My NOGOZO`s Journey Snapshot

The beginning of everything! - Group Video Call

It was April 2020, and the nationwide lockdown had started. I was on a video call with my school friends - Anuj, Dushyant, Samyak & Vikas. Soon, a discussion started about how COVID was spreading in our city.

The safety measure, like opening daily-needs shops only for a certain number of hours, is not helping. Instead, it is spreading it more, as more people are reaching those shops at the same time together. We find it ironic and start to think if we can somehow help in solving this problem.

Of course, the starter was this social reason, but getting something built out of it as a startup was also in the back of our minds, to be honest. For the time being, we called our project by the name - "VADSY" (The first letters of our names combined, cliche lol).

NOGOZO 1.0 - Hyperlocal Marketplace

After that video call, we started planning what to do and how to do it. In short, we thought to start an app where people could buy their daily needs and schedule their delivery or pickup time, so that crowds wouldn't gather together at the same place.

By May 2020, the five of us got the website live (initially thought of as "NOGOZO," short for "NO need to GO when you have ZO"), which was only an informational website at first, with no functionality except for a WhatsApp API. We created awareness via social media, started visiting shops and merchants to understand their needs, hired a few interns for fieldwork, planned out finances, and did a lot of other stuff.

For some reasons, from June onwards, it was only Anuj and me who were willing to continue with NOGOZO. With the help of our interns (who soon became our core team), we managed to make some impact with NOGOZO 1.0. By October 2020, the NOGOZO Mobile App had 25+ small-medium & home businesses, with 1k+ users.

We also received appreciation from local media and were featured in Dainik Jagran - Agra for NOGOZO`s impact.

NOGOZO Marketplace Shut down !

By End of November 2020, we shut down NOGOZO Hyperlocal Marketplace for multiple reasons:

We had no money to spare; whatever we had, we spent. We made little to no money, as it was started for a social cause. Though we are happy about it, that we delivered some impact.
Both Anuj's and my family had COVID and were facing medical difficulties.
We now had a little better sense of executing things and business acumen. Based on that, we decided it could be an amazing project, but definitely not a startup we would want to continue working on.

NOGOZO 2.0 All-in-one Bookstore

After our first stint, Anuj and I used to discuss lots of new ideas, lots of businesses, and stuff. During these discussions, we realized there are some unsolved problems that don't have many efficient solutions in the students' and readers' niche. But it was just another discussion.

One day in late February 2021, Anuj called and told me he got an internship as a Web-Dev and is getting decent enough to put it up for NOGOZO 2.0. He asked, "Are you up for the idea you thought about renting books?"

This time, we started with better consumer and market research. We conducted surveys among students, visited bookshops, did pricing analysis, and did whatever we could to ensure that this idea should be built. From March 2021, NOGOZO - All-in-One Doorstep Bookstore was live. In short, it was an e-commerce website/app where a student could buy, rent, and sell new as well as old books from the comfort of their home.

NOGOZO`s Shark Tank S1 Exp.

During the summer of 2021, we came across a Shark Tank India advertisement and their application link. At that point, we just applied as if it were any other startup/business competition.

Soon after we submitted the form, we realized how big it was as we watched some episodes of Shark Tank US. Given the level, we already considered ourselves out. The first-ever pitch deck we made was for Shark Tank.

Unexpectedly, we sailed through most rounds and finally made it to the pre-final auditions during August 2021. Though we didn't make it to the TV rounds, this experience gave us an encouragement boost and made us confident about our decisions.

How we managed to keep NOGOZO running despite resource constraints?

Anuj was doing an internship since we started this new stint, but as things were expanding, resources again became a big challenge. By that time, I had also exhausted my savings (~25k) that I earned from trading a year ago.

And whether it was our first stint or this one, we never involved a single rupee from our family. There's nothing wrong with it, but that was one of our principles (you could call it).

To resolve that, I also started an intern gig. Luckily, I got it within one month of applying, and it was decent enough to at least support us. This was the phase when we became hell of workaholics, and honestly, we enjoyed it. As founders, we worked as delivery boys as well as almost like CAs for our company. But all our efforts were reaping us some good outputs: our orders were increasing, customer reviews were amazing, and we were constantly making it more efficient day by day. We launched our Android App around the end of October 2021, and it picked up greatly. Users loved the interface and ease of use. By March 2022, we scaled it to here: Deck_Link

We also experimented with opening offline outlet of NOGOZO on the occasion of completing 1k+ users in December 2021. Though shut it down soon within 2 months, due to some unfortunate reasons.

Also, got a chance to showcase our startup in front of Hon. Manoj Sinha (J&k governor) as a part of Association of IIT BHU Alumni.

Received UP Govt. Grant of 5L

We got incubated at one of the UP Government's incubation centers (Sparkle, Mathura) during the spring of 2022. During that incubation journey, we pitched for the StartinUP initiative of the government, where they were encouraging impactful startups in UP through financial grants. Finally, we were among those few socially impactful startups across UP to receive the INR 5L grant in winter 2022.

NOGOZO wrapped off: Summers 2023

Ah! It was a wholesome experience for us. Before closing NOGOZO around the summer of 2023 (operations were closed by spring only), we take real pride in whatsoever we built from scratch to 10k+ users, fulfilled orders from Kashmir to Kerala, and Rajasthan to Assam, did corporate orders too, got a chance to work with and talk to amazing people across the industry as well as the startup world.

Even today, there are more than 10+ customers in my personal WhatsApp contacts who turned into very good friends at a personal level. I can't imagine how this happened. Maybe because we never treated them as our customers but family.

In the end, we learned a lot and now are better than before. Be it Highs or Lows, NOGOZO has all my heart!

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