In the cozy ambiance of Nirvana courtyard, where coffee fueled both our conversations and creativity, the spark for GobbleCube was ignited.
We are three friends (and colleagues) who were part of the core leadership team at Blinkit, building India’s biggest quick-commerce platform. Sri was leading Category and Merchandising, Nitesh was heading Consumer Engineering, and I was building out Data as a Practice.
During our 7+ years at Blinkit, we closely collaborated with 500+ brands, which gave us a first-hand understanding of the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis as they try to build out their business on online platforms.
Brands must not only maximize sales but also ensure profitable growth, which includes optimizing trade and marketing spends across platforms. They need to understand what’s impacting their performance by assimilating and contextualizing the data that is shared with them by the numerous Q-comm and E-comm platforms. The format, granularity and cadence of this data also vary by platform, making it a mammoth task in itself.
Now if we put ourselves in the shoes of the Sales teams, their core objective is to identify the high-priority issues impacting their sales and spends, so that they can act on them. The trouble is that the journey to reaching these high-priority issues requires them to sift through tonnes of data.
At GobbleCube, our objective is to abstract this tedious but necessary process by building a product that assimilates, models, triangulates, and analyzes vast amounts of data to quickly surface those crucial high-priority issues using contextual intelligence. This would enable sales teams to get into action immediately by asking the right questions to the right stakeholders.
For example:
- If a key SKU is stocked out on a platform, they can track the PO lifecycle and push the internal supply chain team to prioritize it.
- If their core SKU is not visible on a platform in certain Must-Win localities, they can align with the platform Category Manager with specific questions instead of a generic question like “Why are my sales not growing?”.
- If their Search and Display ROAS are low, they can understand whether it is an SOV issue or a campaign issue and ask sharper questions to the marketing team/media agency.
- Even more pertinent is a case where the sponsored content is cannibalizing organic results. They will be able to see it immediately and work towards creating business maxima.
First step in the journey, a thorough research on customer pain points
We firmly believe that the success of a product lies in its ability to solve the real problems faced by end users on a day-to-day basis. That's why we spent a lot of time speaking with multiple leaders and operators at brands to understand their way of working and their pain points. Through extensive market research and engagement with industry experts, we validated our hypothesis and shaped our core value proposition.
For instance, a Shopper Marketing Manager at one of India’s largest CPG brands succinctly captured “The need for a single canvas to monitor all key metrics to get to insights faster without navigating 30,000 data points.” Similarly, an E-comm Head at another multi-national CPG brand highlighted “The time-consuming nature of deciphering revenue and availability trends due to data fragmentation across multiple Excel sheets.”
Second, build technology with business context and user empathy
For us, GobbleCube isn’t just a technology solution, it is a product that integrates business insights with how the end customers solve problems on a daily basis. We empathize with the fact that the purpose of GobbleCube is to intelligently automate business decision-making for brands while making the lives of the stakeholders using it simpler, rather than adding more overheads for them. Data and technology are the enabling functions in this journey, not the determining ones.
Driving our vision forward with our partners
As we embarked on this journey, our vision and objective resonated with some of the leading names in the CPG industry who came on board as our design partners. Their context and guidance have been invaluable in helping us build GobbleCube.
We are thrilled to announce that GobbleCube has successfully secured $1.9 million in seed funding, led by Kae Capital with participation from CRV, a US-based venture capital fund, as well as other prominent marquee angels. We would like to thank them for believing in us and giving us the firepower to execute our vision.
Our primary focus is to leverage this funding to strengthen our product engineering capabilities and execute a robust go-to-market strategy.
Future goals
We are continuously evolving and every day when we wake up, our sole purpose is “How can we make Decoding Revenue even more seamless and powerful for our customers?”
In the long term, we aim to become the go-to platform for all CPG brands, where GobbleCube becomes a verb for Decoding Revenue.
