Changing How Small-Town India Shops

CityMall founders Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan are building a network of micro-entrepreneurs through their app in smaller cities

- Harichandan Arakali

Sunita Yadav is a school teacher in a village called Tint, about two-and-ahalf hours by car west of Delhi, in Haryana. The closest city is Rewari, some 15 km away. A friend told Yadav about CityMall, “a digital app” as she calls it, and she signed up last September.

Yadav, 44, is a mother of two, and offers private tuitions to help run her household and pay for her sons’ education. And CityMall, a community networking-based online commerce app, adds about ₹15,000 a month to her income, from the commission and incentives she makes, selling mostly groceries to her friends and neighbours. She has 50 to 60 households that are regular customers.

CityMall’s founders Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, both engineers and repeat entrepreneurs, have added some ‘gamification’ to the app— popular startup parlance for providing incentives for users to do more, similar to how certain achievements in video games can open rewards or new levels and so on for players.

Yadav has cracked three or four levels—based on the number of customers she has brought in and the sales she has notched up—and is a proud ‘silver director’ among CityMall’s micro-entrepreneur partners, all of whom are called ‘community leaders’ by the founders. Kikla and Verdhan started the venture in 2019, but the current model of building a social commerce network around community leaders is a little over a year old, because the duo first experimented with getting customers to buy in groups through WhatsApp.