Flashback - June 2016...
After a good long stint in Tesco, the UK supermarket giant, I joined my husband at his startup to help him develop a new enterprise product. I had a full time ++ job, a 1 year old baby and a home to take care off. Time was really precious.
We were running real short of time and I hated grocery shopping, though we used to shop only the vegetables and meat from local store. It always resulted in multiple journeys. I often forget buying something or other and then get scolding from my hubby for asking him to go to the store in between his work.
Hence I started using shopping list with Google keep, Bring, out of milk, etc.
It reduced my pain, but was still spending a lot of time on this chore and was not very happy. Most of the purchases were from Big basket, Star or Amazon, I still wanted to save the time that I type on big basket to order groceries. That by itself was more than 4 hours a month. That's a time I could have spent with my baby.
How it all started...
Then in 2019, I started on a new experiment to create a shopping list which could avoid me typing the list and could automatically predict and order groceries for me.
We formed a very small close team with people across the country (Anees, Litty and others ). Finally after different attempts, multiple experiments, we launched the trial version of the product in Feb - 2020 with Elite Supermarket. We wanted to see how accurate we were at predicting the items that you missed to buy. Many of you would have received our early SMS's when you shopped at Elite in Feb. We started predicting what you missed to buy and send SMS as soon as the purchase was made at the billing counter.
What turned out...
Then one month after our launch, covid comes in. The focus of every retailer changed to home delivery and so did Elite's. We thought we could help streamline delivery with a quick app. We grossly underestimated. We built a sub par product. Building a grocery specific solution the way we wanted, was not a quick solution. We listened to feedback, and continuously iterated. We even went to the extend of generating route maps for home delivery on those peak days.
Now this was taking away precious resources and was putting financial pressure. We never charged anyone for any of this.
The shopping list was on limbo, all resources were focused on home delivery. Somehow, we put up an initial version, but then took 3 months to make it really work at least satisfactorily. Thanks to the inputs from our customers.
What it became..
Then in October-2020, we decided to get back to our plan. We rewrote the entire design and release the product again in Jan-2021 in its new avatar.
What is in it for you..
Our objective of removing the chore of grocery shopping and returning an additional 8 hours per month back for you to spend on what you love may still be far away as we need to know every transaction you make to predict correctly. But, follow the methodology, we should still be able to save a significant chunk of it. Make sure that you claim every bill that you spend. Zeev will soon start making your list automatically for you.
Everything at a single place.
From a single shopping list, shop from where ever you want. No more will you need to wander around your near by stores to know the best deals.
Any feedback to improve, we would love to hear from you. If you like this article and support us, please do like or give a comment.
Simi Saseendran
Co-Founder - Zeev
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