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This Entrepreneurial Story is about Hitesh, Amit & Prashant who Founded ‘listopten.com’ located in New Delhi, India.
Founding Team:
- Hitesh Sharma (Co-founder): Was a MBA student, however his passion for e-commerce let him to move to a VC funded e commerce start up and drop studies mid way. Hitesh later completed MBA (symbiosis) and started his own venture to peruse Entrepreneurship full time. He faced a problem of finding best things online and joined hands with Amit to execute the same. Hitesh hails from a Maarwari business family in Assam and keeps deep business know how. Connect on Facebook
- Amit Mehta (Co-founder): Amit kumar is a MBA graduate who quit his well settled job to get into this venture with Hitesh. Amit follows one principle in life ” Move fast or die” and has vision to take this company at a height in quickest possible time. He hails from a business family in Varanasi. Amit keeps deep knowledge in the field of marketing and user engagements, he is also an artist by hobby. Facebook connect
- Prashant Singh (Co-founder): Prashant is MCA with 5 years of experience in various companies like yellow pages and matrimony sites. He always had a dream of working at his own venture and creating some value with his skills and finally took risk and quit his job to join hands with Hitesh and Amit for a plunge into Entrepreneurship.
Started on 14th Sept 2013
Location – New Delhi
What is the concept and idea behind Listopten? [A brief description and features of your startup.]
Listopten helps you to find Top10 results based on real people opinion on anything you search online. Listopten helps you generate free traffic for your business from the Top10 lists.
Opinion and recommendations have been biggest driving factors of the buying behaviour in India and world. We are building a crowed sourced Top10 of everything so that you can check user rated Top10 things before making a decision of buying a product, watching a movie etc. We are providing free marketing tool for all business units. You can create Top10 lists and generate free traffic from our website.
What was the motive behind starting Listopten? How did the idea of starting this venture born?
We were sitting back at home and searching for best android phones to buy and landed on e-commerce and few review sites but they could not help to understand which one is the best among all available options. Therefore we thought there should be a site which should only show public generated results of Top 10 items in all categories so that we don’t get lost in 5000+ results coming out of Google search
Tell us about your team. What they do and how they joined you?
Two ( Hitesh and Amit) out of three co-founders met in B-school together, Amit competed MBA and the Hitesh dropped out and joined an ecommerce start-up, after few years they again came back together to start listopten.com. The third co-founder Prashant is close friend too.
How Listopten is different than other sites from the same domain?[ Also include- How did you score in Alexa in short period of time?]
We are the only portal where user can come and check the Top 10 favorite things shared by other users and their favorite online stores and also share opinion on the list and create their version of list. We are not selling directly but helping users to make better choice online and also generate free business to the online stores.
How did you manage promotion of the site?
We are currently getting traffic via word of mouth and google. There is huge shift in how people search on google and the keywords user by them. These days Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword.
Eg- huge chunk of people search for Top 10 xyz or Best xyz instead of just typing xyz on google. People want to see the best 10 results instead of getting lost in all the results and wasting time to sort out best 10. At listopten you get only best 10 of everything.
How much money and time did you invest in your startup?
Currently we are self-funded and invested 10+ lakhs so far including opportunity costs and looking for angel investors who can support us building a long term sustainable product to serve the people searching for Top 10 things online.
What’s your future plan?
We are currently focusing on building product and providing traffic to our e-commerce clients like carnation.in, snapdeal.com, infibeam.com etc. and providing an engaging platform to the users. We are working on monetization of list and users creating Top 10 list will be given monetary advantages as per popularity if his lists
What’s your success mantra?
Our team is purely dedicated to work 16-18 hours in a days and consistently working hard to help people make better choice online. For us our highly passionate team with a clear vision and common objective is biggest strength.
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.
Persistence when things don’t work your way and courage to take the challenge for turning it around with hard-work and patience.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far?
We are a small team working on a big project, we work for 16 hours a day officially but to grow faster we are looking for funds to hire more people who can join our team.
How did you overcome these challenges?
Looking for angel funding, already in talk with few but evaluating Angels in terms of what value they can bring to listopten instead of just money, not all people with money in pocket have mind set to do something big instead of just investing money to make money.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
Providing more and more value back to the client FREE.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
Borrow funds from friends and family 🙂
Whats Your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy?
No marketing budget as of now focusing on organic traffic. Currently looking to raise Angel funding to fuel our start up which will be used solely to hire few people to join our team.
What message would you like to give to upcoming entrepreneurs?
Feel a problem and without thinking much jump into it and improve with time and establish your product, never try to be facebook or pintrest on the first day of launch.
More Info
https://www.startupfreak.com/listopten-com/
Startup Freak wishes All of you, All the Best!
