Naman Sarawagi is a computer science graduate and more like a startup sage who founded findyogi.com, a leading price comparison portal of India. Starting his career with Freecharge, he learnt about product management and marketing for some time and later joined Zipdial. While working as product manager, he realized the true potential of ecommerce but saw a dearth of guidance with regard to shopping decisions. There came the idea of Findyogi and he founded this website that actually acts as a shopping consultant for online buyers.
The story of this zealous entrepreneur is incomplete without uncovering his own thoughts that have brought him this far. So, we interviewed him and gathered few interesting facts and business insights to share with you all. Read more to know about Naman Sarawagi and his venture findyogi.com.
Please provide a brief overview of your product/service.
FindYogi is a shopping decision platform which is currently focused towards consumer electronics for users in India.
What inspired you to build the above product/service?
Ecommerce has seen a major rise over the last 5 years in India. As a product manager at a consumer Internet Company, I realized that buyers are still confused when it comes to deciding what product they should buy. There wasn’t enough advice available. There were lot of blogs but all had generic product reviews. No one was giving context based buying advice, the way it happens with salesman at offline stores. This was where FindYogi born.
What is your life mantra?
Harder you try, luckier you get.
What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?
Getting right people in the team. It is really important and equally challenging to get people with right attitude in the team.
How did you overcome those challenges?
I learnt that one needs to be really patient in choosing the team members. It’s not about choosing someone with the best skill sets but the one who is most suitable in running along with organization.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.
We raised 100,000 USD from Raju Vanapala, Founder of Way2SMS.
How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?
Given our scale, we haven’t really faced this problem; however I think giving challenging work regularly to people gives them a reason to stay.
According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?
Curiosity, Perseverance and Discipline.
Which online tools/services/apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?
Asaana and Dropbox have proven to be really useful tools till now. It was easy for us to adapt those tools as they are simple to use.
Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.
Writing everything down, helps me not to miss out on anything.
Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.
Procrastination
Answer in less than 50 words
One tip to success:
Don’t give up
One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:
Paying through money is better than paying through time.
One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:
To make Findyogi
What are your plans for next 3 years?
We are highly focused towards the consumer electronics as a product category for now. We are looking to expand to all standard planned purchase categories over the next couple of years. We will get into non-ecommerce categories as well.
If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?
I would go back and speed up the things a little
What are your top three getaway destinations?
Kathmandu, Kerala and Mauritius.
Share a quote that inspires you the most.
“If you are not making mistakes, you are not making decisions.”