Hello everyone,
I have been a silent visitor to all the great content that has been flowing here and now that I am back to entrepreneurship, there is no other place where I wanted to post about launch of my new product – Khojdeal
Once an Entrepreneur, Always an Entrepreneur – I always heard people saying this but never knew how I would I ever gather the courage to start up again after shutting down my first venture in 2012. Especially after being a part of corporate jobs and getting to travel the world (thanks to my consultant profile!), it felt that I was getting addicted to that lifestyle.
But somewhere inside I was missing the energy associated with a startup. Endless nights of coding, running behind new accounts, keeping a watch on the latest trends in technology, reading about successful entrepreneurs, meeting them at several events – they were all a part of the exciting world that was left behind me and I felt lost. Really lost.
Last October, I spoke to my wife about all of this and thanks to her supporting nature, I quit Cognizant Bangalore and we packed our bags to head north. Back home to Delhi! I had been researching on the affiliate marketing space for quite a few months and decided to go ahead and launch Khojdeal – A Product & Deal discovery platform.
I am a huge fan of Simon Sinek and couldn’t go further before asking ‘Why Khojdeal’ to myself.
The current e-commerce landscape in India is expanding. We have some massive players like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal. etc who always have great deals for the users and then there are some niche players who want to attract new users to try their product/service. As a user, I am looking for a platform where I can get all products listed at one place. I just don’t need a price comparison engine while buying an iPhone; I want to see all the options available when I am buying anything – It can be a white formal shirt for my office or a semi casual brown shoe that can be wore to work with my chinos.
While looking for them, I also want the best deal/coupon that can be applied on the store (Full paisa vasool chahie!). To support this, I also found that 95% of buyers actually search for deals online with 75% among them search coupons/deals and it attracts closely 13.5% of total e-commerce in India.
This made me believe that users need Khojdeal – A place where they can find the best products & deals curated for them at one place. On top of this, they can earn cashback on everything they buy through us. Yes, we pass on our affiliate commission after keeping a fraction of it for our food 🙂
What have we been doing since past 3 months?
1. Lot of user research – We floated surveys and spoke to a lot of people to understand what they expect from such a platform and tried to solve all the issues we got to know.
2. User Experience – Some similar existing websites were too difficult for a user to understand. Too cluttered trying to give all the information at once. We have tried to keep it simple & neat and provide as many filters as we could so that users can find what they are looking for within 2 -3 clicks.
4. Omnichannel – There’s a good chance that you might be reading this on your phone, so we made sure the experience remains the same from no matter where you access Khojdeal.
3. A lot of sleepless nights – All this is done with a small team of 4 people so we had to put in long hours of coding & designing and we love it 🙂
MVP? Yeah I have heard about that one!
What you see today, was ‘almost’ ready to launch 3 weeks back and no matter how much I have heard about and practiced implementing ‘Minimum Viable Product’ for my clients in the past, I could not let this baby go out in front of everyone half naked. I could not ignore those few pixels which were supposed to be left and not right and that icon which was pixelating when viewed on mobile – you guys know how paranoid product owners are 🙂 I wanted this to be perfect. Well, as perfect as it could be!
Where we stand –
We are happy to launch Version 1, where we will ensure the users get all the latest and best coupons & deals at one place. You can earn cashback and redeem it in multiple ways – transfer to your bank account, send it to your existing wallets like Paytm, Mobikwik, etc, recharge your phone or just request for a gift card.
We hope you won’t be disappointed. We are now working on adding products so that you can get deals based on products and not just stores or categories.
So, request you all to go ahead and give it a try. Pour in your feedback (and some love :)) to vaibhav@khojdeal.com. You can find me on Twitter here 🙂