Helpchat- A chat based platform

 Ankur Singla was paying himself Rs.20,000 as salary in 2012 when he married his girlfriend. That was three years into his entrepreneurial journey; he had not taken home a salary at all. “We had been seeing each other for a decade. And she knew I could earn more if I wanted to,” Singla says. Today he indeed is earning much, much more. His venture, Helpchat, is growing rapidly, and venture capital firm Sequoia, which started investing in Helpchat in 2012, sharply increased its commitment earlier this year with an investment of Rs100 crore. Singla graduated in law from National Law School, Bengaluru, in 2007. He was campus-hired to work in London for Linklaters, a firm advising corporates on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and company structuring. He was there for two years and then returned to India to start an online legal document making firm called Akosha in Chandigarh. Within a year though, he moved to Delhi because he found attracting talent difficult in Chandigarh. He also started doing legal consulting for corporates because the document making business was not bringing in much money. The venture did manage to Rs5 lakh from the Morpheus accelerator. But Singla says the running expenses then was such that the funds were enough for the venture to survive only for seven to eight months. And indeed, things started becoming difficult soon.

 Though Akosha offered a variety of services, the only one that was getting a lot of traction was consumer complaints about problems like defective products and delays in product delivery. But that was not a very profitable business. Those customer complaints, however, provided Singla with a fresh idea. He pivoted Akosha into Helpchat, a chat based personal assistant that helps people find and get services delivered. A user can key in a question like where to find a particular store, and Helpchat’s backend centre will provide the answer. The user can even order products through the platform. Helpchat takes a commission on every transaction. Singla also developed enterprise software that helps large companies address consumer complaints a platform that today has clients like Kotak Mahindra Bank, Aircel, Micromax, and Snapdeal. Helpchat is now automating many of these services, and that recently led to some layoffs. That has been stressful but Singla says stress is part of any entrepreneurial venture. The only thing that is changes is the cause of stress. “The stress of running out of money is more difficult to handle. Today with money in the bank, I am sleeping better,” he says. In his erstwhile legal profession, Singla was taught to deduce what could potentially go wrong. The six years long entrepreneurial journey has taught him to unlearn that lesson. “Now I always think which step has a better chance of being the right one. Because there are plenty of mistakes one can make,” he says thoughtfully