
• Act - Reuse: If the firm can use existing knowledge to meet a tactical opportunity or threat, the role of KM is to
identify this knowledge and enable it to be used. This means that if it is required by a different person/group,
then KM is responsible for making it available to all relevant parties. Knowledge reuse thus combines the
previous points on detection and organization with a new aspect: knowledge sharing.
• Act - Create/acquire: If the right knowledge resources do not exist, the firm may create or acquire them,
assuming the right processes and systems are in place to support this. For example, the knowledge may be
acquired from partners if the right relationships are in place. knowledge creation depends on the right internal
environments that allow for combination and conversion of knowledge assets.
• Failure to act: This is not really a KM initiative in itself, but it does have some implications. In the event that a
firm fails to act there is still a lesson to be learned. Management must evaluate if this is something that needs
to be addressed in the future. This decision is fed back into the loop, affecting future strategic choices.

8. CONT-
• KM Strategic Initiatives:
• Invest: Support or implement. Here I refer to the organizational structures, culture, knowledge retention,
competencies, external network, and systems that direct, affect, and/or enable the KM initiatives discussed
above in the long term. Strategic initiatives may, for example, involve creating a knowledge sharing culture,
restructuring the firm, establishing a beneficial partnership, or implementing a new IT system. If the right
environment, system, etc. is already in place, management must make sure to continuously support it. It is
important to note that some of these do not fall solely within KM, and they are all fields of study in their own
right. However in this case, we are interested solely in the way these broader strategic initiatives shape the
focus and direction of KM in the long term.
• Divest: When knowledge assets become obsolete they need to be removed. KM is responsible for maintaining
relevant knowledge assets.

9. SNAPDEAL BUSINESS MODEL
• SnapDeal is owned by Jasper Infotech Private Limited.
• It operates via a Market-Place business model and Inventory Model of E-Commerce, adopted by
various big players like Amazon, FlipKart etc.
• Today they operate with the Market-place model only.

10. SNAPDEAL BUSINESS MODEL SEQUENCE
• List Sellers – Today SnapDeal claims of having 100,000+ Sellers on its platform.
• Get Sellers to become Active – By Listing of the Products
• Sellers Agree to the TnC of SnapDeal and agree on a selling commission on every order [Ranges from 5-
30% of the Sale Value depending on the item listed to be sold.]
• When ever any order is put up on SnapDeal by a customer, SnapDeal passes that to the seller and
arranges for the pick up and delivery [if fulfilled by SnapDeal] or else the Seller directly ships it to the
customer.
• At the end of a certain pre – agreed period of settlement of payments to Sellers, SnapDeal aggregates
the total sale achieved by a particular seller, and after deducting the sale commission and service tax,
they wire transfer the rest of the money to the seller.
• The sale happens via channels as listed below & For the entire amount of sale achieved by SnapDeal for
particular seller SnapDeal will charge a percentage (%) cut on the total sale amount excluding VAT / CST.

11. WORKING MODEL
• Technology integrations work seamlessly.
• Gives the opportunity to provide wider variety of choice to the customers.
• Snapdeal is thus a very conservative company in making investments.
• Company culture is more about how to do more with less.

12. FUNDING
• SnapDeal business model has led to this behemoth getting funds from every corner.
• Snapdeal has so far received a funding of $1.62 Billion from Nexus Venture Partners, Indo-US Venture
Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, Intel Capital and Saama Capital Blackrock,
Temasek Holdings, PremjiInvest Foxconn and E-Comm Behemoths and VCs of the likes of AliBaba, EBay
and SoftBank have funded SnapDeal.
• One of the world’s largest pension funds, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Singapore-based
investment entity Brother Fortune Apparel have also invested in the company.

13. CONT-
• Snapdeal has received 7 rounds of funding till date:
• Round 1: In January 2011, Snapdeal received a funding of $12 million from Nexus Venture Partners and
Indo-US Venture Partners.
• • Round 2: In July 2011, the company further raised $45 million
from Bessemer Venture Partners, along with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Indo- US Venture
Partners.
• • Round 3: Snapdeal then raised a 3rd round of funding worth $50 million from eBay and received
participation from existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Nexus Venture and IndoUS Venture
Partners.
• • Round 4: Snapdeal received its 4th round of funding of $133 million on Feb 2014. The 4th round of funding
was led by eBay with all the current institutional investors, including Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners,
Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Saama Capital.
• • Round 5: Snapdeal received its 5th round of funding of $105 million in May 2014. The 5th round included
investments by Blackrock, Temasek Holdings, Premji Invest and others. The round valued Snapdeal at
$1,000,000,000.
• • Round 6: Snapdeal received its 6th round of funding in Oct 2014 from Softbank with investments worth
$627 million in fresh capital. This made SoftBank the largest investor in Snapdeal.
• • Round 7: Snapdeal raised $500 million in its 7th round of funding in August this year from Alibaba, Softbank
and Foxconn.

14. FUNDING THROUGH ADS
• SnapDeal is one of the top 10 most visited websites in India. Thus it gets lot of active eyeballs in sale / non sale
times.
• SnapDeal gets lot of requests for product launch, advertisements and stuff. Thus at some point SnapDeal was
about to put in money in Komli Media to get their hands on experience in selling ad spaces, but that deal went
down the gutter on valuation jitters.
• Following people have paid money to SnapDeal for sharing the Ad-Space:
• Samsung
• ClearTax
• Tata Housing
• Housing.com
• Windows
• Mahindra Commercial vehicles
• ClearTrip
• BankBazaar
• Uber
• Some of these have fixed ad space fee and others have sale split for commission and ad space fee mixed model.

15. COMPANIES OWNED BY SNAPDEAL
• June 2011, Grabbon.com.
• April 2012, esportsbuy.com
• May 2013, Shopo.in
• April 2014, Doozton.com.
• December 2014, Wishpicker.com.
• January 2015, Smartprix.com.
• February 2015, Exclusively.in.
• March 2015, Gojavas.com.
• March 2015, Unicommerce.com.
• March 2015, RupeePower.
• April 2015, FreeCharge.in.
• September 2015, Reduce Data.

16. ACQUISITIONS
• • In June 2010, Snapdeal acquired Bangalore-based group buying site, Grabbon.com
• • In April 2012, Snapdeal acquired esportsbuy.com, an online sports goods retailer from Delhi.
• • In May 2013, Snapdeal acquired Shopo.in, an online marketplace for Indian handicraft products.
• • In April 2014, Snapdeal acquired fashion products discovery site, Doozton.com.
• • In December 2014, Snapdeal acquired gifting recommendation site, Wishpicker.com.
• • In January 2015, Snapdeal acquired a stake in product comparison website Smartprix.com.
• • In February 2015, Snapdeal acquired luxury fashion products discovery site, Exclusively.in.
• • In March 2015, Snapdeal acquired 20% stake in Gojavas.com.
• • In March 2015, Snapdeal acquired online multi-channel e-commerce order fulfillment platform, Unicommerce for an
undisclosed amount.
• • In March 2015, Snapdeal acquired majority stake in RupeePower, a digital financial products distribution platform.
• • In April 2015, Snapdeal acquired m-Commerce payments firm Freecharge for an undisclosed amount. However according
to some sources the acquisition was made for $450 million in cash and stock.
• • In May 2015, Snapdeal acquired Hyderabad-based mobile technology startup, MartMobi for an undisclosed amount.

17. MARKETING STRATEGIES
• Working and focusing primarily on its goal, within 2 years, Snapdeal succeeded in making 8-9 million
user base. They entered in top 100 Indian websites in terms of traffic.
• To further increase their members and traffic, they started referral programs on their websites in which
a user was paid a fixed amount for successful sign up of a friend after receiving the referral link to use
Snapdeal.
• They started “Get your first deal free” offer which got huge response from the user side. This led to the
strong brand value of Snapdeal.
• They started cost per lead (CPL) campaign in which the affiliates were paid Rs. 30 for each lead
generated. But the problem was that the margin was very less related to cost per acquisition that was
very high and the average revenue generated on each transaction was approx. Rs. 50-100.

18. CONT-
• But Snapdeal knew how to remain in the market and for this they kept on promoting themself in any
situation.
• After leads were generated, an aggressive email marketing campaign was launched to reach out those
leads. Every day on regular basis, promotional emails were sent to the registered users.
• Soon Snapdeal ventured into a proper e-commerce site including categories like electronics, fashion,
kitchen appliances, apparels and many more.
• Finally in September 2011, Snapdeal turned into a marketplace.

19. ADVERTISEMENT STRATEGY
• Flipkart launched its “Big Billion Day” offer in
October 2014, and Snapdeal left no room for
others to take its advantage. It introduced its
own advertisement along with Flipkart
showcasing users the advantage to shop with
them.
• Again when Flipkart launched its new
advertisement in June 2015, then also
Snapdeal nailed it and created its own ad along
with.
• For promotional activity, Snapdeal used the
face of many well-known Bollywood celebrities
including Aamir Khan, Pulkit Samrat, Alok Nath
and Krishna Abhishek.
• Aamir Khan endrosement with Tagline: “Dil ki
Deal”

20. SNAPDEAL GMV CALCULATION
• GMV is the Gross Merchandise Value i.e. the value of the goods and services sold on its platform put
together. According to estimates, it is still in the $3 – $4 Billion Range.

22. THANK YOU!!