Parag Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO, GoBOLT, Shares Insights on the Company’s Journey to Enhancing Supply Chain Efficiency Through Technology Solutions

StartupTalky presents Recap'22. This is a series of interviews in which we conduct in-depth discussions with founders & industry leaders to understand their growth in 2022 and their predictions for the future.

The logistics industry involves the coordination and movement of goods from one place to another through a supply chain network. It includes activities such as transportation, warehousing, and distribution of products. The industry has been greatly impacted by technology advancements such as automation, digitalization, and e-commerce, leading to increased efficiency and cost savings.

The logistics industry in India is growing rapidly, driven by factors such as increasing trade, e-commerce growth, and government initiatives to improve infrastructure and regulations. The industry faces challenges such as inadequate transportation infrastructure, complex regulations, and a shortage of skilled labor. The government has launched several initiatives to modernize the industry, including the development of the National Logistics Policy and the National Multi-Modal Logistics Parks.

The Indian logistics industry has been growing quickly, and by 2025 it is expected to reach a value of $380 billion.

For this Interview, we invited Parag Aggarwal, Co-founder & CEO of GoBOLT, where we talked about the growth, challenges, insights, and future opportunities in the logistics industry.

StartupTalky: Parag, what products does your company sell? What was the motivation/vision with which you started?

Parag: GoBOLT is an end-to-end tech logistics firm aimed at improving the responsiveness/speed of the supply chain together with optimizing the cost. We provide operational services like express transportation solutions, and distribution solutions together with pure technology solutions to optimize the client's supply chain. The organization was started with a vision of removing the inefficiencies in the supply chain and reducing the time to customers by 50 percent. With ever-changing industry dynamics and regulatory framework support, we believe the Indian supply chain system will soon be comparable to global benchmarks in terms of speed and cost.

StartupTalky: What other products/features have been added in the past year? What is/are the USP/s of your products?

Parag: GoBOLT started as a tech-enabled organization using technology for efficient and effective operations. From the last couple of years, as an organizational strategy, we forayed into a pure-play technology business that provides optimization solutions to clients' supply chains without operational support. It has helped us to get a view of different types of supply chains across the industry. As a combination of operational expertise and technological solutions, GoBOLT is growing at a faster pace providing end-to-end solutions to its clients.

StartupTalky: How has the logistics industry changed in recent years, and how has your company adapted to these changes?

Parag: Logistics as an industry has been very dynamic with respect to technological interventions and regulatory guidelines in the last few years. It was earlier an ignored sector that was marred by a lack of technology and the presence of a huge number of intermediaries. But the market opportunity of almost 200 billion dollars has led to a lot of new-age companies trying to improve the sector together with support from the government with respect to policies like ULIP, ONDC, etc. The sector from the last few years has become a priority sector across the ecosystem.

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StartupTalky: How do you stay up-to-date on the latest trends and developments in the logistics industry?

Parag: The latest trends can be easily gathered by being a part of different forums. GoBOLT as an organization is a member of many government and private forums which helps us in staying updated. In fact, we were invited by the government of India for the launch of the ULIP policy.

StartupTalky: What key metrics do you track to check the company's growth and performance?

Parag: GoBOLT has always focused on profitable growth and not just growth. We as an organization track both our topline and bottom line together with some hard-core operational parameters like Asset utilization, On-time Performance. We believe that to make an impact on the logistics sector, it is very important that the growth is in the right direction and quality of revenues is tracked.

StartupTalky: What were the most significant challenges your company faced in the past year and how did you overcome them?

Parag: We have been facing challenges like fuel price hike which has been the major cost factor of the whole industry. This contributes to more than 50 percent of our cost and its variability has been the biggest challenge across the industry. We as an organization went with a direct fuel supply agreement with Oil Marketing companies and implemented various fuel storage strategies to counter the variability.

StartupTalky: What are the different strategies you use for marketing? Tell us about any growth hack which you pulled off.

Parag: GoBOLT is more into the B2B space in which the customers are focused on cost and service levels. We ensure that we are continuously innovating at the back end to drive operational efficiencies and pass on the cost benefits to our clients and attain cost leadership. Our state of art in-house technology ensures that service levels are tracked and monitored. We as an organization, have been adding customers since our inception and have not lost any due to our focus on cost and service.

StartupTalky: What are the different strategies you use for marketing? Tell us about any growth hack which you pulled off.

Parag: GoBOLT has an in-house tech team that develops products as per our client's requirements. We focus on algorithm-based solutions and use data science tools for getting the correct output. We believe that in a few years, the adaptability of AI and ML in the supply chain will increase multi-fold.

StartupTalky: What opportunities do you see for future growth in your industry in India and the world? What kind of difference in market behavior have you seen within states in India?

Parag: Logistics is a 200 billion dollar industry in India that is growing at 9 percent CAGR. The industry is highly intermediated with not even one player having a double-digit market share. There is a lot of growth opportunity in India in which even a 5 -10 percent market share will make you the market leader.

StartupTalky: What lessons did your team learn in the past year and how will these inform your future plans and strategies?

Parag: The way Covid hit the industry has been a learning for each and every individual. It led us to a completely uncertain environment with different rules of business. For robust growth, it is essential that the business strategies are flexible and the speed of the decision-making goes in tandem with ever-changing external dynamics.

StartupTalky: How do you plan to expand the Customers, product, and team base in the future?

Parag: We are at an ARR of 400 crores with an employee base of 250 + people. We are focusing on growing profitably and growing to annual revenues of 1500 cr in the next few years with a combination of organic and inorganic growth via acquisition.

StartupTalky: One tip that you would like to share with people reading this article who want to get into entrepreneurship?

Parag: I think holding your ground and believing in your vision is the most significant thing in the start-up journey. There will be ups and downs but these things are very temporary and everything falls into the right place eventually.

We thank Parag Aggarwal for spending his valuable time and sharing his learnings with all of us.

You can read other Recap'22 Interviews here.