“There is competition, and there are new customers to reach and connect…..
It’s
been a tremendous voyage from dusty streets of Dariba-Rajasthan Copper
Minning Hub, for Pranay Chulet to build India’s largest online
classifieds portal-Quikr.com
Quikr acts as an intermediate to
connect buyers& sellers of any given productto “Meet Online,
Transact Offline”. The company received an investment of Rs. 550 Crores
from a group led by Swedish investment firm-Investment AB Kinnevik. The
portal as of today holds more than 4.2 million listings and also has
generated over 150 million replies.
The company is located in
South Mumbai &offers over 13 main categories and 170 sub-categories
including mobile phones, household goods, cars, real estate, jobs,
services, education, etc. Portal holds an actual presence in over 1,000
cities in India and performs large scale cross-category classifieds
business amongst its more than 30 million consumers.
Early Life & Education
Pranay
was born in a small town of Rajasthan. His father was a small time
government officer working in mines as a General Manager and his mother
was a homemaker.Most of his early childhood days were spent in the
mining towns of Dariba, Zawar and Maton in Rajasthan.
Pranay
completed his schooling from Kendriya Vidyalaya in Dariba, Rajasthan. He
holds an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi and an MBA from Indian Institute of
Management, Calcutta.
Professional Career
Soon
after graduating from IIM-Calcutta, Pranay joined Procter & Gamble
as Brand Management Executive. But this stint did not last long and quit
in 1997.
In the same year, Pranay started working for Mitchell
Madison Group as Management Consultant/ Engagement Manager. He was
responsible for providing advisory services to his clients in Financial
and Media Industries.Worked for almost 3 years, after which in 2000,
looking at the Dot Com boom, he started his first venture called –
Reference Check. Reference Check was an online medium between service
providers (e.g.: plumbers, electrician, etc.) and consumers. The company
eventually got merged with another bigger incubator called Walker
Digital.
He worked with Walker for a brief period to build and
stabilize the company, before he joined PricewaterhouseCoopers
(Associate Partner) and then Booz Allen Hamilton (Principal) in 2002
& 2005, respectively.His roles at both the companies were of
advising or consulting their clients from industries like Investment
Banking, Media, etc.
The Turning Point of Life
Pranay
started a company called – Excellere in 2007. Excellere was all about
developing web-based educational products.In 2008, he founded Kijiji
India, which was later rebranded as Quikr. Quikr soon raised over US
$150 Million in funding from private equity and investment firms like
Warburg Pincus, Omidyar Network, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture
Partners and Investment AB Kinnevik, and shareholders like eBay
In
the initial phase, Quikr acted as a subsidiary of eBay and Kijiji was
Swahili word which meant ‘community’. Soon after the launch of the brand
the company realized that, the name was very difficult to pronounce and
wasn’t adding to the brand too.Hence, collectively the team decided to
create a new subsidiary, headed by Pranay Chulet & Jiby Thomas, and
officially renamed it to Quikr. However, Jiby decided to quit Quikr in
2012 and started his own digital marketing venture called Webbutterjam.
Chulet,
who has worked in a number of large global firms including Procter and
Gamble, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz , Allen Hamilton, before
settling down with Quikr, believes he still has a long way left to go.
The
company makes money from three verticals - premium listings, lead
generation & advertising and spends largely on marketing efforts and
improving its data analytics and algorithms. It is a model that has
grabbed the attention of risk capital investors. Since inception, the
company has raised more than US $340 Million from a clutch of investors
including Warburg Pincus, Nokia Growth Partners and Norwest Venture
Partners. The company today is valued at close to USD 1 Billion.
The
portal is segregated very strategically, depending on the target
audience. The portal has a very simple yet innovative technique to track
their P2P (People-2-People) sales. To add to that, Pranay has made sure
to spend most of their funds into marketing.
The Growth
In
few years, not only did the company grow, but also got transformed into
a generic brand in terms of classifieds. Quikr crossed a lot of
milestones, like reaching from 1 to 4 million, then to 10 million and
has now finally reached to point where it has a monthly user base of
more than 22 million spread across 65 Indian cities, and had also become
India’s largest horizontal classifieds company.
In 2012, first
ever television campaign was launched and the company tied up with big
brands like Nokia where Quikr apps would be available for users.In the
last 3-4 years, not only had their traffic doubled, but they had tripled
their consumer engagement and had also grown five times in terms of
revenues – which now was touching somewhere around Rs. 200 Crores.
With
an increase in position, Quikr was largely spending on marketing
efforts and improving its data analytics and algorithms as well.Quikr
also started one-of-its-kind – ‘Missed Called Center’. To get to Quikr,
all a customer had to do was, give a missed call to Quikr, and someone
would call them back. That way, the company was also able to reach out
to a larger section of mobile users who, so far were hesitant to spend
money and make a call.And lastly, they also had another great instant
messaging (IM) feature named Quikr Nxt – which enabled the users to chat
with multiple users and share images.
Future Plans
Quikr
is going to launch a new classifieds website for real estate called
Quikrhomes.com. This would allow B2C (Business 2 Customer) as well as
C2C (Customer 2 Customer) discovery of properties. At the moment, Quikr
has over 2 million listings in real estate, one-third out of which are
for apartment rentals. Company would also be launching new micro-sites
under separate domain names like QuikrHomes, QuikrAuto, etc, to simply
business for its users.
Since foundation, Quikr has received a
total amount of US $346 Million in funding from various investors
including Steadview Capital, Investment AB Kinnevik, Tiger Global
Management, Warburg Pincus, Omidyar Network, Norwest Venture Partners –
NVP, Nokia Growth Partners, Matrix Partners India and eBay.
Family
Pranay
recently got married to Tina Chulet, who is the Founder of Waltzz – a
mobile dating app. Together they live in their apartment in Bandra,
Mumbai.
Accolades:
|
| Best E-commerce Brands in India Amongst Youth, in BAV (a Brand Asset Valuator) by Rediffusion-Y&R (2013). The only classifieds platform to be featured in top ten. |
| Best Classifieds Website of the Year 2012 Award at WAT Awards (2011 – 2012) |
| One of India’s Hottest Internet Companies for 2012 by Young Turks Awards (2010 – 2011) |
| AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner by AlwaysOn (2009 – 2010) |
| Listed as Red Herring Asia 2010 & Global 2011 Top 100 Finalist (2010 – 2011) |
| Certificate of Appreciation by Harvard Business School (2011 – 2012) |
Affiliations:
In addition to Quikr, Pranay is affiliated to: |
| Indian Institute of Management Calcutta |
| Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi |
Quotes |
| We get 32 million unique visitors every month. That's one-in-six internet users in India |
| So we are not only targeting high growth in traffic and engagement, but also monetisation. |
| We want to measure the metrics to run the business well, and not run the business and then figure out what works. |
| There is competition, and there are new customers to reach and connect. |
| We
plan to keep building the company the way we have been building it.
India is a huge market and we need to tap the huge potential of this
market. For big businesses like us, it is a game of scale. We want to do
justice to the opportunities this market offers. |
| We will use the capital raised from this round mainly for product innovation, scaling the team and marketing |
| We have millions of small businesses in India which are looking to market their products and services, and it is a huge market. |
| The
power of e-commerce platform is that it is free for most users and
that’s why we have grown this way. A lot of people want to sell used
products and if they can do that without the advertising cost, it
appeals to the Indian sentiment that focuses on value for money. |
| We will grow 10 times in the next 3 years. |
| We are a local player. So, we are launching India-specific categories such as education, entertainment and so on. |