ENTREPRENEUR STARTUP SPECIAL (3) A Bird in
Hand...
From their IIT Delhi hostel rooms to Bharatpur was a natural
progression for the founders of comparison site Smartprix
Spread across nearly 30 square km, the Keoladeo National Park in
Bharatpur in Rajasthan is home to around 400 different varieties of birds,
besides an assortment of other plant and animal life. The city that is home to
this green oasis is an unlikely destination as any to house a startup. You'd be
more likely to bump into a keen ornithologist than an enthusiastic
entrepreneur.
That didn't stop Abhinav Choudhary and Hitesh Khandelwal, IIT
Delhi computer science graduates, from calling the nearby town of barely
200,000 people their home. Their entrepreneurial journey didn't, however, start
in this small town. In the third year of their computer science course at IIT
Delhi, Choudhary and Khandelwal tried to go online to buy a mobile phone, and
were duly greeted with a deluge of brands, models and offers.
They discovered that comparisons were almost impossible to come
by, and they had to take the long way around, visiting individual sites and
drawing their own conclusions on prices, offers and other variables while
buying online.
To try and give internet com merce consumers a one-stop place to
make these comparisons, they founded smartprix.com in late 2011 out of their
hostel rooms. For a couple of semesters, the duo ran their fledgling startup
from there, coding in their spare time, even as they raced to prepare for exams
and submit projects.
After graduating, the cofounders stuck with their startup, giving
up lucrative job opportunities, instead moving back home to Rajasthan to focus
on their fledgling startup. Although the going was slow in the first few months,
soon the big ecommerce retailers (think Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart) were
collaborating with Smartprix.
“We have added around $40 million in GMV [gross merchandise value]
to our partners' business and this year we expect the number to increase to $100
million,“ says Choudhary.
Based on the growth of Smartprix, the duo is already looking
beyond its staple of consumer electronics and plans to add fashion to its
kitty.
Leveraging the IIT Delhi network, the founders reached out to
Rohit Bansal, a cofounder of ecommerce site Snapdeal (he was a resident of the
same hostel) to boost their growth. Today, Snapdeal owns just under a tenth of
Smartprix and the founders lean on Bansal to guide them.
“We have over 1,000 brands on our site, listing some 10 million products,“
says Choudhary. “With the addition of fashion to our basket, we can become a
heavyweight in the price comparison space.“
The duo is already looking to raise a fresh round of funding to
boost its growth, even as it has grown from two engineering students working
from a hostel with too many phones to pick from to a small office in semi-urban
Rajasthan -and to a 25-person startup now based in Noida.
The founders will need to carefully consider a critical shift in
the industry from a browser-centric business, ecom merce is shifting to a
mobile app-driven one. As large players such as Flipkart and part-owner
Snapdeal invest heavily in their mobile apps, is there a fu ture for Smartprix?
Choudhary seems to think so. “There's a lot of headroom for growth,“ he ar
gues. “Indian ecommerce is very price sensitive and not everyone is go i n g t
o b e driven by what they see on an app. We have over a 100 ecommerce
businesses on our site and more are being added as we expand our business.“
|
Rahul Sachitanand
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ETM31MAY15
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