3 youngsters from IIT-KGP are taking on the biggies in the online product discovery space

The story started when a young man named Gaurav Dahake had to buy an iPod for his friend whose birthday was arriving. He turned on his computer and three frustrating hours later, he had bought an iPod which ironically was delivered after the birthday. Gaurav also realized that he could have had a better deal if he had bought the gift from a different source. This experience kept nagging him and he got together with friend and developer Prashant Singh to solve this customer pain-point. And thus was born BuyHatke, an online product and price discovery service. They soon got their UI UX expert in Srikanth Sethumadhavan as well, and the ball was set rolling.

Problem being solved and the revenue model

eCommerce saw an huge upward swing in 2011 and we at YourStory have seen more than 800 eCommerce companies take birth (eSparks 2011 and 2013). With these, we saw the adjoining need for eCommerce enablers and this is where BuyHatke fits in. BuyHatke scans close to 50 credible websites (Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Shopperstop, etc.) and fetches the consumer the best deal.

The BuyHatke team which has grown to 11 now, started out with a capital input of Rs 2 lakh, and broke even a few months back. Revenues come in via three streams, viz. affiliate, advertisements, and exclusive home age listing for retailers.

Funding and competition

If eCommerce sites are more, price comparison engines are also in plenty. Alongside the Accel backed MySmartPrice, we have a few others engines like PriceCheckIndia, PriceBaba, Find Yogi, etc (some of them across categories, some focusing on a few). “We have been approached previously but we bootstrapped, broke even and are scaling fast. We would be soon out in the market to raise a series A round,” says Gaurav.

It’s a competitive space to be in but Gaurav believes that having a great team has helped them stick together and march ahead.

Aiming to be the Google for online shopping in India

“Other price comparison portals are limited in the amount of products they cover. Some are restricted to mobiles, some only to electronics. We are across the spectrum and cover over 47 credible portals and we not only help the user do price comparison but also help him discover relevant products,” says Gaurav.

BuyHatke scans an inventory of over 4 crore products on the net and claims to receive over 500,000 unique pageviews monthly (traffic stats on Alexa). They also recently launched their Chrome extension and a separate mobile comparison platform.

Envisioning to become the single starting point of every purchase made online in India, this ambitious strives to  keep on improving their product.