Naman is a 32-year-old entrepreneur from Bangalore, India who co-founded Refrens.com, an operating system for freelancers and agencies. Refrens is a B2B marketplace to generate more leads and manage backend work with free tools like invoicing and expense management. Naman is responsible for ensuring that Refrens keeps up with customer expectations and is responsible for adding/amending various features on the platform to make it more user-friendly and to keep up with the latest technology trends. Refrens is building India’s most powerful platform for finances and growth.
Refrens, an operating system for contractors, was co-founded by Naman. It handles back-end tasks including expenditure tracking and billing. More than 100K freelancers, agencies, and small enterprises are presently registered on the site.
The Ultimate Operating System for Businesses and Freelancers in India
I’m Naman, and Refrens.com is an operating system for businesses and freelancers. I’m a 32-year-old business owner with a base in Bangalore, India. A B2B marketplace to increase lead generation is called refrens. Refrens offers a variety of free features, including expenditure tracking, invoicing, and more, to assist in managing backend operations at the same time.
I mostly handle the fundraising by making pitches to different investors for this two-year-old firm that is currently rapidly ramping up. In addition, I oversee product and marketing at Refrens. This implies that I oversee the teams that develop and expand the platform while concentrating on a variety of factors such as marketing, public relations, and design.
I am in charge of making sure Refrens meets consumer expectations. As a result, I am in charge of updating and adding new features to the platform in order to make it more user-friendly and in line with current technological trends.
Simply matching supply and demand in the freelance market while charging a fee-for-service is our business model. We are developing the most potent financial and growth platform in India at Refrens.
From Employee to Entrepreneur: The Journey of a Product Manager in India
I completed my computer science engineering degree in 2009. I made the decision to choose a different route when everyone else joined the campus offers from service businesses in India.
As Freecharge’s first Product Manager, I started working there. I took over leadership of the Marketing and Technology teams at Freecharge at a young age. In order to create its first 100k users, I started from scratch.
I joined ZipDial after Freecharge and was once more the first PM there. We created the product from the ground up. I came up with this notion on my own while I was a college student. At ZipDial, I began as a product manager before transitioning to enterprise sales and marketing in the last several months. Twitter has bought ZipDial.
I was born with the desire to be an entrepreneur. That is one of the main reasons I deviated from the norm of students who join a service company right out of college by choosing not to do so. Even though I was an employee at Freecharge and ZipDial, being one of the original recruits afforded me the freedom to pursue my own business interests and create fantastic products.
These events gave me valuable life lessons and inspired me to start my own business. Following ZipDial, I struck out on my own and created FindYogi.com. We concentrated on consumer electronics and created a successful company with more than 2M monthly consumers.
Throughout the process of building multiple startups, I connected with a lot of talented freelancers, but it was challenging to find and communicate with them. It appeared to be a promising market for problem-solving. After working with several established businesses as a consultant, I began developing my second and most recent business, Refrens.com, in 2018.
When collecting payments from various clients, freelancers experience inefficiency and delays that Refrens was created to address. On Refrens, a bill can be generated in less than 30 seconds. Instead than restricting the platform to merely invoice creation—which, by the way, is always free—we are attempting to create a system around invoicing. You may create estimates and pro forma invoices, keep track of your spending, and create TDS and GST reports.
Refrens is a marketplace created for B2B service providers including designers, software developers, accountants, marketers, consultants, etc. in addition to being an invoicing and payments service provider. Our attention is on the expansion of independent contractors and agencies.
From Raw Product to Market Leader
After carefully examining statistics from the sector on the size of the market and the methods of payment employed by freelancers and other professionals. In a small group, we introduced a raw product. We started improving the product after hearing the feedback.
Although there were many invoicing platforms, the majority of them had a short free trial. Not only that, but collecting payments also presented a significant difficulty because it necessitated several follow-ups and reminders. This served as the primary impetus for the development of a system, leading to the launch of Refrens.com.
The crowd wasn’t fond of our first offering. It required a significant shift in user behavior. Our solution was quickly embraced by the freelancing community after taking into account the feedback from various freelancers in the second version. The tool was regarded as being sleek and straightforward.
Small businesses or freelancers can register on our site by submitting the required information. With a highly user-friendly design, they can easily make an infinite number of free quotes, proforma invoices, and bills. The user just needs to change the auto-filled information in the majority of the details as needed. Users are free to utilize their branding and there are no watermarks. Our payment gateway may be included directly into the invoice, which makes it incredibly simple for clients to make payments.
As we went along, we encountered other difficulties that small businesses and freelancers had, such as difficulty obtaining loans or credit, which prompted us to develop special features like Early Pay Discounts to speed up cash flow.
B2B freelancers are the primary market for the business. The goal is to provide an environment for independent contractors that will assist them in resolving daily problems, attracting additional business, and developing a network.
The Refrens team firmly believes that independent work is the way of the future. As a result, in order for this area to succeed, considerable improvements and innovations are required.
Mastering SEO, SEM, and More
By concentrating on the capacity to capture the client-vendor connection, which enables firms to network with one another to produce qualified leads, we were able to develop a USP.
We employ a variety of strategies to sell our goods and raise awareness. To reach our consumers, we rely on SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, and email-based retargeting.
For website traffic, we largely rely on SEO and advertising. For us, using social media sites to grow our consumer base was ineffective. We have attempted a few attacks on Facebook groups and pages, but none of them have been effective in getting widespread notice. For brand promotion and recognition, we are currently concentrating on additional channels like LinkedIn, Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest.
In order to broaden our audience, we are also doing interviews with a number of well-known freelancers in the Indian market. Along with that, in order to improve our search engine rankings, we are concentrating on link-building techniques like guest blogging.
To present, our platform has more than 100K freelancers, agencies, and small enterprises registered. The average monthly growth rate is 15%. This number will increase as new features are released.
Over the next two years, we want to reach one million users in India. After that, we’d like to reach out to South Asia, Europe, and the US. Parallel to this, we are also developing other complementary solutions that simplify the lives of freelancers and agency owners and provide them the tools they need for future expansion.
The Importance of Creating Simple and Practical Products
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Choose a sizable market that you are familiar with. Solve a situation when you are aware of the user. For the long term, resolve challenging issues.
Assume that your user is untrained. You have created a simple-to-use product if you can win over even the most novice user. And if it is practical and simple to use, it will catch on.
being user-centric. It is vitally crucial to put aside our own preferences and concentrate on the needs of the consumer while creating a product. having the flexibility to quickly alter. Continually making an effort.
Maintain “execution” as your company mantra. I consider execution to be the most important and underappreciated aspect of a business. Many businesses succeed more than their competitors simply because they execute well.
The most crucial life lesson is to surround yourself with the people who will help you become the person you want to be. You become a successful person if you associate with successful individuals.
The Importance of User Experience in Attracting First Customers
Getting the first group of customers is the hardest part of every company. This problem also existed at Refrens. We joined a competitive market where some of the firms were extremely developed. The trick was getting the first few customers. To transfer prospects’ data from their current platform to Refrens, we made a lot of calls to them.
We were counting on sales increase brought on by product promotion. Our target demographic is accustomed to receiving an in-person demo and substantial hand-holding for first adoption, despite the fact that the product is free, as was previously noted. We found a solution by improving the design. We began by assuming that our audience had never used an invoicing system before rather than building like a conventional invoicing system. We gained a great deal of new clients as a result.
We continue to change, in my opinion, every single day. I have a fantastic team that is very agile, and as a result, we can iterate quickly to meet the expectations of our users.
Tools for Success
This is the set of tools we employ and suggest.
Slack for cooperation and communication
Asana Cloud for task and project management AWS Analytics: Google Sheets, Metabase, and Analytics
WebEngage, Mar-Tech
GSuite Digital Daily Operations: SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.
Design: Adobe XD, Sketch, Illustrator, and Figma
For further information:
You may read on Refrens.com and connect with us on Twitter
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