It was 6:37 pm, I already was 7 minutes late for the interview of Mr. Nishchal Dua which was scheduled at 6:30 pm. With the apology in my heart, I finally called him thinking he must have been disappointed for the unreasonable delay.
The bell rang for approximately 15 seconds and then I heard from him. It was a “Hello,” followed by “How are you?”. It took less than a second for me that beside being a C.P.O. of Amicus Technology Pvt. Ltd, he is a very gentle and honest person. He asked about me and my work and then we finally headed for the interview.
About the startup:
Amicus is a predictive data analytics company located and operating from Startup Tunnel in Vihara Innovation campus, New-Delhi. with the single objective of providing legit and genuine feedback and enhance the consumer shopping experience by not only telling you the best quality product but also provides with the best seller to purchase from. Even if you are travelling to someplace say USA this website will not only provide you with all the alternatives but the best ones based on previous users’ experience.
Main concept and USP (Unique Selling Proposition):
The main concept of the company is to highlight the REAL COST and not just the M.R.P (Maximum Retail Price) of the product.
According to him, “The M.R.P. is not the only price that we pay over the longer term for the product. The pre-research for the product, if the product is damaged we will have to travel to the Service Centres to get it fixed. All this adds up to the lifetime cost and hence the final cost is termed as the real cost.
Suppose we purchase a smartphone and it doesn’t give the expected battery backup. Now we would have to go out for a power-bank which eventually adds up to the cost. Also if the phone breaks down and you go to the service centre and though the phone is under warranty and they might not charge anything to you, but they’ll keep your phone with them for 10-15 days which eventually is a cost that you’re paying.
So in his words, “Our USP basically is- before you buy and decide where to buy, we will tell you the real cost. Suppose you have to buy a smart of ₹20,000 we’ll tell you the best one for that cost along with its real cost.”
According to him, the users generally focus on two factors, namely –
Cost and Specifications, but Mr. Nishchal exclaims that there are 42 more factors on which their decision should depend upon. Considers all those 42 variables on which the purchase depends upon and suggest the best out of it.
The 3-R Concept
Mr. Nishchal Dua coins up the concept of 3-R namely:
Risk: The risk of something going wrong with your product.
Rights: What is covered in the Terms & Conditions of the manufacturer (HTC) & seller (Flipkart).
Response: How the company addresses your complaints – emails, phone calls, service centres & spare parts.
Amicus Journey:
The company was started by Mr.Nishchal (an engineer & marketer) and Mr.Aayush (lawyer & math geek), initially only thought of summarising the terms and conditions and there was no concept of risk and response. The plan was just to summarise the terms and conditions and provide it to the users. Many users exclaimed that usually they don’t read those lengthy terms and conditions, it was a great idea to summarise them, but that didn’t help a lot.
Hence the concept of Risk and Response was born, and it was decided that the customers should know the real cost.
Eventually, customers demanded for the solution to problems they faced after purchasing the product. So the company is set to prepare another troubleshooting agent AmicVoice which is currently in Beta. Mr.Nishchal exclaims that this completes the loop of perfect consumer experience.
Before the purchase, users would use Amicus Shopping Assistant to decide what to buy & from where; and afterwards if there is any grievance they would use Amicus to amplify their voice and get a resolution.
Origin of the idea
It all started when the Co-founder of Amicus, Mr. Aayush was in Canada and was making a purchase from Amazon which at that time was offering a free one-day delivery. He checked the terms and conditions without having a look at it just like most of us do and accepted it.
After the purchase was made, at the end of the month, an $80 charge was made to his credit card as part of Amazon Prime membership. When he researched and read the terms and conditions, he noticed that it was mentioned that they will not charge for the delivery right at that point of time, but it will be charged later on.
Amicus hence provides a neutral, unbiased recommendation after collecting and cleaning the experiences of millions of users over the world wide web, using their patent-pending algorithm.
Domain:
Currently the website is accessible all over India and provides the info on Smartphones. Gradually they are planning to expand from smartphones too – laptops, AC, Washing machines, Desktop PCs and other consumer electronics and eventually travel & real estate.
Organisation Insight:
The organisation is comprising of three pillars for now:
- The Product Guy: Nishchal acts as the full-time developer who manages not only the team but suggests and works on the methods to improve the overall user experience.
- The Risk Modeller: Aayush who is a Lawyer by profession, does the risk modelling by bending the mathematical equations required for risk analysis.
- Data Scientist: Nikhil serves as the Data scientist in the team whose job is to collect, clean & curate data from across the world wide web. He has already done this with 50 Lakh reviews from 14 sources. He builds the engine that filters the data to be shown over the website.
Challenges faced
- Data Challenge: The basic and first type of challenge that was faced was the data technology challenge covering the major task of data collection, the sources to rely on for data, the integrity & usability of the data and making that data user-friendly.
- Branding: Communicating the idea in simple words came out to be one of the major challenges. It was quite difficult to summarise the elaborate data into 2-3 lines. Being unique and standalone in its way, Amicus Shopping Assistant had to establish its own goals and not follow any other me-too clone.
- Finding Quality Talent: The problem with India today is that a lot creative and technically strong people choose to work with the startups which are very well funded, where they eventually do not have quality work to do. Finding people who are skilled and passionate to build the next big thing is an uphill task.
Roadmap and Future Strategies:
The company also aims to improvise by storing the complaints to its database and then using that data to improve the real cost. So every consumer complaining is helping the future buyer in making a better decision.
Product:
- Based upon the product, the company aims at building a patentable algorithm that can crunch the real cost of an online transaction for an individual.
- Build a recommendation and personalisation engine that takes an individual’s profile into account to drive better conversions.
Growth:
- The company also aims at expanding to the consumer electronics, home appliances and travel and aiming to cover 1 million Indian users.
Team:
The company projects to have an excellent team of 8 players comprising of three types:
- Data Scientists
- Full stack MEAN developers and
- NLP (Natural Language Processing) experts.