By Tanuj Saraf | 09 August 2024
Over the past several quarters, we have repeatedly emphasised our belief in the significant transformation occurring in the broader SME enablement space in India and across the globe. Our actions have echoed our words as we continue to invest in companies that are developing solutions to capitalise on this evolving landscape. Helium is one such company that empowers brands, both large and small, to provide a personalised product browsing experience for their customers.
Personalisation - The Way Forward
It's intriguing how humans operate; we actively seek attention and treasure personalised interactions. Similarly, just as we are willing to pay a premium for food that is well-presented over sloppily served, we often attribute greater value to our purchases when the overall experience feels customised for us.
Offline retailers have the opportunity to utilise a range of personalisation methods to enhance the shopping experience for their customers. These strategies encompass addressing customers by name, suggesting products based on their previous purchases or indicated preferences, offering bespoke or customisable items, delivering specialised services such as personal styling, and acknowledging loyal patrons with exclusive incentives and rewards. By incorporating these personalised approaches, offline retailers can cultivate deeper customer loyalty, boost sales figures, and establish a distinctive presence in a competitive market.
On the other hand, many online product pages have a big problem: they lack personalised content and recommendations. Instead of tailoring information to individual user preferences, browsing history, and purchase intent, they offer a generic, one-size-fits-all approach. This lack of personalisation not only hurts the customer experience but also reduces engagement and conversion rates. Customers see static content and product recommendations that don’t match their unique interests and behaviours.
Enter - Helium
Helium helps brands build a composable personalised storefront for their e-commerce platforms, leveraging headless technology to deliver dynamic web pages at blazing-fast speed. Their solution allows websites to target audiences and customise product browsing experiences for them.
Investment Rationale
Gap in the market: Helium addresses a persistent issue that may seem resolved at first glance but remains unresolved. In the current e-commerce landscape, the product browsing experience is standardised. This means, a user in Boston, USA browsing a product on an iPhone receives a nearly identical product page to a consumer in a remote Indian village with no knowledge of English. In the era of hyper personalisation, relevant product browsing experiences have a direct impact on the customer experience.
Growing market: Amid the steady expansion of the e-commerce sector, brands (especially after the covid epidemic) are striving to lessen their reliance on platforms such as Amazon and meet online product demands through their own branded outlets, which allow them to have better control over their users’ experience. With Shopify hosting over 4.6 million stores, predominantly SMEs, solutions like Helium would help level the playing field for the Davids when they compete against the Goliaths of the e-commerce world.
Agile team: Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Luck is not chance – it’s toil. Fortune’s expensive smile is earned”. It roughly translates to - the harder we work, the more luck seems to favour us. We find the energy and speed of execution of this team infectious. The founding team has been tirelessly working not only on the product development side but also on onboarding brands and making sales. Selling is often the part that founders shy away from the most, but Helium founders have already converted clients both in India and overseas.
Early stage bets are more artisanal than methodical. While we have to be cognizant about the market size and its growth potential, be aware of the competition and understand the defensibility of the product etc., at the end of the day, it's a bet on our intuition that the founders have it in them to build something remarkable. We believe that investing in Helium will allow us to have a front row seat into the future of the ecommerce domain.