Pranay Chulet, CEO Quikr On Company’s Growth Plans And Viability Of Paid Business Model

Quikr was just recently in the limelight for Appointment of new CEO and recent funding of Rs. 20 crores by Omidyar Network and returning investor Matrix Partners India. The company was also seen bridging digital gap by attracting audiences through marketing blitzkrieg in recent times.

Here is an Exclusive Interview with Pranay Chulet, New CEO, Quikr on company’s growth plans and planned paid business model for Quikr, Indian classified portal.

·What is your current business Model based upon?

Our revenue streams as of today are largely advertising based, and include both Text Ads and Display Advertising. We are also going to be launching Paid Listings very soon – these will basically include optional payment that business and individuals can make in order to get more visibility for their ads, thereby generating a higher number of responses for themselves. But we will always continue to give our users the option of posting free ads. Our monetization strategy has been developed with a backdrop of our community oriented principles, and any of our current or future revenue streams will be structured in a way that ensures that we always take good care of our community of users.

· Where do you foresee major growth ?Would we ever see a pan-India expansion from Quikr?(Quikr recently launched services in few more cities).

Our strategy is to build a network of local community based websites across the country, and we will be in over 50 of the top Indian cities within the next 3 months. We believe growth will come for Quikr from both metros and the smaller cities, with the network effect kicking in for each new city in a short amount of time after we launch in it. We can’t ignore the potential of the smaller cities – they might be individually smaller than the metros, but in aggregate, they offer an opportunity of a staggering magnitude.

· How much of total revenues do you expect to garner from the paid options? Is it a viable strategy for Indian Market?

While it is hard for us to disclose the exact revenue breakup, what I can say is that Paid Listings is and will be an important revenue stream for us. People are going to be willing to pay as long as they see a benefit. Consumers have been doing so for a very long time in newspaper classifieds so there is no reason to believe that it is not viable as long as you deliver on your value proposition. We are getting a lot on organic interest on Paid Listings already.

· What is your future projection regarding Online classified market in India? Does the over crowded scenario dilute Quikr’s growth plans?

To the contrary, I firmly believe that Online Classifieds is at a very early stage in India and there is a lot of upside left. If you look at the need in the market vs the number of people who are using the digital classified platforms today, you can safely say we have not even scratched the surface yet. Given the size of the opportunity, it is natural that it has attracted a few players, but you see, an over crowded market is very different from a market with noise. You have to look at the market players in the context of their current standing, team, investors, strategy, and execution. Anyone can put up a website, but as we all know, it takes a little more than that to build a business

· There was recent buzz regarding Quikr’s advertising spend. Any light you could share on that?

We have reasonable but efficient marketing spends. Internet Marketing is one of the key drivers in our marketing efforts with both text and display being there in the mix. But we understand the power of offline media, and are considering some interesting moves there. In addition, we will also be using the offline media tactically.

· What is your future strategy for Indian market? What all feature additions could users expect from the Portal?

Be simplr, be quikr! A simple user experience has been the secret sauce for Quikr’s success so far, so anything we do will revolve around our product being easy to use and offering our users the quickest possible way to address their needs. Before we decide to go for the cool new thing, and there are a lot of those to go around in the internet world, we always ask ourselves whether Mrs. Chaddha in Karol Bagh in Delhi would find it useful.

Would you ever chalk out international plans?(Quikr has seen large amount of funding intake in recent past).

People think of expansion to other countries when they have doubts about the potential of their domestic markets. The Indian market has so much to offer, why would we want to look outside?

Our Analysis

The Online classified market is growing at rapid fast speed. Companies like Quikr, Clickindia, OLX are seen making strong headways into the market with many service additions and funding updates in past.The market would still take few more years to proliferate and become highly profitable as paid options may not work that well in India at least for Online classifieds.The future competition from social networking giants in domestic market can also dilute market share for Sole classified portals.