Saurabh Singla grew up watching his mother order her daily groceries over the phone to the nearest kirana store and a delivery boy delivering them. But little did she know the availability of the product before ordering, which sometimes made her call other neighborhood kirana stores or go to a farther marketplace to fetch them. Apart from that, some of the big e-Commerce players in the space started killing these small shops. Watching this incipient dismay for years, Saurabh along with his friends Paresh Goel and Ajay Sethi decided to organize this unorganized sector and created LazyLad as an n-commerce (neighborhood commerce) platform where people can order their groceries from the nearest mom & pop or kirana store, from the comfort of their homes.

The Beginning

Saurabh and Paresh, former IIT Guwahati graduates, donned the entrepreneurial hat soon after college and created two ventures - Angular Technologies and PrepGuru. But little did they know that the fierce competition and their unpreparedness would deflate their dreams. Driven by the suggestions of the industry know-hows, the duo then joined hands with Ajay (another IIT alumnus) and scrutinized the e-Commerce segment that's been shining since sometime.

Hunting for the options, they found out that the other side of the coin entailed a bitter picture to explain, where the mom and pop stores had started waning one after the other, owing to the breeding online marketplaces, thereby orphaning many homes which were relying on them. The same cognizance lured them to create an out-of-the-box application, which would successfully bridge the gap between buyers and retailers. This is when LazyLad came into being as a platform architected perfectly for the lazy as well as the busy people who love to buy from the nearest kirana stores instead of online shopping, while it also brings mom and pop shops on to a mobile platform to leverage neighborhood commerce to the customers who are just 1-2 kilometers away.

Backed by massively asset-light model that makes the transactions hassle-free and a passion to orchestrate the highly unorganized N-Commerce market, the neighborhood market on mobile endows the customers with a wide range of options to select from their menu, which consists of six segments - bakery & confectionery, fruits & vegetables, flowers, daily groceries, meats & seafood and stationery. Though, the logistics is handled by the retailers themselves, frugal innovation assures a free home delivery within 90 minutes. Helping the merchants to seize more customers, LazyLad serves as a window to the retailers, providing an access to the real-time inventory on the deliveries and other business-critical factors.