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Arindam Chaudhuri, Editor-in-Chief, 4Ps B&M Chief Consulting Editor's Desk
Rajita Chaudhuri
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LOOKUP
MEET THE MAN WHO IS HELPING BUSINESSES CHAT WITH YOU
Deepak Ravindran, Founder, Lookup, and serial entrepreneur, has roped in the likes of Biz Stone (Co-founder, Twitter) as investors; in conversation with 4Ps B&M
 

I founded Swades Solutions, an offshore Web design/SEO firm, in 2005. However, I did not take it forward in order to pursue a bigger dream. From the confidence of my first venture, I moved onto chasing bigger dreams. I also launched an e-commerce/deal website, Just4sale.in, during my high school summer vacation before I got admission for college. The website failed because of the lack of team support. Failure did not disappoint me so I never stopped experimenting. I later decided to study engineering to source a team for my next idea. At the age of 21, after joining Kannur University to study Computer science, I dropped out and co-founded Innoz along with 3 friends – Hisam, Ashwin and Abhinav. We started a service called SmsGYAN as our final year project. It instantly became a raving success inside our college campus which soon spread to other parts of the state and country. Internet penetration is still low in India, and the number of mobile phones have overtaken laptops and PCs. This fact motivated us to build a cost effective platform on mobiles for instant information. Everybody – irrespective of age, location or vocation – has questions to ask, be it simple or complex. Not everyone with a query has access to the internet to get the answer. Imagine being able to get all the information you ever needed by just sending an SMS! SmsGYAN did just that. When the service started going viral, we decided to build a company around it and named it Innoz (coined shortly for innovation). SmsGYAN later became the world’s largest offline search engine allowing its 130 million users to text any question and get answers immediately, without the need for internet on their mobile phones! The product boomed in a few years which was followed by partnerships with every telecommunications provider in India, and it soon came preloaded on devices. We were profitable from day one. We monetised it through cellular subscription, one rupee per query, and developed a subscriptions model of 30 rupees per month.

Then came Android. When low-end Android phones hit the market, smartphone penetration skyrocketed. In September of this year, India was named the fourth largest smartphone market, with 111 million connected devices. Accepting that the market had moved on, and knowing that me and my team had built a product worth salvaging, we looked to emerging markets abroad. Other countries reached out to us for the service we built, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia where internet usage as well as the number of smartphone users was much lower in comparison to India.  As a result of this demand, we decided to give away the source code for free via www.offlineinternet.org

Thereafter, in 2013, I started my next venture named Quest which was targeted at the US market and raised seed funding from 500 start-ups and other angel investors. Quest was a Q&A app with inbuilt geo-tagging to help users find others nearby who can answer questions. I built it with a friend Mohammed Hisamuddin – one of my college mates who co-founded Innoz, the startup behind the SMSGyan app. Unfortunately, Quest was not able to gain significant market share in the US, where there are a few players in this space like Jelly, Quora, etc.

Lookup was the successor. It was born from the usage pattern that we observed while working on Quest. A lot of the queries on Quest were related to local businesses. Some even got responses from those running the outlets.

I launched Lookup in 2015 and positioned it as an instant messaging app that connects users with local businesses. It allows retailers to respond instantly and never miss a query or a potential sale. It guarantees the user a response within 5 minutes and allows them to find prices and availability of products or services, book appointments, or make reservations at restaurants in one’s locality.


Biz Stone and I knew one another on a need-to-know basis, as my previous startup Innoz had a partnership with Twitter. What started off as a general exchange of ideas on the Indian market and its potential, turned into an investment discussion on Lookup. He also introduced me to Twitter’s other founder, Jack Dorsey, who I turned to for advice.

Facebook also has introduced chatbots. Is it going to help Lookup spread its reach faster?

We are going to launch a Lookup bot inside Facebook shortly. Previously, we launched Lookup inside Twitter called Lookuplite.

What are your plans for Lookup for the future? Where do you see it 5 years from now?

Our future plan is to have 1 million local businesses and 3 million users by 2017 on our platform.

India has over 40 million small urban businesses with less than 10 employees each. These include everything from coffee shops and groceries to small restaurants. Traditional organized retail never really got big in India, our bet is that mobile commerce will leapfrog it and work with mom and pop stores. About 95% of these small merchant businesses (SMBs) do not have a good digital presence.

The future of Lookup would be to bring all the SMB’s online and enable them to do commerce over chat, which we believe is the simplest platform that everyone understands. We want Lookup to become one among the top five apps in India in the next five years.

You are a big soccer fan and it seems that the world of business is not much different from that of soccer. Recently, Leicester City won the Premier League. The odds of Leicester winning at the beginning of the season were 5000/1 and yet the David managed to beat the Goliath. Is Lookup also the David of hyperlocal business ready to take on the Goliath and bring about a disruption!

There is over $10 billion invested in all ecommerce companies in India so far. The odds of Lookup beating these well-funded companies is tough. However, we believe our model is very innovative, and nothing is impossible. Leicester City is definitely an inspiration.

As a young founder, what is your best advice to the budding entrepreneurs?

Take chances when you are young, tell stories when you are old.

A leader you look up to? 

By far, my mentor and role model has been Kris Gopalakrishnan, one of the co-founders of Infosys. The biggest learning I got from him was humility. No matter how big and far you get, maintain the simplicity in your life. In other words, work more, worry less. Despite being one of the richest Indians in the world, he leads a simple life and is the humblest of all people. That is how I want to define my life as well.


          
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