THE WIND IN HER HAIR
Ambika Sharma, Founder and MD of Pulp Strategy, loves touring the country on her bike
For 43-year-old Ambika Sharma, the Founder and MD of Pulp Strategy, a digital communications and marketing agency, her love for biking started when she was just 12 years old. Her father, a retired army officer, loved his Royal Enfield and inculcated that love in his young daughter. She got her first bike— another Royal Enfield—when she was in college in Delhi in the late 1990s. At that time, not too many women rode bikes. The BBC programme Wheels wanted someone to test ride their bikes and Sharma got that as a freelance gig. “That got me an opportunity to ride every two-wheeler that was coming into the market, adding to my love for bikes,” says Sharma. She retained her trusted Royal Enfield right through college and work, and when she was finally able to afford it, she moved to a Honda 600cc Super Sport in 2007. In 2010, she moved to a Honda 1000cc.
Having tried her hand at sports bikes, she moved to a Harley-Davidson Road King in 2013. “I wanted to go on this long tour with my dad. He was riding pillion and I wanted the right touring bike,” says Sharma. They did an 18-day
trip of the coastline of India, from Delhi to Kanyakumari and back. “The plan was to eat fish at every village on the coastline,” smiles Sharma. The plan came about impromptu when Sharma’s father complained that there wasn’t good fish in Delhi. Post the trip, Sharma’s father bought his own bike—a Harley-Davidson SuperLow—and now for nearly eight years the fatherdaughter duo has been biking all over the country. “We have a list of the places we travelled to when I was a kid and we want to visit those places again,” says Sharma. They have ridden over 150,000 km across the country. They explore one state every year. They have already done trips to Gujarat, Nagaland, Odisha, J&K and Ladakh, among others. On the cards, is the North-East that they want to explore in detail.
Sharma’s other bike is a BMW GTL, also meant for touring. She prefers touring bikes as they are meant for long-distance travel. “You need to carry all your stuff with you, so the bike has to provide for that.”
What was the problem you were grappling with?
It is a common belief in the start-up ecosystem that burning cash is the only way for fintechs to get customers on board. And a popular narrative is that consumer fintechs cannot turn profitable. The key stakeholders, including the investors, believe in this narrative.
Whom did you approach for advice?
To change this perception, especially about consumerfacing payments firms, it required a complete buy-in from the core team and the tying in of individual goals with the company’s vision. In 2019, I discussed this with my core team during an offsite and together we decided to be the front-runners in demonstrating that consumer fintech in India can scale and be profitable at the same time.
What was the advice you received?
The core team advised a cultural shift in the DNA of doing things and regular tracking of P&L. We also decided to invest in ROI-driven growth-oriented processes.
How effective was it in resolving the problem?
In FY19, we decided to become a fast-growing profitable company. Within a year, we turned profitable (in FY20) at cash Ebitda level. Our BNPL segment has been profitable since inception. We achieved profitability at PBT level in the quarter ended December 2021 and, thereby, became the first Indian fintech to turn profitable. We have scaled to 120 million registered users, having spent only $100 million since inception. The strategy of focussing on sustainable growth has helped us invest aggressively at the right places— people and technology—without incurring high cash burn and sacrificing growth. We have spent cumulatively `370 crore since FY19 to grow the revenue approximately 2.5x. We acquired 77 per cent users organically.
You don’t need to burn cash to scale up’