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Arjun V.
Co-Founder & CEO @ Zoko (YC S22) | Scale Your Ecommerce With WhatsApp
Arjun V. is the Co-Founder of Zoko, a platform focused on maximizing WhatsApp's potential for E-commerce businesses. With a background in Civil Engineering and an MBA from INSEAD, Arjun has leveraged his experience as a Global Product Manager at Hilti and former CEO/Co-Founder of Convocomm Software Private Limited to address the communication challenges faced by e-commerce merchants. His entrepreneurial journey began at Y Combinator with Zoko (YC W21), where the platform was first launched and later evolved to cater to the specific needs of businesses in sales, marketing, and customer support. Arjun's vision is to streamline and enhance customer engagement through WhatsApp, empowering businesses to drive growth and efficiency.
Highlights
Learn how Animeal successfully used Zoko’s WhatsApp Catalog feature to boost their revenue by an impressive ₹1 Million in just three months!
By integrating this tool, they transformed customer interactions into seamless sales, achieving a conversion rate of 35%—far surpassing other channels like email and SMS.
This case highlights the power of innovative solutions in driving business growth, especially for industries like pet care.
Kudos to Animeal for setting a new standard in customer engagement and revenue generation through WhatsApp! 🚀 #WhatsAppBusiness #CustomerEngagement #Innovation #PetCare
Startup success is easy. You just need to be better than a Nigerian Prince scammer.
I've talk to lots of early-stage founders on how to validate their startup idea and lots of them are like:
"We talked to so many people, but they said no."
My response? Bullsh*t.
How many people did you talk to? "Oh, we talked to five people."
😂 Listen...
Heard of the Nigerian Prince scam? Google it. They "convert" one in a ten thousand people and made nearly $3B last year.
You just need to put in the work like they do.
Go speak to 1,000 people.
That's it. That's your MVP of a go-to-market strategy.
"But Arjun, that's a 0.01% conversion rate!"
Exactly. Are you telling me you can't do better than the Nigerian Prince scammer?
The hard truth:
- You don't get points for a fancy GTM efficiency
- Nobody cares how you got your first 100 customers.
- All that matters is that you got them.
AirBNB used to steal craigslist listings, Reddit's founders created fake accounts and populated the site with interesting content to make the platform seem active and engaging to new users.
Even today at Zoko (YC W21), we send 20,000 emails to get 100 paying customers/month. That's a 0.5% conversion rate. Barely better than a scammer!
Remember:
In the early days, you're not building a scalable business. You're proving that someone, anyone, will pay for your stuff.
Before you hit a million dollars in revenue, stop whining about margins, CAC, or whatever fancy VC metric you learned in your MBA.
Start doing the work:
- Send more emails
- Make more calls
- Knock on more doors
Be relentless. Be shameless. Be better than a Nigerian Prince scammer.
PS: Nothing against Nigeria or Royals. Just admiration for statistical significance.
