Unwrapping the Code Behind GO DESi’s Sweet Success

GO DESi’s foray into the Indian sweets category on Quick Commerce (QComm) is nothing short of a true-blue David vs Goliath story.

The handcrafted Indian sweets and snacks maker, which is about 7 years old, captured significant market share away from legacy Indian sweets brands by identifying a simple opportunity in the Kaju Katli segment.

The brand realised that this, not-so-humble Indian sweet and the darling of Indian festivities, was not available on QComms across a lot of regions. In fact, most leading brands did not even seem to mind not being present in those locations.

“A legacy brand with its loyal customer base can have the luxury of not being present everywhere. But as a startup, if you can bridge that gap and provide that difference in customer experience you can win over the customer pretty fast,” says Smitkumar Raval, Head of Growth at GO DESi.

Not wanting to waste any time, GO DESi got to work and not only launched Kaju Katli across those regions but also played around with pack sizes and price points.

Since then, GO DESi has comfortably created a space for itself in the QComm Indian sweets category. It has been charting this success story by leveraging GobbleCube’s real-time, actionable insights on locality-level availability, share of voice (SOV) data, price-point mapping across platforms and brands, and competition tracking.

In an honest and insightful chat with us, Smit talked about the role data and insights play in building mutually beneficial relationships with platforms and how GobbleCube has been a trusted partner in their incredible QComm journey.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

We have grown about 250% over last year on QComm, and our entry into new categories played a large part in it. This was partly possible because we are always in discussion with the GobbleCube team. We are always keen to know how to drive better insights and results with data, and have a structured product or category launch plan.

For categories that we are dealing with, where purchase patterns are primarily impulse purchases, platforms such as GobbleCube are very relevant. Because with QComm platforms, there is a lack of data visibility which makes you unsure of where you are present and what your product visibility is. This makes it difficult to understand what is happening and what immediate action points to take.

But with GobbleCube, this has become easy. For example, sales of one of our SKUs dropped suddenly. To know what happened we got onto the GobbleCube platform and realised the immediate problem was of availability. We were able to identify cities in which our availability was low and immediately put an action plan in place to remedy it.

As a startup of course, cost matters. But these investments (in platforms like GobbleCube) are long-term. This service is not going to make my problems disappear but it helps us to be armed with relevant information. Otherwise I am just going in blindly with vague statements like “My product is not available.” Where, why, when and by how much - these are questions that GobbleCube helps us answer to find real-time solutions.

On the GobbleCube dashboard, products get mapped to a relevant category. I get to know the category size and how much category share I have in a particular region. When I do an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) on a category and SKU, I can identify where the next big opportunities are going to be.

Let’s look at the Indian Sweets Category, where we have grown by about 5x because of growth in both existing and new categories.

Sweets is a very large category with a variety of products. It’s much more of a classic play where the traditional way of consuming sweets still reigns high (via local shops) in 200 gram, 400 gm, 1kg packs.

Now, creating or entering a new category comes with a lot of cost. So then we started identifying the top sub-categories within sweets. I realised I don't need to launch in each and every sub-category; I just need to identify where 80% of the sales are coming from and gauge my bandwidth and capability to enter that category and make it big.

But when you are introducing a new category in a traditional segment, changing shopper preference and behaviour is going to take time. So you need to introduce a new category in a new format for faster and smoother acceptability. Using data and insights around pack sizes, we decided to launch the single serve format which none of the other players were doing.

Then we looked at other things our competitors were not doing. So we launched Coconut Ladoo, Coconut Barfi, Badam Katli, also in single serves. This way we are playing both in a large category with a high-quality traditional product and also in a completely new format.

The bottom line is - with all this data from GobbleCube, we were able to create a really refined version of the product that we should be launching, the price point, pack sizes. Coupled with conversations about the category with QComms themselves, it then becomes easier for me to convince the platform category manager to launch a new product or category.

Data which is meaningful and insightful can help have a better conversation with a platform because that is when the platform sees that you are able to offer something better than other brands.

Sometimes, the platform approaches you with an opportunity to enter a category that has very little brand presence. Sometimes you can go to the platform and tell them what category you want to enter based on data. This is where GobbleCube helped us where we could look at the data and come to the right conclusions about where the opportunity is.

For instance, based on the fact that almost 85% of the category is selling Ghee-based Mysore Pak we told the platform that we should enter this category and they agreed. But of course, it changes from platform to platform. For some platforms, a non-ghee might be really big, for another ghee-based might be big.

So whenever we get data, we bifurcate and break it into multiple classifications. It also gives us an understanding on how to price our SKUs.

Having data and insights on your side is a win-win for both you and the platform.

When you know what pack sizes to launch, where the white spaces are, you can help the platform category manager grow their category better because sometimes platforms don't have the insight either.

With so much going on around us all the time, we live in a bubble and think we are doing the best we can. But then suddenly the industry is changing, and it's all so fast paced right now. So it's essential to have a give-and-take approach. Platforms will also support you, but it has to be more than just short-sighted efforts to fix availability issues. It also has to fix gaps to help them grow their business.

When I scale up revenue and performance on one platform, I can go to the other platforms and show them their gaps and help them grow too.

Moreover, if you enter a low-competition category at the right time, you could become one of the largest players. For example in the Gond Ladoo category, we noticed there was only one brand. Moreover, despite Gond Ladoo being a winter sweet, it was not big on regions in North India where winters are severe. So that became an opportunity for both us and the platforms.

These are the kind of opportunities you can identify with data to have better discussions about launching a product or entering a new sub-category. A platform will listen to you so long as you're providing information to them which is not there with them right now.

In quick commerce right now, the race to ensure your products are available, visible and delivered within that 10-minute window.

One thing that we were aware of when we were onboarding (GobbleCube) was that platforms have different data-points. So what I didn’t want was to deal with four dashboards every morning just to figure out where the gaps are. When I have an all-platforms-in-one dashboard, I can just click a few buttons and easily figure out my action points across platforms.

Be it challenges with availability, pricing, visibility, drop in sales or impressions, or simply keeping track of competition - all of this is available on GobbleCube within a few clicks.

Of course, I can download the data from the platform, but it's so time-consuming and as a startup, I don't have the luxury of resources. I need something that can summarize the situation for me in the morning for quick discussions with the platform and immediate resolutions.

The simpler the data gets, the easier it is for us to make decisions on it.

With GobbleCube, when I go to a meeting with a QComm platform, I don't need to download platform data. I can just take the insights from GobbleCube and go with problems and solutions for specific locations or stores. That’s 80% of my job done right there.

So yes, a lot of time has been saved in arriving at solutions and acting on them. It’s not easy to put down a number right now. But to put it in context - without GobbleCube, I might need to hire two resources just to make sure our products are available across platforms and they will always be doing just that one thing.

And this data pool is only going to keep increasing as the number of dark stores increases.