One Wallet Newspaper, a first of its kind application that lets one pay their newspaper bills online, allows vendors to manage their customers and process all their transactions online has proven to be a boon for newspaper vendors in India. Apart from seeking a leading position in the industry, One Wallet is well on its way to make an impact so big that it forever changes the way the newspaper industry works.

It strives to digitize the otherwise conservative industry and provides a common platform for management, automated bill generation and payment collection to the vendors. With the launch of the application in November 2015, for the first time in over 2 centuries of the industry’s history, vendors are equipped with technology and are collecting their bills online.

 

Mr. Neeraj Tiwari, the founder of One Wallet has always been fascinated with technology and wanted to use technology for the benefit of the overburdened unorganized businesses. He was struck with the idea of developing One Wallet Newspaper app when he found his newspaper vendor at his doorstep as late as 9:30 PM for bill collection. He was determined to do something for the benefit of such businesses by giving them access to technology and helping them adapt to it. Further, through One Wallet’s in-house research, he found that around Rs. 5000 crore worth of bills are distributed and collected manually by 6 lakhs newspaper vendors in India.

Since the launch of the app in November 2015, 1500 vendors are registered with the application and around 50,000 households are connected to pay their bills online. The application once installed on the newspaper vendor’s mobile phone generates bills automatically within seconds, which earlier use to take around 15-20 days to reach his customers. As soon as the bill is generated it is sent to customer’s android Smartphone, through SMS, email and consumer application to facilitate online bill payment. In this digital age, the application aims to minimize vendor’s paperwork and helps them run their business and expand.

One Wallet has tied up with 134+ newspaper publishers to procure paper prices and also provide important updates to the vendors. The vendors would no more have to keep a track of all the prices of the newspapers manually.

By December 2016, One Wallet aims to connect with 50000+ newspaper vendors. Realizing that this is the best time for fresh and radical thinking, they have secured a patent to digitize the coupon subscription system and are in a process to launch the same in the next 2 months. Through this feature, the vendors can avoid the frequent losses incurred by them through loss of physical coupons. The vendors won’t have to visit the publisher’s office to encash the coupons. Processing of coupons will be done online, thus saving time and energy of the vendors to a great extent. The coupon delivery and coupon payment time will be reduced to 5 minutes and 24 hours respectively. They are currently operating in Mumbai and intend to cover the entire state of Maharashtra by June 2016.

Name of Startup: One Wallet Solutions Pvt Ltd
Launch year: 2015
Startup’s Website: www.onewallet.in
Address of Startup:
One Wallet Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
F-12, Haware Centurion mall,
Seawoods, Navi Mumbai – 400706
INDIA

About the founders: 
Neeraj Tiwari the founder of One Wallet Solutions Pvt Ltd has over 9 years of experience in internet and mobile applications development. He has extensively worked with UI/UX design and business development and sales. After completing education, he started his own website development company T-network and it was during this time, the idea of developing something like One Wallet Newspaper struck him.

Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem? 
As of now, a newspaper vendor doesn’t have the proper means to manage customers, calculate and collect bills; and on an average it takes him around 20-25 days a month for the whole process. Processing around Rs 5000 crore worth of billing is done at such a slow pace is a serious concern. The need for automation in newspaper vendor industry was apparent and that’s where our team decided to step in.

Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process
A first of its kind application, One Wallet lets customers pay their household bills online, allows vendors to manage their customers and process all their transactions online has proven to be a boon for newspaper vendors in India. One Wallet strives to digitize the otherwise conservative industry and provides a common platform for management, automated bill generation and payment collection to the vendors.

Who in your mind is your ideal customer? How did you get your first customer? 
Ideal customer for us someone who would like to reduce the hardships involved in running his business. Someone who’s open to technology and would like to efficiently use it in his daily operations. We have more than 1500 vendors registered with our app. Our sales team conducted detailed analysis of the market. Accordingly we approached newspaper vendors demonstrating our Beta app. Vendors joined us one after the another once they were convinced of the usefulness of our app.

What is the pricing model you are following?
The app is free to download from Google Play store. We charge 2% of the total bill amount of every online transaction done by the customer so that we can continue providing uninterrupted service.

Is this Product leading to something bigger? 
Though, currently very much focused on newspaper vendors app, we plan to venture into other unorganized businesses such as milk vendors, cable operators and society maintenance in the near future. We also plan to bring all these unorganized sectors under one app so that customers can easily pay theirs bills with just few clicks and with the help of a single app.

Uniqueness about your Startup.
We are the pioneer in this sector as no other organization has thought of catering to the need of newspaper vendors even though the newspaper industry is more than 240 years old. We are proposing a unique idea to the newspaper vendors helping them digitizing their work and bringing their business in the 21st century.

Names of the core Team Members, along with their Designated Roles:
Neeraj Tiwari – Founder and CEO, Swapnaja Phalak – HR Manager, Shona Jacob – Marketing and Branding Manager, Parag Malusare – Sales Head, Seshagiri – CTO

What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months? 
By December 2016, we aim to connect with 50000+ newspaper vendors across India. Also, start service to cable operators and society maintenance venturing further into the unorganized sector.

Any other information you would like to share?
As a step towards making newspaper vendors work easier, we have secured a patent to digitize the coupon subscription system and are in a process to launch the same within the next 2 months. Through this feature, vendors can avoid the frequent losses incurred by them through loss of paper coupons. The vendors won’t have to visit the publisher’s office to encash the coupons. Processing of coupons will be done online, thus saving time and energy of the vendors to a great extent. With the help of this feature/service, the coupon delivery and coupon payment time will be reduced to 5 minutes and 24 hours respectively.