CEO & Co-founder Harsh Pokharna built OkCredit in 2017 as a mobile-based solution aimed at helping micro businesses collect their receivables faster and pay their payables on time. The app provides on-demand visibility of credit records for merchants and enables credit payments digitally across the country.
Harsh recently took to LinkedIn to share insights into his journey and what he learnt along the way.
Harsh’s LinkedIn Post
His LinkedIn post highlighted his 10 years of startup experience & valuable lessons learnt that would help a lot of young entrepreneurs.
His post read:
I quit Flipkart to build a startup because I wanted to make a lot of money very quickly.
Founders were raising millions of dollars in funding all around me. It seemed easy.
But, the reality?
- Failed for the first 2 years trying 3 different ideas
- Burned through all my savings, had to freelance to survive
- Been building OkCredit for 8 years now, still a long way to go
I learned a valuable lesson👇🏽
Startups ≠ instant success.
It’s a long-term game, not a get rich quick scheme.
Play it only if you truly want to solve a problem, or you’ll end up disappointed.
Harsh received an overwhelming response to his post, with netizens being in support of the lesson he shared and wanting to learn more about Harsh’s journey.
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His Startup Journey So Far
But in 2015, Harsh, an IIT-Kanpur graduate, quit his job at Flipkart intending to build his own startup. Alongside co-founders Gaurav & Aditya, Harsh made a list of issues that they and the people around them faced and needed to be resolved.
One of the things was that, because of time constraints, we missed spending time with our family. So they developed an app that would push a call anytime you were free. But it didn't seem like a big enough issue, and after a few days, they became bored.
Among other things, he thought of developing a bill-splitting app. However, none of these issues were significant enough to pique his interest. And then, the idea of OkCredit emerged out of his own experiences of buying things on credit.
About Ok Credit
OkCredit provides small business owners and their customers with a mobile-based solution. Through digitisation, it seeks to lessen the merchant's workload associated with keeping paper account books. The program allows for digital credit payments nationwide and gives merchants on-demand access to credit records.
To address the issue of trust, the consumer is notified by WhatsApp or text message as soon as a merchant registers a transaction in their name on the platform. If a customer's payment is missed or delayed, the app enables retailers to notify them of the collection.
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Building OkCredit
The idea to build OkCredit came out of the co-founders’ personal experiences of buying things on credit. They used to buy groceries on credit from a nearby store, and every time they would go there to settle it, it would take a lot of time. That was because the shopkeeper used to keep the records on loose scraps of paper.
Plus, the bill was always higher than they expected. They had these two problems—record keeping for merchants and trust in its accuracy, and that’s how the OkCredit journey began.
To begin with, they managed to convince the shop owner to track their payment through OkCredit. Initially, the owner had his concerns, which the founders helped solve by spending time to generate reports daily so that he could verify with this ledger book. After a few days of trial, the owner soon added a few other customers.
Converting the current accounting system into an OkCredit-compatible format was the next stage. After they met with the owner to add all of his clients and their balances to OkCredit, something changed. OkCredit hasn't looked back ever since the retailer told its employees to use the app for all transactions.
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