Twitter is littered with customers ranting about their poor experiences with brands. People complain about delayed shipments, unreturned cashbacks, and in some cases, receiving stones and bricks when promised iPhones. But it’s not every day that you see a startup CEO tweet to a fellow startup CEO because they haven’t received their money.
CashKaro CEO Swati Bhargava today sent out the following tweet.
The person she’s referring to is Bipin Singh, the founder of Mobikwik. Now these aren’t small startups that are having cashflow issues at the end of the month. Mobikwik is one of India’s largest payment gateways with 20 million users, and has over $86 million in funding. CashKaro too has raised over $4 million since it was founded in 2013.
Being a deals site, CashKaro has tie-ups with several vendors and they take a commission for every sale they make. They had a tie up with MobiKwik as well, and it’s likely that MobiKwik hasn’t paid them the money for the customers they sent them.
While it is not uncommon among startups to bicker on payments, the fact that two well-funded startups had to resort to Twitter to resolve this is perhaps a sign of the coming times.
Update: Bipin Singh has issued this statement: “It’s not factually correct that payments to cashkaro [sic] are pending for more than six months – affiliates are paid basis validation by the advertiser which takes time given the number of transactions. Also our terms of engagement with affiliates make this clear and there is typically 90 days of time we take to pay. This is all pre agreed with our partners.” The tweet has also been deleted as of this morning.
Update 2: A CashKaro spokesperson has told OfficeChai that “there was a problem in reconciliation which has now been resolved with Mobikwik.”