What were the characteristics and demographics of Instamojo's early customers, and which customer segments did the company initially focus on?

We divide customers as a pyramid. At the base are the micro merchants, then small merchants, followed by medium, large, and super large. The micro merchants, the guys who are on social platforms, like WhatsApp, or Instagram, or Facebook. They are people like me and you. They're freelancers, teachers, arts and crafts makers, homemakers, and so on and so forth. For them, the payment link was a God send. I don't know how to build a website. I don't know how to integrate a payment gateway. I don't have to talk with a payment gateway or a bank for all of this. I can just register the bank account and a phone number, and I can get started in a few minutes.

That itself was quite viral in nature. Now in today's day and world, micro merchants are not classified even as businesses. Even if you go by MSME parlance, they're not considered businesses. I'm talking about businesses that are doing up to $10,000 of sales a year -- Very small, tiny micro merchants. And upon focusing on them, we realized that there are a lot of them, but the value is small. We realized that we were going to play a volume game. Had I been a payment gateway, I'll be going to the large enterprises doing millions of dollars in transactions. But these guys would not be doing that. So the benefit is our margin structures were very different. Like today, our margins are at least eight to 10X more than a payment gateway, but the volume would be eight to 10X smaller than a gateway. So we did a trade off of let's go for mass because we have to work on retention. If 10% of merchants tomorrow switch, it doesn't matter to us because we don't have a concentration problem.

We focused on the micro merchant base -- a lot of them using the product, bringing more virality -- and focus on making it more simple and more sticky. And they're still focusing on it. By the way, we have not gravitated from a micro merchant base to enterprise.

Because of the product, the solutioning, the pricing was completely different.