Meet the team that built a solopreneur platform to help women power their entrepreneurial dreams

Data published by the Ministry of Science and Technology states at least 44 startups that became unicorns were born in the year 2021. As the world grappled with the pandemic, India was rising to take a lead in the global startup ecosystem.

One such startup born during the pandemic is Alippo.

Alippo was created to be a platform by women, for women, by husband-wife duo Nikhil Bansal and Ayushi Sinha. Today, the app is being run with two women at the helm - Ayushi the co-founder and Sukriti Soni who came on board as Founding Member and Growth Head.

Ayushi was inspired to create the platform when she saw her mother-in-law experimenting with food recipes at home during the pandemic.

“It struck me that women in India are passionate about trying new things and learning new skills, but lack the right opportunities. In fact, India has around 30 crore women in the working age bracket who are not in any formal paid work,” Ayushi says.

To tap the largest untapped economic resource, Alippo started as a platform to help women learn different skills and then start a business of their own. From baking and cooking to product formulation and makeup, the platform has a wide range of courses for all.

“We started as an edtech platform but soon evolved into a full-fledged growth engine for solopreneurs to launch and run their businesses,” Ayushi says.

Not just an upskilling platform

The courses at Alippo go beyond helping women to learn new skills or build products.

“How to sell it? How to go about finding a new customer? What are the marketing strategies? What should be the packaging? How to get the pricing right? How to get licences? These are all the areas where we provide end-to-end assistance,” Ayushi says.

Alippo’s business scaling strategy has always been listening closely to its customers and incorporating their feedback. The app has been rated 4.9 on Playstore and users share stories of how the platform has made a difference in their lives.

“So far, we have trained 1.5 lakh women in different categories, out of which 1,300 have already started home-based businesses. These are encouraging numbers for an early-stage startup like ours,” Ayushi adds.

Alippo and WebEngage Startup Program

Talking about the role of the WebEngage Startup Program in their journey, Sukriti, delves into the importance of using retention as a solution to hand-hold users through entire purchase journeys.

“Edtech platforms normally face the issue of lower frequency of purchases from customers. We too faced a similar situation initially, and hence turned to retention as a solution,” Sukriti says.

“Retention is not just a strategy but a way for us to build end-to-end user journeys. We want to make sure that if a woman learns a new skill on our platform, she is able to build a business from the same.”

Alippo has partnered with WebEngage to help solve retention woes.

“Usually with CRM tools there is a lot of complexity involved. But we have faced no such issues with WebEngage. Their team has been with us right from the start and has helped us make a significant impact,” Sukriti adds.

WebEngage has primarily partnered with Alippo to help them build personalised user journeys, which is crucial for startups’ business growth. For a user looking for baking courses, a personalised journey will recommend not only relevant courses but also subject-related webinars to attend.

“Apart from retention, partnering with WebEngage has helped us with new consumer acquisition. Our user to paid customer percentage has gone up from 17 % to 25 % in the last three to four months,” Sukriti says.

Democratise starting up in the country

In the next 10 years, millions of micro entrepreneurs will play a role in fuelling the country’s economic growth. Alippo’s vision is to help as many potential candidates as it can to build profitable businesses.

“We want to democratise starting up in the country. We are also using generative AI to build something called AI Co-founder, which will support these micro entrepreneurs to run and scale single-handedly,” Sinha says.

This story is the fifth in a series called Retentioneering, where new-age startups share with us their experience of working with the WebEngage Startup Program and how it helped them with various retention efforts.