Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Today, we're going to be speaking with Manas and Sri, who are the founders of a company called Gobblecube, a very interesting name, which is a growth operating system for brands. And with that, we're going to welcome both of them on the show.

Utsav Somani: Welcome, guys. Thank you, Dhruv. Thank you, Utsav. First, ask you the story behind the name to warm things up.

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): Yeah, it's an interesting story. I think one thing which we were very, very clear about is that we'll build something on making sense of data so that brands can act on it. But we didn't want a very cold name which has data as a word in it. So data is stored in cubes. So we said cube, and then you gobble a cube and you kind of give out insights which are relevant. So I think that's the short story behind Gobblecube.

Utsav Somani: And you built this after being at Blinkit. I believe both of you met there. So you have 400 brands on your platform, 2 million in ARR and coming fresh out of a fundraiser, 15 million series. So congrats on all of this. What did you learn inside Blinkit that you wanted to build this by siding with the brands now?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): So I think a big credit of that goes to Sri because as somebody inside the platform, it is always very easy to think customer first or shopper first. But the beauty of that was Sri was leading category in merchandising. So he worked very closely with brands. I think the insight that we had was the fact that as commerce is becoming more and more hyperlocal in nature, it means that there is a huge opportunity for brands to make sense of this data and become more focused in terms of what they want to do, in terms of outcomes and what are the input levels that they have in their hands, which become honestly a city by city playground. But that's the perspective that Sri brought in. And for us, that was the opportunity of going out of Blinkit and building this operating system for brands, which helps them make these decisions in real time.

Dhruv Sharma: Manoj, for people who may not be very familiar with GobbleCube, what is it that you can show brands that the platforms, their dashboards are not showing them already?

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): Sri, do you want to take that? Yeah. So I think fundamentally, one thing that we really had is the amount of enrichment, the enriched data that we share with brands. So whenever you want to deep dive a problem, it's not just about your data, where the answers lie. It's also understanding what is the competition data, how have they been performing, how you've been performing relatively. Marketplace is a very competitive, there is competition in marketplace and you have to be competitive, which means you need to look at a lot of things relatively. I think that's one view that we bring in. And we also bring in cross-platform intelligence. It's not just about how you're performing on one platform, but how does that compare across platforms, where do the anomalies and opportunities lie? So that's one thing we do differently. And of course, aggregating all data, bringing it to one place definitely makes it easier than earlier having four people spending five days just getting all the data together. So, yeah.

Utsav Somani: So why don't we simplify it? I know you've put some case studies on your websites. Do you want to share maybe one or two with our listeners, just so that they can like paint a picture of GobbleCube in action?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): A hundred percent, so let me do that. So I think let's define what is the success or the outcome that I want to achieve as a brand. And for me, those are two, three, four, right? One is what is the kind of optic growth that I achieve on any platform, whether it is a Q-com platform, whether it is an e-com platform, how much am I growing in terms of category share? It becomes important because in a hyper growth platform, I need to make sure that I'm also beating the competition. And the third is, am I doing it in a contribution positive way? Am I incrementally improving my contribution margins? Now, these are the outcome metrics that a brand is gunning for, but what they have in their control are essentially a bunch of input metrics. Do I, am I keeping the right assortment? I am focusing on the right. Do I have the right availability for my products? Am I creating the right sort of visibility for my products? Am I putting in the right promos and offers to kind of push them, right? And every one of these needs to be looked at, not just in isolation as she was mentioning for them, for the brand themselves, but also in context to your competition. So essentially, when you think about GobbleCube, it is an insights first system, which connects all these dots together. And imagine that as a brand persona, you walk into the office today, what are the five most important things that you need to focus on, which helps you grow the business fastest? Essentially, those set of answers or actions is what GobbleCube offers you.

Utsav Somani: And the massive names that you're working with, maybe some case studies? One or two?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I mean, I think again, like we can't be specific about the case studies over here. But overall, I think what we've been able to achieve with some of these largest customers is almost like a three to five weeks growth in terms of their revenues on these platforms, doing it in a much more efficient way. And again, I think just creating an insane amount of observability into the system where they're more focused in terms of what they're doing, rather than just like spending time being analysts trying to figure out where the gap is. I think those have been our biggest achievements working alongside these brands.

Dhruv Sharma: Manoj, I think it'll be very interesting for us to pull the thread and you said outcomes, I think it'll be very interesting. So to sort of pull the thread on that a little bit. And maybe the question to ask is, once a brand starts working with you, what outcome can they drive inside of, you know, a day, maybe the first few days of working with you inside of a month. And of course, good things always take time. So over the next quarter, over the next, you know, half year, etc. So just sort of spread that out. It's almost like a Christopher Nolan style timeline.

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): Yeah, go on. So yeah, I'll take that. So you're right, the way we look at it is what are the tactical interventions they can do? And what are the strategic interventions that they can do? So of course, day zero is like, and that's what we've seen, like, the moment we do a demo, we show them the data for the first time. The first revelation is, okay, now I understand why my sales is not growing, right? What are the top five things I can do? So it's like, okay, these are the five SKUs where I need to fix availability. These are the five cities where I need to focus on fixing availability. Where does the problem lie? Is it my fill rates? Or is it SKUs not being transferred? So it's like that becomes the first thing they come to know within, let's say, 15-20 minutes of coming onto a dashboard. So it gives them an immediate plan saying that, okay, next 30 days, these five items I fix, this is the growth I can drive, which is very operational in nature, right? What will the supply chain teams need to do? What will their performance marketing teams to focus on? That becomes the tactical insight. Then comes the more, the next question comes, okay, now that, and which is what happens, like, mostly, you will be able to try this, see that improvement, then we start answering slightly more strategic questions, right? Which are the categories which are, which are the cities which are growing faster, but you are not present, you need to list, get your assortment listed there, which are the categories which are growing fast, but you don't, you're not well represented in them, right? It could be a certain pack size, it could be a certain price point, right, which becomes more strategic discussions, which they want to take. And of course, then there are like even more strategic, is there a new SKU, which it should be launching, which is a slightly more long term, what are the new product developments you need to focus on, right? How does your pricing strategy need to evolve, like over the long term? So yeah, so that's how it goes from like just being what we can do today to what how we can help you grow sustainably over the next.

Dhruv Sharma: Maybe one quick question before we jump on to the next, from the platform standpoint, who are they really loyal to a category or a brand? You mean like the customer? No, I mean the platform, if like, you know, a quick commerce platform or any platform, are they more concerned with, you know, categories as a whole, say personal beauty care or specific brands that must be available on their platform?

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): And being on the other side, I know that my focus is to grow my category, right? Brands are the means to do that, right? So I will, I need to grow my category, some brands become absolutely essential where it is where the brand leads the category, a brand is the category in itself, sometimes it's almost brands can be replaced, it's more of a revenue play, right? It's more of a bottom line play for me, or some of them are, some of them are classified as cash now, some of them are footfall bringers. So at the end of the day, I'm growing, I'm solving for the category and growth of the platform, right? Brands are the means to achieving that.

Utsav Somani: There's a slightly technical question that I'm going to ask you. I've read this name on your website, I think on one of your posts, Antman, that's believed to be one of your most as well on how fast it processes things and also the connectivity that it brings to other ERPs and like all sorts of ad inventory and everything into this. So I mean, talk to us a little bit about that maybe.

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): So I think, see, the way we were thinking of building this entire architecture is the fact that one of the biggest challenges that we faced in our time at Blinkit and Growth was and one of the challenges that brands actually faced was the delay in decision making between identifying a problem and getting to the answer. Because most of the times, when you talk about leadership, they have limited time span. So if you take too long a time to actually get to the answer, they won't.

Utsav Somani: How much do you think you can help? I mean, how will you compress that too?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I mean, it has to be seamless. It has to be immediate. Because if I have a question right now, exactly, that is where we focused extremely high on the latencies that you have. Because if I have a question right now, and I don't close the loop right now, you've probably lost my attention anyways. And that's where we've kind of like built this extreme focus in terms of building this engineering excellence in terms of creating all these real-time data pipelines to give these answers.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And what's behind the scenes? Like, what kind of tech stack and how are you doing this better than anyone else in the market?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think it's just about investing in the right quality of teams. So we've got like Satyam, who used to lead the entire data engineering at Blinkit, Rohan, who used to be the head of analytics at Blinkit. These are the kind of people that we have building in our team. Nitesh, our co-founder, was the head of consumer engineering at Blinkit. So again, creating an assembly of folks who know the tech inside out. But also another very important thing which we hold very close to our heart is data privacy. Because again, you can create the best of data pipelines, but we also need to recognize that we're working with some of the top enterprises in India and data privacy needs to be at the core of whatever we're building. So I think those are the two vectors on which we over-index as a technology team.

Dhruv Sharma: Manushree, you know, the relationship between, again, the platforms and the brands is symbiotic. One can't exist without the other. And then you guys just explained to us how the platforms are more, you know, more incentivized in a sense to grow the category as a whole. Of course, brands care about, you know, themselves. I'm assuming there is an inherent tension between the two, and especially when they show up and have these meetings to decide, you know, what are the targets for the next quarter and so on and so forth. I've never had, I've never been in one of those meetings, but my guess is they're not, they're sort of adversarial by design. Is it a fair assumption that a Gobblecube customer comes with a little more leverage to those meetings than they would if they weren't using Gobblecube?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): So I'll answer that. So you're right, Dhruv. Let's zoom out and think about this for a moment. If a brand grows, the platform grows alongside. So ultimately, it is a win-win. The problem over there is that if a brand walks into a meeting and says that, okay, the brand walks into the meeting and tells the platform, you need to tell me how I need to grow. What the brand has fundamentally done is it has passed the buck of problem solving to the platform and the platform has already has like tens of thousands of brands listed over there, right? They don't have the bandwidth to do that. Visually, if you as a brand leverage something like a Gobblecube to come to those answers and walk into those meetings saying, guys, I'm coming in with a plan, let's do X, Y and Z, and that's how I grow on your platform and the category grows alongside. That is where the platform will start respecting you a lot more. And I think that's what we bring on the table personally.

Dhruv Sharma: And from a consumer's standpoint, as a consumer, so we spoke about the platforms, the brands, but let's bring the consumer into the room. As a consumer, when I see the same product listed on three platforms at three different price points, what's really happening behind the scenes? I really don't have an answer.

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think that's just price matching going on, very honestly. But yeah, see again, you will always find those kind of cases, but we also need to appreciate the fact that when we think about groceries, especially it's a basket purchase. So yeah, while there are always these head SKUs where you will do a little bit of price matching, but after that, it is actually more of the consistency of the experience, right? Is this a platform where I can make my entire basket or I always find like three things which are unavailable? I think that becomes way more critical as a variable for me as a consumer to decide which platform do I go to.

Utsav Somani: And what data source was the hardest for you to integrate with? I mean, I'm guessing all the I mean, e-commerce and the quick commerce platforms already have existing dashboards and APIs and relevant tools and access controls. But was there a particular data source that was technically challenging for you to integrate into GobbleQ?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think it's all par for the course. Of course, what we're dealing is fundamentally a lot of unstructured data, which tends to change very, very quickly. And I think that's an acknowledgement that we had from day one, that this will be an ongoing process. It's there is not a single day where I can sit and say, oh, everything is in a salt state, right? Something or the other is always kind of evolving. Even as platforms mature, the quality of the data, the quality of the stability of the data, it is moving in the right direction. So I think that's you kind of get into this with that acknowledgement. The primary focus for us is how do you still generate value with whatever data that you have? I think that's the mindset with which you need to approach this problem.

Dhruv Sharma: And if you were to take us behind the scenes of an implementation with a brand, how many users could you possibly be working with and how many different stakeholders within the brands, how many different teams? And so how do you grow adoption once you sign up a new customer?

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): So, of course, like it varies, but I think some of our best customers, we are talking to the brand team. We're talking to the key account management team, which is working with the platforms. We're talking to the supply chain team, which is managing availability and fill rates and transfer. We're talking to the performance marketing team, which is worried about how are the ads getting around? How are the spends being managed? We're also talking to insights team, which is figuring out which are the new trends which are coming out, which are the trends you should capture before they become real. And of course, then there are the sales head who will look at how the performance has been across platforms. Where am I? Am I meeting my targets? Where should I focus? So I think it's, I think that's something which has pleasantly surprised us also with how the number of teams that have started using our data points and kept coming back to us with, OK, now can you also help me solve this problem? So that's also meant that the problem universe that we started off with has just widened. And so that's been exciting also. But at the same time, it's also meant that we had to really speed up.

Dhruv Sharma: I think this also closes the loop on how some of the opportunity to help them identify a tactical in nature, some strategics, if you're talking to the market insights team, they're not working on a launch, which will happen in a day's time, but it'll give them.

Utsav Somani: So your press release mentioned the word agentic as well. I think that's one of the hot topics these days. So can you describe us what the agent does? I believe you have different agents like Gob's boost and few others. So does it just give recommendation that a human has to close the loop on or is it fully autonomous?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): Sure. Right. One is the fact that you have a multi or an orchestration of multiple agents and not like a single agent, primarily because of what she was just alluding to, that you've got these different personas. And basically all these personas want to operate on the same source of truth, but have a very bespoke way of problem solving, which is how the agents are custom built to each of these different personas. But as the second part of your question, you're absolutely right. See, eventually there are two sets of cases, right? One is where the agent can autonomously take an action on behalf of the user, of course, with some level of oversight. But unfortunately, as we are sitting today, not all the systems are completely straight through processing, which is where some of the agents will still have to operate at the recommendation layer, because there's fundamentally a human in the loop required to close the loop. But of course, see, the way we think about it is not the current state of evolution, but how the eventual ecosystem will evolve. And eventually things will become more and more straight through processing, which means the agents will become more and more autonomous in nature.

Dhruv Sharma: And if we zoom out a little bit and start and ask you guys about your expansion plans beyond, you know, modern commerce into general trade, perhaps, and then even internationally, what's the right way to think about that stuff?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think two aspects to this. One aspect is, like we talked about the persona expansion, that is already happening, right? That is already in the works. The next is channel expansion. So while you've started with Q-com, you expanded quickly to Ecom. But how do you leverage some of these signals to drive also goodness into the GT and empty spaces that are there, right? And that's how, one, we're thinking about it. The second is, of course, the geographical expansion of these things. Because again, I take great pride in saying as an Indian that India is the country which is defining the playbook of how future commerce will look like, and that's going to look quick. But that means that there's fundamentally a very different architecture in terms of the value chain of commerce and how it's going to operate. And that's something which is taking the world by storm, right? We're seeing those green shoots already happening in the Middle East region, in the Southeast Asia region, in the LATAM region, but also in countries like the US. And I think that's how we kind of repeat this playbook globally. That's how we think about it.

Utsav Somani: And what are the numbers looking like right now?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think I can't give specific numbers. But yeah, I mean, I think the growth rate has been absolutely stupendous. I think one thing we talked about was like a 10x growth rate year on year. But I think even as we look towards the next year, we're seeing massive amount of demand that we have from the client. So I think growth is definitely something. Right now, the supply constraint in terms of our ability to actually ship things. And I think that's what makes us very, very positive.

Utsav Somani: I mean, you basically came out of beta in September 2024. I'm just going to read out some of the logos that you have. HUL, ITC, Tata Consumer, L'Oreal, Hershey's. I mean, that's insane pace of onboarding. Typically, relationships like these would take 18 to 24 months. And you've done that in less than 10 months. What's the secret?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think it's problem market fit. Yes, Harish.

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): I was about to say the same thing. Yeah.

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): So I think it's a problem market fit, because whenever you're making an enterprise sales, you go to that decision maker and you tell them what you're solving for. Now, if that is their P0 burning problem, it doesn't take long for you to convert the deal. If you're trying to sell them a vitamin, which is not, which is, yes, it's a problem, it exists, but it is probably my P3, P4, you will obviously take time to close the deal. So I think what we did as Gobble Cube was to actually spend a lot of time figuring that problem market fit out. And that's where this enterprise sales cycles are kind of playing out for us.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Dhruv, any final couple of closing questions?

Dhruv Sharma: Sure. Like if, say, you know, there's a new brand that for whatever reason doesn't know about Gobble Cube just yet, what would you say to them about, you know, is there such a thing as being too early for Gobble Cube? Or would you encourage them to start working with you on day one? Start working with you on day one or achieve a certain scale?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think it's a, it's a virtuous flywheel, Dhruv. So I don't think there is anything which is too early. In fact, one of the things that we are launching very soon is our incubator program, which helps like even the in-stage brands to kind of leverage Gobble Cube. Now, of course, it comes with the recognition that the problems that you're solving on day one can be very different than the problems that you're solving when you're much bigger in terms of the scale. But how do you curate that journey is something which we, which are very hard at work solving for.

Utsav Somani: Probably the younger brands don't need like pin code by pin code intelligence, maybe for them, like starting with a particular city and deciding which dark stores within the city.

Dhruv Sharma: Showing up in searches, I think a big problem for them.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. I mean, do you guys help the brands negotiate deals with the e-commerce platforms? I heard like, I mean, the range is pretty wild out there.

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): We don't do that.

Utsav Somani: All right. We stick to the product. What do the next 18 months look like for you?

Manas Gupta (GobbleCube): I think it's absolute madness, but we're excited about that because as I said, right, we are right now, honestly, supply constraint in terms of our ability to ship things out fast enough. The speed at which we are getting questions from the brands that we're working with is absolutely mind boggling. And we're truly humbled to be in this position.

Srikumar Nair (GobbleCube): And it's giving us sleepless nights, as you might say.

Utsav Somani: Wishing you guys all the best. It's hot out there. So stay safe. And I wish all the delivery riders to be safe. And everyone who's listening in, please keep a glass of cold water or serve them water whenever they're coming in for your deliveries. And then there are folks like GobbleQ who are ensuring that the right brands reach us. Have a good, good rest of the week ahead and we'll see you on Wednesday. Thank you, everyone.