FindYogi is a shopping decision platform which helps you decide which product to buy and from where. This is achieved through structured and comprehensible data about products backed by expert personalized advice.
The main idea is to give enough to a consumer to help them make a confident by decision. What we do different from others is the personalized 1-to-1 advice from an expert. While there are many sources on the web that serve generic data, FindYogi gives you contextual personalized advice.
FindYogi was launched in June 2013. The aim was to help consumers make better buying decisions. We initially believed that feature scores, filters, sorting, comparison etc. would be enough to drive decisions. What we realized later is that these features only capture spec-sheet driven facts and present them in a generic way. The personalized advice platform was added later to capture irrational factors in decision making and address each user’s context individually.
E-commerce has seen a major rise over the last 5 years in India. Most of the consumer interest is driven by the cheap prices and heavy discounts that e-commerce companies have been providing. Though as product manager at a consumer Internet Company what I realized what that buyers are still confused when it comes to deciding what product they should buy. There isn’t enough advice available. There were a 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 is where FindYogi was born.
About Team
Naman Sarawagi is the founder of FindYogi. He is an engineering graduate. He was the first product manager at Freecharge (acquired by Snapdeal) and Zipdial (acquired by Twitter). We are a team of 12 managing Tech, Marketing and Content. We follow a 2-tier hierarchy with 1 leader in each department. Hard working. Output oriented. Everyone works out of a single office which allows for maximum face time. We have little tolerance for excuses. We try best to have lunch together.
Challenges and Goals:
Building the right team was a major challenge. We never invested much time early on. Down the road we realized its importance and understood that one needs to be patient in choosing people with the right blend of attitude and aptitude.
Competitors in the market
While there are no players in the market that consumers make buying decisions, we do compete in parts with some gadget blogs and price comparison sites.
Strategies for increasing customer base
We are currently banking on our strong product that gets us a lot of word-of-mouth marketing. Going forward we will engage in inorganic forms of marketing like online ads. The other set of growth will come from increasing the number of categories that we cover.
Visualization and plans for next few 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-e-commerce categories as well.