Abhinav AgarwalFounder & CEO of Dudegenie Published On: Saturday, October 10, 2015 Views 2451

"Always set an example for your colleagues and your peers."

When you first look at the career of Abhinav, you get a clear idea that he is man with immense expertise in the core IT sector. He has spent numerous hours working on several projects across different domain, creating a niche for himself. From an associate software developer to heading a team of developer, he has shown his prominence at every step of the way. What makes his career so incredible is that fact that he has done is bachelor’s degree in a non-technical field.

During his time at IIT, Bombay he was part of several activities and societies, which helped him, gain much needed experience. Currently he is working on his own startup called DudeGenie, which is a virtual personal assistant with an accurate sense of knowing how to get things done. It puts the priorities of the consumers first helping them in fulfilling all wishes before they are done saying aloud. Within a few months of inception, DudeGenie has gained huge popularity with more than 20,000 users.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

DudeGenie is into making people’s everyday life easy and convenient. There are many apps in the market today. Each one is for a specific purpose. For example, you have apps to just order, or just to buy groceries. The list goes on according to the list of tasks one has to do on a daily basis. Ironically, managing all these apps, that is supposed to make life easy, gets tedious and confusing. This is where DudeGenie steps in. We eliminate the need for multiple apps. Just download DudeGenie for all your needs. It’s like having a personal assistant who’s around all the time to take care of all your needs, be it booking movie tickets, planning holidays, buying grocery, checking for deals and discounts and so on.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

The idea came about when Rikshav, Shaunak and I understood the need to aggregate the dispersed hyper-local market for users. With the market flooded with vendors, finding well-curated reviews and managing accounts across vendors seemed next to impossible. We tried to come up with a simple solution to deal with the issues and decided to launch DudeGenie as a pilot project on Whatsapp. Right from its inception, we wanted our product to leverage technology, local markets and personal preferences to offer a chat-based platform for convenience and hassle-free product search and demand-based delivery.

What is your life mantra?

My life mantra is really simple. You should always use your struggles and frustrations today to motivate yourself rather be annoyed with yourself or with someone. It is always you who is in control of the way you want to look at life. Let nobody tell you otherwise.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

We have faced a few challenges during this journey, the major one being changing the user mindset on how easy and convenient this service is. The past 3 months have been a process about educating the users and slowly changing their behavior. Also, the idea that one app can cater to all types of services is something new and it take time to establish trust with the users.

How did you overcome those challenges?

We have overcome these challenges by collaborating with multiple hyper-local players to make services available across Bengaluru. Also, we have focused on the marketing communication across all channels to educate and build trust among the users.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

We have raised seed fund from Orios Venture Partners. The amount is confidential.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

As of now, we have not faced the challenges around attrition as it is a fairly early stage startup. We only recruit those people who want to continuously strive to improve at every point in their career. Given that the business model incorporates multiple verticals into one, we feel that there is ample scope for all employees to learn and achieve personal growth month on month. Hence, the model itself will take care of the attrition.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Perseverance, Honest with himself and Humble.

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

There are several tools: Gmail for communication, Google Docs and Sheet to plan day to day work, MS Office for documentation and analysis, Photoshop/AI for graphic designing and many more. These are some of the most easy to use tools to get almost all your work done.

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Ability to focus on the present in spite of constantly planning the road ahead.

Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.

Trying to solve everything on your own and being too hard on myself if something does not work.

Answer in less than 50 words

One tip to success:

Always set an example for your colleagues and your peers. This way, people working with you will also expect themselves to work with the same level of dedication and belief.

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Avoid being stagnant in life. Always work towards a goal. If you achieve one then set another.

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

Be humble no matter where you are in life.

What are your plans for next 3 years?

In the coming days, DudeGenie aims to improve response efficiency, strengthen back-end support to aggregate the hyper-local vendors into one single platform and finally cater to and engage more customers by expanding to other cities.

If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?

I would do it exactly the same way. At the end of the journey you have to realize that everything that you go through adds to your learning experience and you always have something to take away from it.

What are your top three getaway destinations?

Goa
Manali
Lonavala

Share a quote that inspires you the most.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.” – Steve Jobs

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