As a part of the Women in Engineering Day week, Express Computer has interviewed eminent personalities from the technology space to give more perspective on how women are thriving in this industry.
The pandemic has brought in a lot of unfortunate and tough decisions that companies have had to take to survive. CashKaro has a different story to tell. The cashback and coupons company has been hiring candidates despite the pandemic. The company has raised a total of $4.6Mn led by Kalaari Capital and Ratan Tata.
Led head-on by Rohan and Swati Bhargava, Express Computer gets in conversation with global entrepreneur Swati Bhargava, Co-founder at CashKaro about her journey in the tech industry.
Please elaborate on how CashKaro works.
CashKaro is India’s Largest Cashback & Coupons Site and the ultimate savings destination for savvy online shoppers. To avail great deals and extra cashback via CashKaro, one just needs to sign-in to the CashKaro App/website, find the e-commerce site they want to shop at and click on it. The user will then be redirected to the site of their choice, where they can shop as usual and earn extra Cashback from CashKaro, on top of all existing discounts & offers.
CashKaro users have access to 1500+ popular sites like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Udemy, 1mg, etc. to shop from, across all categories like fashion, beauty & personal care, grocery, home-appliances, phones and laptops. The additional wow factor to these savings is that CashKaro Cashback is real money that one can transfer to their bank account or redeem as Amazon or Flipkart gift cards.
A regular CashKaro user earns between Rs. 20,000 – 30,000 per year as Cashback, while those who shop in larger volumes and frequency via CashKaro, can earn the same amount in just a month’s time. In addition to earning cashback on popular shopping sites, CashKaro users can also earn Cashback on online payments of Utility Bills, Travel Bookings, Magazine Subscriptions, Food Orders, Online Gaming platforms and much more. CashKaro has in a short span of time, paid its users over Rs. 100 Crores as Cashback. To share with you, we have almost 5 Millionhappy users including students, working professionals, homemakers, and deal hunters across the board.
Seeing the instant and massive success of CashKaro, we recently launched EarnKaro, which is India’s first Social Cashback App. It enables online shoppers to find and share the best deals across categories like fashion, health, food, recharge, etc. with their social network using WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, etc. EarnKaro allows members to earn profit from the sales made through the shopping links shared by them. This is in line with our vision and goal of becoming the largest savings destination in India, by constantly creating more opportunities for people to save and earn money online.
EarnKaro also has immense potential for creating a thriving ecosystem of micropreneurs in India, by becoming an empowerment tool for youth, women, social media influencers, among others, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities. Given that EarnKaro provides an easy work-from-home opportunity with flexible hours, it is a breakthrough product, more so in the current scenario with people being confined to their homes and many individuals, unfortunately, being out of work or having to take pay cuts. While an average EarnKaro user can easily earn up to Rs. 20,000 a month working flexible hours from their home, those with a larger social media following and influence can even earn as much as Rs. 1.5L a month on the EarnKaro platform.
How is CashKaro handling the pandemic? Will you be resuming the office soon?
As an organisation, CashKaro puts the safety and well-being of its team members and their families above everything else, so we will continue to work-from-home until the situation with respect to Covid-19 cases in India, gets significantly better. We have defined several function-wise SOPs and made available adequate equipment to all the team members as per the nature of their work, to bring in efficiency and seamlessness to work-from-home. We also have video calls with individuals as well as teams on a daily basis to ensure we stay connected and continue to work adhesively as a team, just as we did while working from office.
At the same time, it’s also important to keep our members happy and motivated. And so, every morning, I post the photo of one of our members on our office chat along with a message on how that member’s zeal and enthusiasm while working from home, has been a motivation for all of us. We also organise Fun Wednesday gaming sessions to engage all our team members and to ensure that they enjoy their #LifeAtCashKaro, be it from home or office. We always had a vibrant culture in our office and now we have managed to make a similar one while working from home as well, which is a mini-achievement for us itself!
The current scenario is a big push to fintech as the world moves to digital. How is CashKaro leveraging on it?
Indeed. The push towards Fintech is a major catalyst towards the growth of Indian e-commerce. According to a recent report by GlobalData, India’s e-commerce industry is expected to touch ₹7 trillion by 2023, which will be significantly propelled by Coronavirus. Being intent on avoiding physical stores and cash-based transactions, online shopping will see a sharp spike even in tier 4, 5 and 6 cities, where users may have so far had reservations on purchasing things online. In addition to the safety element, I feel this is also a time where people are going to be more inclined to save as much as possible, due to uncertainties related to employment and finances, and CashKaro helps them do just that. So in that sense, the product-market fit for CashKaro right now is even greater than it was before. Hence, we have increased our marketing spends significantly for CashKaroacross channels to reach out to more users, as India prepares for an all-time high number of online shoppers.
Can we rely on technology solely to be the panacea for all problems? If so, how?
In my opinion, technology is certainly a means to solving various problems and if one has to think of a plausible solution to a problem related to one’s business, our day-to-day lives, or even certain natural phenomena, then the technology to an extent is the bridge that leads to the solution. A very recent example of this is how technology came to our rescue when all of us had to suddenly resort to a work-from-home setup. Though ultimately technology depends on the human mind just as much as humans depend on technology to get various things done, and one cannot go without the other. Technology may not be the sole panacea for all problems but it certainly is the cornerstone of most solutions.
How are you ensuring cybersecurity on this platform?
All CashKaroservers are firewall protected. We follow the highest standards of security when it comes to safeguarding our database or any other business-related information for that matter. Our IT team has built great technology that has multiple levels of encryption to ensure that user data remains safe. Cybersecurity is one of the areas which has our highest focus, especially with the growing phishing attacks and hacking globally.
How can we have more women joining the bandwagon?
Personally, I already see that shift happening where many households today have women who are either first-generation entrepreneurs or career women and are balancing their personal and professional lives so well. What’s interesting is that this trend is now also beginning to prevail in tier 2 and 3 cities where a greater number of women are showing a preference for entering the corporate/jobs’ landscape.
Even organisations are increasingly recognising and encouraging this trend by inculcating a gender-neutral culture and providing equal opportunities to both men and women team members, CashKaro being one of them..
Lastly, getting support from family is critical. A woman should not be made to feel guilty about her work or about leaving kids at home to do her job. Families should take the career of their female members seriously and encourage them to go out and pursue their ambition, without any apology.