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This Entrepreneurial Story is about Anupam Khurana who Founded ‘Price-hunt.com’ located in Gurgaon, Haryana.
About –
The website was conceptualised by Anupam Khurana and Palka Khurana in late 2012 and was launched in January 2013.
Anupam Khurana is B.E. (Mechanical) from Delhi College of Engineering with 15 years experience in the software industry. Palka Khurana is B.E. (Instrumentation) from Delhi Institute of technology with 10 years experience in marketing and sales management.
When Started: January 2013
What motivated you to start your Business?
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 in online shopping and one still might miss a store offering a better price.
Thus we came up with an idea of providing 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 us to the idea to develop price-hunt.
Tell us about your Business
Price-hunt revolves about the idea of presenting a one stop search for all online shopping. The price search engine (that’s what we really look at it as) gets the product search in real time and presents the user/shopper with current prices across online stores. We do not promote any particular store/brand and the results of the search are presented in an understandable manner.
Further add-ons apart from the real time search across major online stores are “Deals of the day” from many stores so you don’t have to go looking everywhere and search simplifying hints like “Popular Products and Books”.
What is a Day in a life of you like?
I try hard to maintain my work and family life balance. A usual day in my life begins early at 6:00am with an early cup of milk over the newspaper. This is followed by an hour and half at the gym and breakfast. Work begins at 9:00am with time spread over working on site marketing strategy, design and development, feature enhancement etc. Work can continue up to 7:30pm with lunch break around 1:30pm. After 7:30 its usually family time and the day ends around 10:00.
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.
As in any business, there is always a mixed bag of skills and discipline that work and no one particular skill that gets you right. But, yes, the one strong point that gives advantage is the ability to learn and implement new technologies so as to enhance our business.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far
Indian online retailing is just beginning to grow. Since our business model is focused on the online retail segment, the major challenge is that this sector is still disorganized. None of the major online stores have product feeds to help sites like us. There is no standardization like produce codes followed in Europe and USA. Moreover, some of the online retailers also present a hostile attitude towards price comparison sites (though ours isn’t exactly a price comparison site, but the layouts etc are very similar and we compete with such sites for our audience).
How did you overcome these challenges?
We have developed special in-house software to align products from different sources. Also, since we want minimum human interference in the day to day operations of the site apart from blog contributions and updates, we have made customized multi-threaded software for getting real time data very fast.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
For our particular nature of business, a white hat SEO is one of the best ways to secure new clients/visitors. Social media is another route and it spreads the word very fast.
What advice do you give to other business owners?
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.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
It has been always said that most failures failed as they gave up just before they were about to succeed. So, when the times are difficult, always believe you are just near success.
What’s Your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy
We plan to go through the generic search engine optimization route to get visitors to our site. Once the visitor lands on the site, rest will be up to user experience to retain and encourage repeated use of our site. The funding for the time being is self funds, but a venture capital route might be looked at when we go in for expansion.
Your Achievements
Price-hunt.com has an average visitor count of about 600 and we are building up on that. We have just started and will go a long way.
What’s your favourite quote?
“Winners don’t do different things, they do things differently” by Shiv Khera.
Who inspires you?
I have always been inspired by Albert Einstein for his sheer dedication towards his work and his ability to think different.
Do you have a Business Philosophy?
The basic philosophy I work towards is that one should provide something useful as a product of the business activity. Money will automatically follow if the product or service is of genuine use to people. Also, honesty and truth are the basic traits to be incorporated in a business.
Contact links
More Info
https://www.startupfreak.com/price-hunt-com/
Startup Freak wishes Anupam & Palka, All the Best!
