Sunil DograCo-Founder of Dekhke.com Published On: Monday, October 12, 2015 Views 3216

"Don't inhibit yourself - once you have made up your mind follow it up with full conviction."

Sunil is a Serial Entrepreneur, with rich industry experience and a knack of building solutions to streamline process. He has always been a technology driven person driven by ingenuity and proficiency. After completing his Bachelor of engineering in Electrical Engineering, he went on to pursue his post-graduation in international business. Nevertheless, before that he entered the booming It industry as an analysts and climbed the ladder of success working across different verticals as an analyst.

His first stint at entrepreneurship was in the form of online property portal called Squareguzz. Over the years, this venture has gained huge traction becoming a full Service real estate advisory and brokerage services company. Now he is back again with his second startup, Dekhke.com, which revolves around the concept of online price comparison. It allows users to compare price of products on various ecommerce website before purchasing. Currently he is working as a COO as well as CMO of the company.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Dekhke.com is a product discovery and price comparison website focused on electronics. It provides customer options and recommendations based on their specific needs. When the customer has chosen his/her product, dekhke.com allows him/her to compare the prices of that product across fresh sale merchants like flipkart, snapdeal and amazon and refurbished products sellers like overcart, surpluss, greendust etc.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

With the e-commerce sector taking off in India, we believe that there are too many products on the anvil and people often do not buy the right products for their needs online. Customers need help in their decision making process at the top of the sales funnel. This is where we come in and offer need based product recommendations to the customers. Once the buy decision is made, on the pricing front also we offer the price comparison across leading e-commerce portals which saves a few rupees to our customers which if someone does manually wastes lot of time and energy.

What is your life mantra?

To live life for fun. Stay happy and spread positivity.

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

I embarked on the entrepreneurial journey about 3 yrs back when I co-founded squareguzz.com – a real estate advisory and broking services company. The real estate market in Delhi/ NCR has been downhill since the time we entered and thus it has taken us long to establish ourselves. While we still believe that there is big gap that needs to be addressed there, it is something that we will be scaling up once the macro conditions are conducive. However, Dekhke.com is something that is non-cyclic in nature but the challenge here is to manage a large amount of products and to make ourselves discoverable by prospective customers.

How did you overcome those challenges?

For Square Guzz, we have stayed lean with cost control and have been able to generate enough cash flows to sustain and to fund Dekhke.com as well.

For Dekhke, we have leveraged our IT skills to create an in-house Product Information Management system that allows us to manage the products data independently of ecommerce system. Also we have been very fortunate that some of the learnings from Square Guzz like hiring the right persons for the job and being frugal, have been inculcated in Dekhke right from the start. On discovery front we are relying heavily on content marketing and social media marketing which is making us reach out to a lot of our customers.

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

Currently it is bootstrapped but we are looking to raise funds.

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

Being from IT background, we have a similar culture as it is in an IT services company. We provide a platform for employees to learn and explore many new things on the job to keep them excited. We also follow an open culture in the team and have most of the breaks together and having monthly team party to unwind.

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

Perseverance
Commitment
Hardwork

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

I use Uber a lot and find it very impressive and is definitely a big advantage to have a taxi at your disposal on the go in like 5-10 minutes.

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

Getting up early, hitting the gym and reaching office on time.

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

Giving too many chances to non-performers.

Answer in less than 50 words

One tip to success:

Don’t inhibit yourself – once you have made up your mind follow it up with full conviction.

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Must not burn cash in early stages of your venture.

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

Decision making needs to be smart and fast – If you have an idea, do the prototyping and put it out for discussion. Do not start thinking of a fancy name, start worrying about patents, copywriting etc and do not leave your job or jump to starry conclusions before you have done a proof of concept

What are your plans for next 3 years?

To expand both horizontally and vertically by adding more categories and merchants (including offline) on dekhke.com. To increase the traction 1000 fold!

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

I would try and explore a career in sports as that’s one thing I love to do to de-stress. With a lot of sports like Tennis, Soccer and Kabaddi getting corporate backing these days, sports scene in India looks quite promising. The idea of playing and earning at the same time sounds like lot of fun

What are your top three getaway destinations?