Thu 23 April 2020

DaanCorona is an online platform for selling vouchers for India's largely undigitized small and medium businesses. Check it out here - https://daancorona.tech

We built DaanCorona to help local businesses without income sources, during the COVID-19 lockdown. In these efforts, I co-led (1 of two) a diverse 16 member team and my role was most similar to one of a PM (Product Manager). I wrote about my learnings, too, HERE.

Here's an interview we did with the English Press Club at BITS Pilani. Here's another with the Alumni Relations Cell. We were also featured on gocoronago. Some links -

Why DaanCorona?

The COVID-19 imposed lockdown affected local non-essential businesses the most. Local businesses like restaurants, retail stores, cafes currently have no revenue streams. They find it difficult to support their own families and are forced to lay-off employees due to financial troubles. We observed that these were micro & small businesses and these, more often than not, had no digital/online presence.

While conventional, battle-tested tools — donation programs and charities — are effective, they often alienate entire demographics that do not find the idea of donations appealing.

Piecing these observations together, I conceived the idea for DaanCorona. It combines a platform for digitizing local businesses and a marketplace for selling prepaid vouchers. Customers buy a voucher now, help out a local business, and redeem their vouchers once the situation improves. Finally, a better alternative to donations!

Read our FAQ² section to understand the platform better.

What is DaanCorona?

A study ¹ reports that people are generally reluctant to donate money as they do not have the financial resources or they don’t trust charity organizations to spend their money well.

With DaanCorona we tried to tackle these two problems, vouchers can be redeemed in full later and your money reaches our partner business directly.

Customers do not donate or 'give away' their money, instead, they only 'give away' its liquidity and retain its value.
We want DaanCorona to be a better alternative to donations.

Here's a Gantt chart illustrating the entire workflow:

Note: Observe how there are very few processes that depend on the business's participation (coloured blue). This is intentional and is by design since we're targeting a group that isn't very tech-savvy; un-digitized local businesses.

How is liability handled?

Businesses without an existing online presence often don't do well on online platforms, primarily due to a lack of trust from customers.
Combining the ideas mentioned above meant that we would need to be an intermediary between the end-customers buying the vouchers and the businesses selling the vouchers. By acting as an intermediary, we expect to introduce trust and accountability into the equation.

DaanCorona signs an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with partner businesses and transfers the responsibility of honouring vouchers onto the business itself. DaanCorona simply acts as an intermediary and limits its liability. Even so, surprisingly, a majority of our customers do not find it very difficult to trust us or our partner businesses. I suspect either
-> The "be-an-intermediary" strategy by itself is successful at building trust, or,
-> We are still targeting the demographics which are okay with donating money.

Team

In the first few brainstorming sessions, it was apparent that DaanCorona would need a diverse team, handling everything from web & app development to legal stuff.

Over time, we recruited a core team of 16 members, each working within one or more of our platform’s verticals — Web Development, App Development, Product, Video Editing, Design, Legal, and Outreach.

We also hosted a volunteer program to help DaanCorona expand to other cities and sign up more businesses and customers. We had over 19 people sign up as volunteers. While most of them were undergraduate students, a few were MBA students. Details here: Dare2Compete link

The Core Team:
Non-Tech: Ayush Yembarwar (me), Aditya, Tapan
Web Developers: Nikhil K, Nikhil V, Sankha, Srivatsa
App Developers: Ayush J, Anubhav, Gauransh, Naman
Video Editors: Akshaj, Armaan, Sambhav
Graphic Designers: Sonal, Mukund

My Role @ DaanCorona

I acted as a co-lead at DaanCorona. I worked in the Product, Legal, and Outreach teams. My role involved getting DaanCorona from an idea to a concrete product. While I did not work on the development myself, I was responsible for strategy and for implementing it by directing the development teams.

Resources:

References:

2018 Global Trends in Giving Report
Read through our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and our About sections.