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Exclusive Interview with The Newest Search Startup Antya.com’s Founders
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We have interviewed the founders of Antya.com- the newest search engine, Mr. Sunny Saurabh and Mr.Bharanidharan. This is the first investment done by the ex-CEO of Desimartini (which was sold to HTMedia) and who is also a CEO of SecondShaadi.com Mr.Vivek Pahwa, who was recently interviewed on WATBlog.
Lets hear from the founders of Antya.com, as what do they think about their startup. Here is the entire interview.
WATBlog: What was the Rational Behind Antya, the name and the concept? How did you come up with this concept?
Antya.com Founders: Antya aims to make the web discoverable to the end user. It takes the ‘query’ and tries to infer the intent behind it. E.g.: for ‘low cost airlines’, you’ll get all the low cost airlines in the country.
‘Antya’ means ‘what exists at the end’, so basically, it is the end result that the user is looking for.
As product managers, we often discussed startups. A few months back, we debated over what was one thing you looked for on the world wide web. We came to the conclusion that it was increasingly getting difficult to discover websites on the web. And users shouldn’t have to type every query to get results. If I type “orkut”, I should also have the option of browsing through related “social networking” sites, and that too, the ones that are more popular amongst user communities. That’s one reason why Antya allows users to rate and review results.
WATBlog: Why do you thing Antya will be successful? Whats the pain point it solves in the longterm?
Antya.com Founders: We hope Antya will be successful primarily because, in the end, users don’t like to type too much. That’s one pain point we are trying to solve. For that reason, we have “Antya View,” where for any query, you get all the results in one view. You don’t even have to scroll down the page! This allows users to discover results rather than search. One of our very first users was Vivek (Pahwa), and he found Antya pretty useful to browse the web, when you are not looking for anything in particular.
WATBlog: Whats your biggest challenge at this early stage?
Antya.com Founders: Being taken for another competitor to Google in India, which we are not. We are making the process of discovering websites easier. In that space, we don’t think we have a competitor.
WATBlog: How to you plan to market Antya?
Antya.com Founders: Our online campaign is about to go live. We will have a good offline presence as well. This is because Antya is a product for the masses, its primary target audience being first time users on search hailing from small towns and cities. We also hope to educate businesses to update their websites regularly as part of our marketing strategy for a better user experience.
WATBlog: What are the possible revenue models for Antya going forward?
Antya.com Founders: At this stage, we are evaluating two primary models: Text-based ads alongside search results and allowing businesses to sponsor a link in their results. We are also exploring subscription based models, but that’s at early stages.
WATBlog: How big is your team and how to do plan to scale in the future (team requirements)?
Antya.com Founders: That’s a good question. As of now, we have just two people – and that’s both of us. We are looking to hire a full-fledged team in Gurgaon and Chennai for our engineering, R&D, content, and operational efforts now. Any interested candidates could mail us their resume.
WATBlog: As startup entrepreneurs who have just launched their product is there anything you would like to share or say to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Antya.com Founders: If you’ve an idea in your mind, and you feel strongly about it, go ahead and execute it. But, always start with a prototype, it not only gives clarity to your vision, but you evolve the product in the process. You will be able to see offshoots of your vision that you couldn’t ever have imagined!
It is good to see young startups getting funding even before they are launched. Antya.com is a case in point for all other young entrepreneurs who are looking at venturing into the internet space as to how to build a differentiated product even in a crowded space like search. Though early days Antya does seem to have a promising model in the brands discovery and website discovery search engine that they have built.
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“Being taken for another competitor to Google in India, which we are not. We are making the process of discovering websites easier. In that space, we don’t think we have a competitor.”
Pray tell - what does Google do if not the above?
Hi Ravi,
Google indexes pages. But Antya indexes websites. So its primarily a website discovery tool. On the face of it may look like antya is trying to be a google but if you give the website a try you will know its not. Yea you can say that antya may have very little use case as most people would look out for information whether on a particular page or website rather than discovering websites but saying that it does what google does wont be correct.