Are you a Xiaomi smartphone user? Actually, it has become a very common sight of people using Xiaomi smartphones. After all, Xiaomi is ranked the number one smartphone of India.
Xiaomi officially entered the Indian tech market in 2014. This is the story of Manu Kumar Jain, the co-founder of Jabong.com, because of whom Xiaomi can boast its success that it has earned today.
This is not an ordinary story of an entrepreneur getting success, but a reverse story of achievements of a common man becoming an employee from an entrepreneur.
Confused? Read the entire story and I bet by the end of it your eyes would be shining..
The dawn of the new journey
Manu was not satisfied with the job of McKinsey and was eager to leave and start something on his own. In the tech industry, many had tried leaving McKinsey for the same reason but most of them had failed. Still, Manu started exploring and evaluating various ideas in the tech domain: online healthcare, e-commerce for baby products, so on and so forth.
It was then when a junior from IIM Calcutta, Praveen Sinha approached Manu and tried convincing him for co-founding a company which was being incubated by Rocket Internet.
Hard work pays off
After a lot of thought, it took about two months for Manu to get convinced for him to come on-board as a founder at jabong.com.
Soon, after the company was launched, Jabong.com had crossed 1,000 transactions a day – which was unbelievable! Only then Manu realized that 60% of the traffic came from mobile phones and thus, he was hugely fascinated by the smartphone: the way it was giving access to millions of people who had never used a computer at all.
This was the turning point in Manu’s life.
Xiaomi Enters India
Somewhere in 2013, Manu got to know about a company called Xiaomi through a blog. The company was then just 3 years old, had started selling phones in 2012, but was already one of the best-selling brands in China.
The flight to China and Xiaomi
Next, Manu set off on a 20-day backpacking trip over China, from Beijing to Shanghai and Shenzen. There, Manu met a whole lot of internet entrepreneurs, mobile entrepreneurs, understood the Chinese start-up ecosystem.
It was during this trip that Manu met the founders of Xiaomi for the first time, in person. Following the trip, Manu was pinged by the Xiaomi’s Bin Lin, who shared the company’s plans to enter India. Luckily, they were looking for an India business head and they believed in Manu’s skills.
Nothing can stop you!
Manu though had lacked the domain expertise in selling phones, but that was precisely the reason Xiaomi wanted him to be the head.
Finally, Manu took the decision to join Xiaomi in April 2014 and joined in May. Manu then had no team, no office, just him working out of a Costa Coffee next to Flipkart headquarters in Bangalore. He just had a mindset of the Operations Head, India.
The ladder of success
But Manu’s plans and strategies made a huge impact in the Indian tech market on the release of its first smartphone. More than half a million customers attempted to log in and buy the phone. For the first time in its history, the Flipkart site crashed. Amazing, isn’t it?
The sale was so huge that Xiaomi quickly announced a second sale in the same month and this time Flipkart had to build a new tech platform – in just one week – to handle the traffic that was sure to come its way.
Also Read: Why Indian SmartPhone Companies Are Losing To Chinese Manufacturers
This was the craze of Xiaomi smartphones from the very beginning. Nothing could have been Xiaomi what is today without the help of Manu Jain. He is truly an inspiration for all.
