It was at a time when several people around me were cooking heavy product dreams and I learnt the difference between a lifestyle business and a growth business. That bug to solve a big problem got me. Most foolishly, I started with an engineer I met during a train journey from Bangalore to Mumbai and decided to solve a personal problem. Too many people asked me before buying a gadget, I had no time to help all of them. PriceBaba’s first version was only to show the best price for an available product. That was the biggest question my friends always asked me, a good bargain price to buy something at. 

As it seems, that alone wasn’t enough to build a product that millions of users would use. As we demoed our offering to consumers, successful entrepreneurs and investors, we learnt that there is a lot more we need to do. While it is an entirely different story that we still feel the same way in many ways. Over the last 12 months we added offline stores, product specs, images, videos, price history, product comparison and launched in half dozen Indian cities. 

First version of PriceBaba

We had no clue about the amount of work we would need to do, the kind of skills, manpower and money required to build this. We saw a problem and jumped. I left a profitable media business and decided to put my savings behind a problem, the scope of which we are still fully realising and had little clue on how to solve it. 

We acquired users for our beta offering, took feedback from them and kept adding new things to PriceBaba. Overtime a group of 5 investors who were equally clueless on the business side as we were joined us and they placed their bet on the team and the problem. When we ran out of money, in came Geeks On A Plane and we went to Silicon Valley with 500 Startups to learn some more black magic. 

We have been incredibly challenged during this period and we had incredible fun too (P.S. See our Android Kaju Katli Campaign). Today we are more confident than ever to achieve our year end goal of 1 Million users / month. And yet we think we are still realising the magnitude of the problem that we face. We have jumped from a plane, trying to assemble a parachute mid air! 

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Price-Hunt.com is a real time price search engine which searches and delivers the best prices across various online stores in India. Price-Hunt showcases wide product range from various categories like Consumer Electronic Goods, Mobiles, Digital cameras, LCD TVs, home appliances, clothing and apparels, shoes, watches, jewellery and much more. But search at Price-hunt.com is not limited by categories and one can find anything here that is available at online stores. Its main aim is to make Indian consumers aware of price variation for products in India and make it possible for him/her to save money through price comparison.      

The Brainwave that led to Price-Hunt

Anupam Khurana

Founder Anupam Khurana is B.E. (Mechanical) from Delhi College of Engineering with 15 years experience in the software industry. 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. Once keen to shop online, the traditional way is to browse each of the various online stores and order the product from the stores offering the best price (of course with a name and reputation for being good).

This takes a lot of time defeating the purpose of time saving with online shopping and one still might miss a store offering a better price and end up buying the product at a higher price. Thus Anupam came up with an idea of providing a 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 him to the idea to develop price-hunt.

The 5 W’s of Print-Hunt

Price-Hunt’s USP is that it does a real time price search across various online stores from India and provides one click search for a product to find the best and accurate current price at that moment.  The Price-hunt bot is always on its toes to get the price and details that are featured at that very moment. The differentiating factor with Price-Hunt is their robust technology platform which is one of the most critical requirements of a successful price comparison website. The complex algorithms help serve up the best prices to make online shopping convenient.

Price-Hunt is still very new and the initial response seems encouraging. They hope to meet their goals and targets soon.

Testing times!

Since it is a real time search engine, one of the major hurdles that they are facing is that they need to have stored content to mark their presence in search engines. As technically they do not store real time results on their server, search engine optimization poses a real challenge for them. Thus, they have developed a special in-house software to align products from different sources. Also, since they want minimum human interference in the day to day operations of the site apart from blog contributions and updates, they have made customised multithreaded software for getting real time data very fast.

Indian online retailing is just beginning to grow. Their business model is focussed on the online retail segment and the major challenge is that this sector is still disorganised. None of the major online stores have product feeds to help sites like Price-Hunt. There is no standardisation like produce codes followed in Europe and USA. Moreover, some of the online retailers also present a hostile attitude towards price comparison sites.

Fundings and Finances

Price-Hunt is currently self-funded for the time being. They might look at fundings as and when required. The revenue model concentrates primarily on affiliate association with the stores and the money generated through leads or sales commission. The company will also explore advertisements as a revenue channel as traffic on the site grows.

What’s the future?

Mobile version of the site is under development. It will be an adaptation of the desktop version to the mobile with reduced features. Also in plan is an Android application for mobile users in the near future.

“Hard work and perseverance are the key mantras to achieve success. We work in a very globally competitive environment and providing the best product/services is the only way to be successful. Whatever you do, give your best.” is Anupam’s advice to our future Startup founders!

If work, college, or priorities keep you busy from doing your own price research do not shy away from taking the help of saviours like Price-Hunt. All you require is a laptop with an internet connection and a couple of minutes, do it whenever, wherever and add a few more bucks to the savings you need for the shiny car!

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