https://www.santhe.info/
Entrepreneurial journey told by two students
Story written by Ted Thiansai
“Ask yourself, why are you doing this?” It’s always been Karthik’s reminder to himself when start doing something. Karthik Manjunath had been through thick and thin just like everyone else. Today, he is his own boss at Santhe Company, which brings a lot of benefits to Wix store owners engaging their customers through WhatsApp and SMS globally.
After completing the Master of Management at The University of Sydney in 2012, he had an opportunity experiencing E-commerce environment at Uber in Australia. “We helped them launch Uber taxi” Which was an eye opener to him and undoubtedly inspired his idea and creativity. We all know that every day is not a Rosey day for us, which is in the same way as Karthik Manjunath. He launched the other social app with his friends, but it was not successful, he noted to himself. “That was one of the failures that we had to go through”
Until another opportunity arose, as he has an IT background in E-commerce industry, which attracted his friends to start own ride sharing space startup and it was successfully acquired by the company in India. He never stops developing and he enjoys exploring the world to uncover the problems that irritates people. “I look at problems to solve because ideas, essentially could be something that you think is a problem”
Speaking of Innovation, he perceived it’s very crucial nowadays as it can help our business differentiate itself from the market. “You identify a certain problem and solve it uniquely.”
This is to say, Karthik is very content when the customers love his product as he manages to overcome the customer’s pain “Because of your product, I could reach out to more customers, I have improved my customer relationships, this is something that motivates and helps me”
It has been an ongoing journey to him. He’s always been cautious that things do not last forever, what would he do if E-commerce went down? “Offset your risk by investing in another product, which is in a growing space” This is how he adapted himself to change.
Karthik added “Sitting at home, we are not going to get any problems to solve” Why don’t we go out somewhere and figure out a pressing problem in the industry for design thinking, once we are able to uncover, think about how we can build the solution. All entrepreneurs need an inspiration.
Story written by Luying Huang
(1/2) “Essentially, now I’m building conversational commerce and app, it’s more like you talk with a robot, and when you purchase a product, right? That is what happens. For example, you run an e-commerce store, and that you can chat with me via WeChat, you can buy something so you can talk to me in mind, like, “Hey, do you have a yellow top that I’m looking for?” Then it will give you options for all of the stuff. You can purchase that top from that particular store, which is essentially isn’t use currently in pilot now, but it’s been used by around 100 stores”, an introduction about the Santhe company given by Karthik Manjunath, the founder of this company, who graduated in USYD couple years ago, “posted that I was very early at Uber as an employee in Australia. It was actually the second city outside of France when they were internationally expanding, that is when I and a classmate of mine join Uber. Back at that time, we did a bunch of things for Uber like marketing campaigns. After that, I came back to India and started my ride-sharing startup with a bunch of friends here, which was then acquired by a local company called cars on-trend. So that was essential to help them build the technical expertise in the ride-sharing space.”
(2/2) “From your experience, you look for problems to solve, which will essentially help the other person as well, right? The opportunity of establishing the company essentially comes from interacting with a friend of mine. I was helping her to build an e-commerce portal, which based out of India. However, the portal had a lot of older people as well, who are trying to a product. Right now, WhatsApp is big in India. Therefore, you need a person behind WhatsApp to essentially take orders. This is where I thought an automated ordering process via WhatsApp would be marketable”, he talked about this when he was asking about the motivation of building this company, “Good feedback about the product, and how it is helping customer’s life is something that keeps me motivated. Additionally, the comments also motivated me to add more features to the product and new product launches”, which means the provided customer value by Santhe has created a mutual effect between services provider and customers.