When the word savings comes to mind, the instinctive thought is settling down. Most of us usually don’t think about saving for big-ticket spending like vacations and such. People usually turn to bank savings or credit cards for such spending, but Multipl has come up with an innovative solution for saving money.
Founded by Paddy Raghavan, Vikas Jain, and Jags Raghavan, the money management app helps users strike the right balance between savings and investments. It uses unique savings models to help users get a 5x value of their savings, such as Brand Saver, where Multipl partners up with brands and people directly save up with brands for future spending. Another model called Market Saver invests the users’ money in curated market instruments like mutual funds and lets the user tag it to brands to get the dual benefits – returns from the market and exclusive discounts from the brands
Origin of a money management company
Before starting Multipl, Paddy and Jags co-founded another startup called cmpute.io, which was acquired by CISCO in 2018. Paddy says that they saw people spending from credit regularly and that people in their own circle taking credit loans and ending up paying interest at 36 per cent, which gave them the idea to start an app that revolved around savings and making it interesting.
He adds that Multipl’s unique savings models are the USP of the brand, which helps users save for their upcoming spending and get 5x more value for their money. Speaking about the growth of the brand, Paddy says that users have started focusing on travel, home improvement, insurance premium and other such spendings.
He says that after featuring in YourStory’s Tech50 list, they have seen a 3x growth in terms of the number of users on the platform, and even though it’s still early days for them, it has been pretty significant for them in terms of user growth.
In terms of challenges, Paddy says that they haven’t really faced any roadblocks yet as they are still an early-stage startup, but choosing the domain was a difficult task. “We also chose the .xyz domain, as we were catering to Gen X, Y, and Z, but the .in domain gave us a kind of trustability that .xyz couldn’t,” he says.
Truly Indian
Speaking about choosing the .in domain, Paddy says that it was always about the India story for them. “The .in domain is something that people have come to trust and depend on, so if you have a .in domain, you have a clear indicator that the entity is India-based, and something that is for Indians,” he says.
He adds that even though they haven’t been specifically tracking how the domain has helped with the growth of the brand, the website has always been an integral part of their professional communications. “We don’t track the domain in terms of performance independently, but it is definitely helping us grow because the website is a place where a lot of traffic comes to understand what we do. We are an app-only platform, but the website plays an important role in building trust,” says Paddy.
Looking forward, paddy says that they have partnered up with 25 of India’s top brands, and on the rewards side, they have more than 200 rewards partners. “Now that we are expanding the number of partners we have, we should cross 100 brands very soon. 2022 is going to be a breakout year for us as we are going to establish the whole model of ‘plan now and pay smarter’, which is superior to every other existing model,” Paddy concludes.
The Shaping India Inc’s Online Growth series chronicles the journeys of startups and SMEs in India and how creating an online presence on the .in or .Bharat domain powered their success stories.
