Wishberry

History

One half of Wishberry, Priyanka Agarwal, is a Wharton graduate with a degree in the prestigious Management and Technology program. She always wanted to be an entrepreneur and hence, started her first company Innova Materials in college and even won an engineering B-Plan Competition. Due to Visa issues, she couldn't work for her own company. This is when she decided to join the consulting firm McKinsey India. Around the same time Innova Materials (now Innova Dynamics Inc.) raised $5.5 Million in Series A funding. This is when she decided to 'screw it' and pursue something of her own. Teamed with a school friend, she started Random Motion Advertising – a firm that aimed to advertise on the Black & Yellow cabs in Mumbai. But the idea couldn't take-off due to complex taxi union issues.

In 2010, she then moved to her second idea, which was Wishberry as a wedding gift registry website. However, she realized that her target audience i.e. Urban Indians, were too shy for the gift registry system popular abroad. Therefore, she switched from gift registries to donations – using Wishberry as a platform for people to raise funds for social and charitable events. She raised Rs. 5 lacs for the Mumbai Marathon in 2011. By 2012, Wishberry had grown ten times, raising about Rs. 50 lakhs through such projects. This is when Anshulika, also a McKinsey consultant, came into the picture. Anshulika is an English literature major from Miranda House, Delhi University. She was recruited into McKinsey straight out of university and worked there for about two years, before she met Priyanka.

Anshulika knew Priyanka through a project both were working on during their time at McKinsey. She was co-authoring a report on crowdfunding in the social sector in the US, when she came across Kickstarter – a crowdfunding platform solely for creative projects. Realizing that Priyanka was also exploring this territory in India, she wrote to her explaining that crowdfunding went beyond charity and was more feasible and valuable for the creative sector in India. Intrigued and taken in by this idea, Priyanka invited Anshulika to join her in this venture. However, during this time Anshulika was getting ready to move to the US to pursue a lucrative career and the 'American Dream' with McKinsey USA. But, Priyanka managed to convince her to drop her US plans and sail into the uncharted waters of creative crowdfunding in India together.

About the Founders

Priyanka Agarwal - Co-Founder & CEO

Priyanka manages a little bit of many things: product, finance and operations. A perennially confused over-achiever, Priyanka graduated Wharton with 2 degrees (business & engineering), started her first company in college, worked at KPMG, Goldman Sachs & McKinsey, all before co-founding Wishberry with Anshulika. Priyanka believes crowdfunding is the answer to everything, be it buying an iPhone 6 for herself or a Nap pod for the office or even raising seed financing for Wishberry. "Screw it, let's do it!" she says for any and every crazy idea, inspired by the even crazier Richard Branson. Well after all, crazy is her middle name.

Anshulika Dubey - Co-Founder & COO

Anshulika handles Sales and Marketing at Wishberry. Inspired by the characters Dagny Taggart and Miranda Priestly, this Ex-McKinsey analyst found the idea of crowdfunding while on a project at McKinsey. She got so fascinated by the concept that she ditched a US job opportunity and flew back to India to pioneer crowdfunding for creative artists in the country with Wishberry. She doggedly believes that crowdfunding is the lifeline for all creative artists in India. But at the same time she says, "It's not all about the money, honey"; more than money, it's the people's belief behind a dream that makes all the difference.

Crowdfunding focus, policy and model

Focus on Creative Projects - Throughout 2012, Priyanka continued to run Wishberry as a platform for all kinds of crowdfunding, while Anshulika led exploration of crowdfunding in the creative sector. By the end of 2012, they shut down their focus on charity crowdfunding, mainly because of low profitability (as commissions were low), there were multiple gatekeepers and charity didn't have such a pressing need for crowdfunding as it had other modes of funding. By 2013, they shifted focus to creative crowdfunding, while keeping it open to all sectors.

All or Nothing Policy - Also, at this time Wishberry followed both 'Flexible' (wherein the project creator gets to keep whatever amount is raised) as well as the 'All or Nothing' (where the project creator gets nothing if the target amount is not raised) crowdfunding policies. Today, Wishberry has made the 'All or Nothing' policy mandatory for all projects. They learnt that this policy is not only important to build the funder's trust and project creator's accountability, but also, has proven to be more successful when comparing the success of Kickstarter (All or Nothing) to Indiegogo (Flexible).

Reward based model - The reward based model of crowdfunding was locked-in when the duo learnt that creative artists were more amenable to this model, as projects like films and music couldn't really turn to conventional modes of funding like a Venture Capital. In this model, the rewards given to the funders by the project creator can include a copy of his/her work, a memorabilia from the project, his/her time for a Q&A session, etc. and does not include monetary returns. Reward based crowdfunding was the best way forward for independent creative artists, giving them the creative freedom for their projects.

Challenges

The main challenge faced by Priyanka and Anshulika was during the seed round as it was difficult to sell the idea to investors because its a new industry globally. The concept that Wishberry worked on was unproven, and the scale of crowdfunding for creative projects is not the same as conventional e-commerce startups. However, there is more impact and profitability in crowdfunding. So, a major task was to find people who were as excited about the project as the Co-Founders.

Another challenge the co-founders faced was the bias against female entrepreneurs. There is this common notion across industries that women don't make great entrepreneurs due to juggling too many priorities at the same time such as marriage, kids, household chores and such domestic responsibilities. They may not be able to focus on their career as much, let alone lead it. Shattering this glass ceiling has been one of the major challenges faced by the duo.

Rounds of funding

Differentiation from international platforms

A key difference between Wishberry and some of the other international platforms is that it is not a 'Do it Yourself' model. It is almost like a crowdfunding agency that works with project creators to better present their idea, whether it is through the editorial content, the pitch video or the rewards that are being offered on their campaign page. This is important in a country like India because project creators here are shy and aren't used to putting themselves out there, marketing their ideas and asking for money. Hence, they have to be trained in the know-how of a crowdfunding campaign.

This is also important because unlike the United States, where there are strong online communities segregated by the kind of content they follow, in India, there aren't as many consolidated online communities. The online space remains fragmented, making it extremely important for Wishberry to play a role in explaining the campaigner the kind of demographics they need to target and where those demographics exist online. Hence, this entire agency aspect of Wishberry is as important as providing a technology platform.

Key achievements