Manish GroverCEO & Founder of Shaadimagic Published On: Monday, September 14, 2015 Views 1954

"Winners never Quit, Quitters Never Win."

Manish is a wonderful people & relationship manager with tons of patience and commitment. This has given him the credence to complete any work accurately in stipulated time. His knowledge in various domains often makes his peers speechless.

After completing his BE in electronics and communication he went on to pursue MBA in marketing and finance. He is performance-driven, results-oriented professional with a background in sales and marketing and a comprehensive education in technology & finance. During his career, he took upon several roles, which gave him ample expertise in various domains. However, as he rose up the ladder of success, an entrepreneurial bug bit him, which resulted in Shaadimagic.com. It is an online platform, which lists vendors and agencies operating in the wedding services industry, claims to have a listing of more than 150,000 wedding service providers across India.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Shaadimagic.com is a portal which aims to be a complete one-stop shop for all wedding planning needs.

• Online Wedding Planning magazine

• Biggest Search Engine for the rated and reviewed Wedding vendors

There is no one stop shop and Wedding planning being such an elaborate task, it becomes very difficult without a guiding hand. ShaadiMagic provides a step by step guide on how to plan and manage a wedding. Helping to be brides, grooms and their family from woes of wedding planning by providing all the information on how to plan their wedding such as trends, suggestions planning tools etc and from whom to plan i.e nearby rated and reviewed vendors at same place.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

I always wanted to start something on my own and move off the beaten path and want to create something innovative.

As always looking for a business opportunity, in February 2011 at my friend’s wedding an idea struck me, to start a wedding planning portal where to-be weds can get all the required information and make their tedious wedding planning experience comfortable. I discussed the idea with my brother and couple of my friends; we researched and found no noteworthy market player in the online wedding planning space. We proceeded to launch an online portal shaadimagic.com, a one stop shop for all wedding needs in the month of April 2011 where to-be weds can get all the required information to plan their dream wedding and make their tedious wedding planning experience easier. Since then, there has been no looking back; our team has started updating the portal, adding new features, forming strategic tie-ups and continuously adding new services & content to make it big in the wedding industry.

What is your life mantra?

Fortune favors the brave.

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

The most challenging part was to continue the venture when my Co-founder left it after initial struggle.

How did you overcome those challenges?

Having strong belief in the business model, we kept the burn rate low and build a small but strong team to reach new heights slow and steadily.

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

We have not raised any funds from investors till date. Its a bootstrap self sustained venture, additional fund comes from my other venture as I do run an Consulting venture as well.

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

We hire only those who have the right attitude and passion to work in startup and enthusiastic towards fashion, entertainment & weddings and then fulfilling their expectations. We have not received much attrition though its difficult to hire the right talent at first place. We focus on hiring less people but right one instead of hiring more number of wrong candidates.

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

1. Attitude

2. Confidence

3. Intelligent Risk taking ability

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

There are number of those which we are using quite effectively such as

1. Buffer for social media

2. Tawk for customer engagement

3. Google Spreadsheets for internal communication

4. WordPress

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

Making and writing down my To-Do list regularly.