His latest venture Price Hunt is driven by the motto to help people decide so that they do not end up regretting the decision to buy anything at a higher price. It is a price comparison and product discovery site with a vision to simplify and enhance online shopping. Price-Hunt helps people easily find “what to buy” and “where to buy from” and helps them make better and wiser purchases. According to his peers, he is very dedicated and hard working person who is ready to take up any challenge.
Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.
Pricehunt is a price comparison and product discovery site with a vision to simplify and enhance online shopping. The site mainly aims at enabling consumers to compare prices at their convenient time and without moving around in shops. It is a onestop comparison website where an online shopper can compare the prices quoted by various trusted eCommerce vendors. It searches from over 20+ credible online portals and over 500+ brands and fetches the best deal within seconds, thus saving lot of manual time of doing price comparison. It helps people easily find ‘what to buy’ and ‘where to buy from’ and helps them make better and wiser purchases.
What inspired you to build the above product/ service?
Online shopping is gaining momentum and has bright future prospects with an increasing number of people opting to do shopping from the convenience of their home or office. The common online shopper has to go through multiple steps before he finally lands up with a product.This takes a lot of time defeating the purpose of time saving in online shopping and one still might miss a store offering a better price. Pricehunt seeks to eliminate all these steps and reduce it into one simple search. Thus we came up with an idea of providing one click search for all stores so that the shopper finds the best price/deal immediately comparing offerings from the different stores for the product searched. This led us to the idea to develop pricehunt.
What is your life mantra?
The basic philosophy I work towards is that one should provide something useful as a product of the business activity to the consumer. Money will automatically follow if the product or service is of genuine use to people. Also, honesty and truth are the basic traits to be incorporated in a business. I always believe in the “Never giveup attitude” mantra. It has been always said that most failures failed as they gave up just before they were about to succeed. So, when the times are difficult, always believe you are just near success.
What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?
Indian online retailing is just begining to grow. Since our business model is focused on the online retail segment, the major challenge is that this sector is still disorganized. None of the major online stores have product feeds to help sites like us. There is no standardization like produce codes followed in Europe and USA. Moreover, some of the online retailers also present a hostile attitude towards price comparison sites (though our isnt exactly a price comparison site, but the layouts etc are very similar and we compete with such sites for our audience).
How did you overcome those challenges?
We have developed special in house software to align products from different sources. Also , since we want minimum human interference in the day to day operations of the site apart from blog contributions and updates, we have made customized multithreaded software for getting real time data very fast.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.
The funding for the time being is self funds, but a venture capital route might be looked at when we go in for expansion.
How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?
For the time being, our development is shared between our core team, all of whom have share in the organization. Non core processes are outsourced, hence the problem of Brain Drain has minimally affected us. We try to maintain a favorable working environment and a personal touch with our team.
According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?
Everyone has their own mantra for success. However, qualities like hard work, perseverance and entrepreneurial skills are indispensable.
Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?
We work on linux based systems which is Open Source. Most of the tools are available for development in Linux environment itself.
Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.
Passion for Computers and Software Development is a constant motivation which translates into productivity for me.
Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.
Very easily believing in people and trusting them for important work is one thing I would want to change in myself for it makes me vulnerable to being cheated.
Answer in less than 50 words
One tip to success
Whatever you do, give you best.
We work in a very globally competitive environment and providing the best product/services is the only way to be successful.
One mistake you believe every individual must avoid
Thinking that there is shortcut to success is a mistake I believe, needs to be avoided.
One most important lesson that you have learnt till now
It is only the balance between work and family life, which can help you sustain in this competitive world for a longer time.
What are your plans for next 3 years?
Our priority is to bring our website to the foremost in price comparison so as to be able to help people save money. We also plan to enhance the mobile experience of our service. We also plan to go international once we establish strong foothold in India.
If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?
There would not be much difference as things have been reasonably in sync with my career expectations. The only difference I wish would have been an early start in the online industry which would have helped us a lot.
What are your top three getaway destinations?
Goa, Singapore and Dubai.
Share a quote that inspires you the most.
“Winners don’t do different things, they do things differently” by Shiv Khera.