To deliver success, learn from the past!

Ronaldo Mouchawar and John Tsioris.

Alvin R. Cabral
Trend Tracker
You're hungry, need something for mum's recipe or want to get some cleaning items for dad's car. You go to a supermarket, whisk all the items into a cart and find that every cashier queue is stuffed.

What do you do? You take matters into your own hands.

"I felt the need for a reliable on-demand grocery service to buy me some extra free time to do the things I enjoy," says John Tsioris, founder and CEO, InstaShop.

"I wanted to avoid the long supermarket lines and the traffic on the way and here we are."

By saying "here we are", Tsioris is talking about InstaShop, a grocery delivery app that he founded and which has solved the problem a lot of us face in our on-the-go lives.

The app offers grocery items for delivery to your doorstep, in which you can pay for online and track its status. It promises less than 30 minutes to an hour depending on your location, and also features scheduled deliveries. Its website shows locations where the service is being offered; if where you are isn't listed, you can request them to add it.

Oh, they also have a side service for house cleaning, in which they can send help in as fast as two hours.

Slowly but surely

As with any fledgling company, Tsioris and his team worked hard to nurture InstaShop to growth.

Launched in June 2015, it started out with a small supermarket serving only a part of Dubai Marina.

Apparently, users liked the concept; in the first six months of operations, seven shops were already on board covering seven areas in Dubai, and after the first year they were serving Abu Dhabi as well.

And looking back in 2016 - in 12 months - InstaShop became about 10 times the size its was in December last year.

"InstaShop was first introduced as a minimum viable product; we didn't even have a functional application when we scored our first supermarket partnership," Tsioris recalls. "Within a month we developed a simple and very straightforward application where the user could place an instant order. Since that time the application interface has changed so much."

While the inspiration to form InstaShop came from queueing up, Tsioris says it was built around the concept of getting the right order on time. Miscommunication issues during regular over-the-phone orders is one such problem that the app has addressed.

He says it may sound simple, but anything amiss can mess things up real bad. So, satisfaction is key here.

"There are so many things that can go wrong and we need to shield the customers from," Tsioris points out.

"We don't want to let a customer down, but if that happens, it drives us to learn, improve and try hard to keep it from happening again."

Ioanna Angelidaki, marketing head of InstaShop, echoes this top-of-the-list priority. "Our users are our strategy. Our customers are our first priority, we operate, change and evolve fuelled by their needs," she says.

Today, the company has expanded to Sharjah, with more areas in the Middle East coming up. he adds, declining to name which cities are on their cross-hairs.

Startups, of course, require funding to keep it going. And InstaShop was wise enough to turn to one of its peers: major online retailer Souq.com.

"Our company never sleeps, literally actually, operations-wise and business-wise," Tsioris stresses.

"We are always keeping an eye on new opportunities and profitable partnerships. This is one of the reasons why we brought in Souq.com as a strategic investor, to empower InstaShop to grow alongside such a powerful player in the Middle East."

He adds that within InstaShop's first year, the company had already raised its first million. Tsioris declined to disclose the amount raised from the Souq.com funding round, as well as InstaShop's present valuation.

Adding Souq.com to the company's other "top-class" investors - Jabbar Internet Group and VentureFriends - is allowing InstaShop to "empower" it and "reach its full potential".

For Souq.com, it's all about helping others get on the right track. But it was also InstaShop's concept that enticed the Middle East's largest online retailer to invest in it.

"These... partnerships form part of Souq.com's drive to support SMEs in the region, as well as to create an integrated network to provide a world-class online shopping, delivery and after-sale service experience for customers," says Ronaldo Mouchawar, CEO and co-founder of Souq.com

"InstaShop has a strong concept and platform in its own right, and by utilising our leading logistics app, it is looking to further grow its presence in Dubai and the other emirates. We are also empowering the business with access to Souq.com's customer base and technology."

It's a give-and-take relationship, as it also opens more growth opportunities Souq.com in the region.

But before gaining that most promising status, Tsioris had his share of disappointments.

"I tried my luck in the startup world with a voice social network called Vound, [but] the endeavour didn't end up to be successful," he recalls.

And what do you do when you fall? You get back up - better and wiser.

"But [it] was a great learning experience; if I had let Vound get to me as a past failure I wouldn't have been able to formulate InstaShop. Instead I learned from this past performance, identified possible mistakes and built up even more confidence to move on with my next venture."

And Tsioris has a message for aspiring entrepreneurs: keep punching.

"If I had to choose one thing to say to fellow entrepreneur that would be 'learn from the past'."