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Arman has 10+ years of experience in building and scaling startups. His first venture was eShack, post which his passion for coffee made him create SleepyOwl along with his friends and co-founders Ajai and Ashwajeet.
Their idea is simple; make incredible coffee available to consumers at home, work, and well almost anywhere they crave it.
In the past few years, SleepyOwl Coffee has emerged as the leading brand in the country’s cold and hot brew coffee market. They have pioneered a transformation and earned a loyal customer base across India, a nation traditionally known for its preference for tea.
As the Founder at SleepyOwl, what are your primary focus areas?
My primary focus lies in growing our business across various channels, be it marketplaces or Q-comm platforms. In order to do that, we place a strong emphasis on the strategic use of data. We leverage data to:
- Provide great end-shopper experience, by ensuring availability of our products across locations
- Ensure that our promos and visibility spends are being properly applied and communicated across platforms
- Faster RCA of any identified issues so we can take corrective action quickly
- Engage in meaningful discussions with platform category teams around JBPs, promo planning, and which SKUs to push
What are the key problems you encounter on a daily basis?
Personally, getting all the data at one place is a challenge in itself. Since we sell multiple products across multiple platforms, ensuring we stay on top of the end-shopper experience is critical: the availability they see, the promotions they are getting, and the merchandising that is being done.
To address this, my team and I look at the entirety of data regularly to understand availability at locality level, identify sales opportunities and leakages, and establish causality. The faster we identify gaps, the quicker we can act.
What challenges do you face in maintaining a top-notch consumer experience, particularly within the Q-comm channel?
For monitoring customer-facing metrics such as availability and visibility in Q-comm channels, we need to take a detailed approach at a micro-market (locality) level as these are served by different dark stores. And this is not just limited to our metrics, but also keeping a close eye on competitors.
We’re planning to leverage market intelligence data to enhance our monitoring and decision-making process. However, a notable challenge we face is that these service providers are often fairly expensive and cover a very limited data set. Most of them provide information at the pin code level, while quick-commerce operates at the locality level.
I’ll give you an example. I was checking the availability of my top-selling SKU on one of the Q-comm apps. While it was available at my office address, it wasn’t available at my home address, even when my home is fairly close to my office!
Now this is a gap that I would never be able to identify at a pin code level data. Existing service providers often miss these nuances that are critical in today’s world of hyperlocal online commerce.
Within your business operations, what is the current approach and the pain points associated with it?
Our business operations run on a lean team model where individuals manage multiple platforms and responsibilities. With limited bandwidth, sifting through huge amounts of data is an extremely tedious task for them. A lot of times where issues like product unavailability occur, getting timely alerts, doing RCA, and addressing them becomes a time consuming task.
A recent incident involving my Co-founder, Ashwajeet, underscored this challenge. During one of his customer calling sprees, a loyal customer from Bangalore pointed out how he has been struggling to find our cold brew coffees consistently on quick-commerce platforms.
This feedback triggered a series of deep dives on our end, which revealed that the stock availability of this particular SKU has been a persistent issue in Koramangala, Bangalore. It took us several days to get to this realization before we could solve it.
The point that I am trying to highlight is that if we don’t have the right data and alerts in place, issues affecting end customer experience take a lot of time to get identified, let alone RCA’ed and solved. This is a huge cost for brands.
Are there aspects where you think a better solution could significantly enhance your operations? If you were to look for a solution, what kind of solution would would you imagine?
Certainly, I see significant importance for a product that can aggregate all the data in one place, identify and alert us about the gaps/opportunities so we can act quickly and confidently.
Moreover, if this tool could contextualize the gathered information to help us in our strategic decision making, it would be a massive benefit.
