Startup interview: Gokul Gurijala, Co-founder, Green Till

RTIH gets the lowdown on Green Till, a digital receipts and customer engagement platform for retailers.

RTIH: Tell us about yourself and Green Till

GG: I am a software QA and project manager by profession and a passionate product designer, process inventor. I, along with Pranay Madanala and Ankit Patil, co-founded Green Till in May 2020. 

Pranay is a cyber security professional with a strong telecom and networking background and Ankit is a data analyst with great retail experience.

Everyday all of us buy something or other at a shop and everyday we pay money and get our purchase receipts. The way we pay money has changed over the years but receipts have remained exactly the same for decades. 

When we think about global warming and climate change, we think about big fancy buzz words like electric cars, jet fuel, industrial waste, but we still carry these little receipt monsters in our pockets.

There are numerous issues with paper receipts for consumers, one famous one being losing receipts and not being able to exchange, return or claim warranty or tax.  

The idea was to have an app for storing all receipts digitally, but as we started working on this, it was soon evident that unless retailers offered receipts digitally there is no way this could be revolutionised. 

So we brainstormed to design a product that is acceptable for everyone. Our main design principles were consumer privacy, retailer ease of operations, impact on environment. 

We came up with Green Till POP, where retailers can plug and play POP to offer digital receipts. Consumers using the Green Till mobile app will save all their paper receipts from any retailer in one place.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?

GG: We had been working on various ideas for a long time, but nothing seemed convincing and didn’t seem like a problem worth solving until we stumbled upon the digital receipts idea. 

Once we conceived the idea, there was no looking back. We were building prototypes the following day and within a month we were doing market validation of the product. 

If we look around and see technology taking over our daily lives, shopping, work, money perhaps, receipts are the only place where technology hasn’t intervened in a revolutionary way. 

When tap to pay was launched it didn’t take long for consumers to adapt to it. How many of us email receipts? Which is the only digital option as of today.

So, we decided this was a safe bet and started working on commercialising the product and making it viable for retailers.

RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?

GG: The retail industry is slow to adapt to changes when legacy technology is involved. Card payments, tap payments, modern EPoS systems, everything takes time.

And in our research we found the reason for this was the amount of change involved and the cost and risk associated with the change to legacy tech. This causes retailers to carefully consider change and options for change. 

We addressed this as we lay our foundations. We wanted our digital receipts solution to be plug and play, no matter what. And we achieved it. For many retailers, the first question when we pitched Green Till was: how long will it disrupt my tills?

And our answer was less than five minutes and that is only because we want to ensure everything is hooked in correctly. Retailers love the fact that this is plug and play, and the cherry on top of the cake is that we are changing loyalty forever.

Every retailer counts on their loyal consumers for promotions which is only 20-30% of their store traffic, so the remaining 70-80% of business comes from walk in consumers that retailers have no idea about whatsoever. 

Green Till lays a direct channel to this 70-80%. Retailers love it, consumers can’t believe they no longer have to keep paper receipts, or feel guilty about printing receipts, or bear losses for over sized clothes or broken electrical items at home just because they have lost the receipt.

There is no way this happens with Green Till.

RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?

GG: Apart from being short of cash frequently, we find it incredibly difficult to reach out to the right person in a retail organisation who can listen to our pitch and make a decision about our product. 

The real issue though has been none of us founders are from sales background and hence selling this as an idea and now as a product has been an uphill task, taking into account the product is way more cost effective compared to printing receipts on paper. 

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?

GG: In my opinion, the transformation to omnichannel itself is a challenge for retailers in terms of making key decisions at an initial stage about technology, about what they want to achieve etc..  

Again the biggest difference in omnichannel across channels is how they issue purchase receipts.

For example, I bought a juicer from Power City after I had done so online and then collected it at the store after making payment so the receipt was in my inbox. 

But on the day I went to collect I also bought a shaver at the store and the receipt was handed over to me.

I still had my juicer receipt and was able to replace it when it broke (of course after a labour intensive search in my inbox). I am now nervous should my shaver fail as I have no proof of purchase.

RTIH: What's the best question about your company asked of you recently by an investor and/or a customer?

GG: A lot of the time investors have spent minutes in between our pitch presentations imagining themselves using the app and almost all of them have come up with new features they thought would be useful. 

This was a good sign for us as they were seeing themselves using the app from a consumer’s point of view.

Retailers have asked us to demo the solution after every presentation as nobody could imagine how this could be done with a plug and play device where normally any changes would take months of projects and expensive trials. 

RTIH: What can we expect to see from Green Till over the next 12 months?

GG: We will be launching the product direct to retailers with full on sales campaigns by the end of the year.

With a Green Till device the printer at the till becomes redundant. With our product goals for 2022 we will see payment terminals become redundant. 

Expensive payment processing systems will be replaced with Green Till terminals where payments and digital receipts issue will be completed in a single QR scan/NFC tap. 

We also have crypto payments and "scan and go " features on our horizon for the years that follow 2022.