So, which company is Apna? What was the development process that brought this startup from zero to 1.1 billion USD in less than 2 years? Let's go together ThinkZone Find out in this article.
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WHAT IS APNA?
Established since 2019, Apna is a platform that provides career guidance and job search solutions for blue-collar workers in India, with 3 main product branches:
➤ Find a job: Recruitment platform for blue-collar workers with recruiters, helping recruiters take less than 5 minutes to post jobs, and have suitable candidates in just 2 days.
➤ Community: A social platform that connects blue-collar workers with each other, there are currently more than 70 professional communities established and actively operating on Apna every day.
➤ Train: Career guidance content/courses for blue-collar workers.
With these three product lines, Apna aims to build a community of tens to hundreds of millions of blue-collar workers in India, where people can connect with each other, improve their career skills, and find work opportunities.
Apna's target audience is: blue-collar worker, that is, workers who do manual work such as hairdressers, carpenters, shippers, repairmen,...
In India, this is a very large force in the workforce, estimated at approx 300 million people (2021 data). Especially during the Covid crisis, the number of unemployed workers in India increased sharply, creating a great demand for jobs and market opportunities for a product like Apna that solves the problem of finding a job.
An interesting thing about Apna is that this application only has an Android version and does not have an iOS version, drawn from the fact that the low income of blue-collar workers in India does not allow them to buy high-cost Apple devices such as iPhone or iPad.
APNA'S DREAM FIGURES
Before going specifically into Apna's journey to unicorn, let's go over the impressive figures that make this startup truly remarkable. As of September 2021, Apna has achieved:
➤ 16 million users
➤ 150,000+ recruiters (with retention rate up to 95%)
➤ 5 million jobs (active jobs)
➤ 18 million recruitment interviews per month
➤ 70+ worker communities
➤ Operating in 28 cities across India
Total number of Apna users over time. Unit: million people.
We are even more impressed when looking at Apna's capital raising history, with a total capital raised of 193.5 million USD.
| Time | Round | Money raised | Lead investors |
| Sep, 2021 | Series C | $100M ($1.1 bil valuation) |
Tiger Global Management |
| June, 2021 | Series B | $70M ($560M valuation) |
Insight Partners, Tiger Global Management |
| March, 2021 | Series A | $12.5M | Sequoia Capital India |
| Sep, 2020 | Series A | $8M | Lightspeed India Partners, Sequoia Capital India |
| Jul, 2019 | Seed | $3M | Sequoia Capital India |
Those are impressive numbers for Apna, and soon we will find out how that journey was accomplished.
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WHO IS APNA'S FOUNDER?
Apna's founder is Nirmit Parikh, who graduated from Nirma University in Ahmedabad with a major in engineering.
At the age of 19, Nirmit opened a technology company called Incone Technologies, in which he built automatic mechanisms for gates at dams, stemming from the annual flood problem in his hometown. Later, Nirmit merged Incone with the family company, providing flood protection solutions with an AI system that predicts floods and monitors water levels in reservoirs.
3 years later, Nirmit went on to found a company, Cruxbot, which was later acquired by another company, Kno Inc, a startup from Silicon Valley. Then Kno Inc itself was acquired by Intel, and this M&A deal brought Nirmit from Silicon Valley, to become a director at Intel Education. Here, at the age of 26, he studied an MBA course at Stanford University, then worked at Apple, where he accumulated more experience in strategy and software.
Leaving Apple, Nirmit decided to return to his homeland India to start a business.
APNA'S JOURNEY TO UNICORN
Apna's dream-like journey was created by a talented founder who understands customers, desires to solve big problems in society, and has a suitable market approach.
Understand workers clearly, and don't follow the path of other job search platforms
According to founder Nirmit Parikh, the name Apna comes from Apna Time Aayega, a famous song in Bollywood, whose main message is to solve the major obstacle of workers in finding suitable work opportunities.
However, a job search platform alone is not enough, and has been proven by the failures of many companies in the market. (according to share of Sequoia Capital fund when investing in Apna). Job search platforms always face the problem of constantly burning money to collect users, when users keep coming and leaving, because each person usually only needs to find a job 1-2 times a year.
Apna team approaches the market in a newer direction, and user-centric much more.
In early 2019, founder Nirmit worked directly as a worker at a manufacturing factory in Ahmedabad, then worked as an electrician, foreman, warehouse worker,... to be able to directly live and understand the lives and needs of blue-collar workers in India. Through this time, Nirmit realized an insight that workers need more than just a job search platform: they also need a platform to connect, exchange and learn from other workers like themselves.
That is why Nirmit decided to approach the market by building blue-collar worker communities in many different professions, from telesales, hairdressers, carpenters, mechanics, etc. and to date there have been more than 70 such communities established on Apna.
The response and spread of communities has verified Product - Market Fit (PMF) for this product branch. Up to now, Apna still maintains a team of 30 people who chat with more than 1,000 users every day to understand their needs and build close relationships with them, clearly demonstrating the user-centric nature of this startup's product and business thinking.
➤ Learn more about PMF through the article: “From 0 to Product - Market Fit, then scale-up”
Speedy testing, optimization and product development process
From the early days, Nirmit has built a culture throughout the company around continuous testing and optimization, to create a digital product that can scale and is always loved by all users. (“a scalable, digital-only product loved by its users”).
Before achieving PMF, the Apna team created up to 30 different versions of the app, tested each feature with clear metrics, and then refined the features that brought the highest user interaction index. This process is implemented quickly in just a few months until the product reaches PMF.
Feedback obtained from daily interactions with users is also carefully considered to improve the product. In each locality that Apna targets, this startup carefully researches the language and behavior of workers there, and uses AI to automatically adjust the content on the app to create the best experience, most suitable for the culture of each region.
Processes within the company are also standardized, making Apna's expansion to other cities take... no more than 1 week!
Find the right people at the right stage
For each different stage of development, Apna's founder outlined clear criteria for the personnel he was looking for. Specifically, Nirmit divides development stages and personnel criteria as follows:
➤ From 0 to 1 (before PMF): At this stage, Apna is looking for members who have expertise in the field they are responsible for, but at the same time must clearly understand Apna's target customers (blue-collar workers and the companies that recruit them), in order to improve products and achieve PMF quickly.
➤ From 1 to 10 (after PMF): At this stage, Apna begins to scale, and the personnel sought are leaders in operations and business strategy with experience in deploying scale-up to other areas, to help the company have a stable operating system, ready for the scale-up process with a reasonable scale-up strategy.
➤ From 10 to 100 (powerful scale): During this period, Apna will look for personnel with expertise in scaling with experience in scaling many products to international scale.
APNA'S BUSINESS MODEL
Reading this, you will probably wonder, with so much investment capital, with so much money burned to acquire users, where does Apna's revenue come from, and how much is it to compensate for that huge amount of costs.
And the answer, surprisingly, is that Apna has never had any revenue.
That's right. Although Apna has become a unicorn, it is still in the pre-money stage. Sharing about this aspect, founder Nirmit Parikh said that Apna is running a number of tests to test different fee collection options from Apna's huge user base, and will officially implement the fee collection policy in 2022. One of the fee options that Apna is testing is charging for recruitment interviews, and still keeping other services free such as posting job ads or registering for career guidance courses.
Currently, this startup is still focusing on taking advantage of the newly raised $100 million for the goal of expanding the market to 300 cities in India, and starting to enter a number of other markets in Southeast Asia and Africa.
SUMMARY
Above is an overview of Apna, the startup that has the fastest speed to become a unicorn in India without having any revenue yet.
Although continuously burning money without having any revenue always comes with a big risk that the startup may run out of money without having time to create a stable revenue source, however, with the capacity of the Apna team analyzed above, and the huge number of users that Apna has, making money from this product is probably not a difficult problem. (according to founder Nirmit himself).
How will Apna develop in the near future? And is there a similar model that can be developed in Vietnam? Let's wait and see!
Reference:
https://www.sequoiacap.com/india/build/apna-leveraging-insight-speed-and-storytelling-to-scale/
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/15/india-jobs-app-apna-raises-70-million/