Entrepreneur of the Month

Are you looking for information? Turn to the web! This sound advice seems to be the order of the day. However, in spite of the wealth of the information and opinions and highly efficient search engines you often come up with nothing less than the Great Wall of China.
How can I be sure that my taste matches that of the reviewer?

• How authentic is it?
• Is this still valid?
• Are the opinions and reviews promoted by some commercial considerations?

We often face these questions everyday.

Citipals, attempts to give you the weightage behind the information. Citipals has a distinct business model. It lets its users create a customized network of ‘friends’ or trusted reviewers and trusted publications, website and blogger. Once the trust is established, the reviews are weighted according to your trust and displayed. The stated vision of Citipals is ‘Citipals connect you with your friends to help with everyday lifestyle choice’”.

Citipals is the baby of Ashish Baldua and Manish Baldua. Both of them have a background of solid growth with Yahoo! India. Manish headed up the engineering team for Yahoo! Shopping Group (Shopping, Real Estate, Classifieds and Auctions). Ashish headed up the engineering team for the Yahoo! STAR properties (Shopping, Travel, Autos, Real estate).

What inspired them to start Citipals? ‘The web now has tons and tons of information. However, whenever, we wanted to make a choice, the web was only somewhat helpful. We still found ourselves calling a friend for a recommendation we could trust,’ says Ashish. He wanted to translate this trust we place on certain opinion into his business model. ‘The next phase of the web will be more of a push paradigm, where the information will find you, instead of you finding information (the current search paradigm). And as information will find you (or get pushed to you), our aim is to make sure that it is information you trust.’

Ashish believes that this emphasis on trust is the differentiating factor with the other businesses in the same genre. In relation to other sites such as Burrp and Ask Lila, he says, ‘The focus of these sites is UGC (user generated content). While even Citipals wants users to contribute, our focus is on delivering trusted recommendations,’ he emphasizes, ‘We are focused on building a platform that users trust. Not sure, who else is as focused on’.

Citipals currently covers food & dining, nightlife, health and beauty categories in India (Mumbai and Pune) along with Bollywood/Hollywood movies. It plans to cover more categories under lifestyle, as well as other metros and towns across India. Ashish says optimistically, ‘Our scope is to cover all lifestyle categories (Local, Movies, Music, Travel, and Shopping) with the focus on delivering trusted recommendations. So the market is pretty large.’

Their immediate plan will be the ‘Movie Match’ feature. This feature lets a user rate/review a set of 25 movies from five categories (takes just a minute). They can then compare your tastes with your friends (for fun), or any other user for that matter (more fun). CitiPals also uses data from MovieMatch to make smart recommendations of upcoming movies. When asked about the long term plans, he says, ‘Long term, we will be moving into more categories while we continue to build out as well as tune our trusted recommendation platform.’

Currently Citipals is a small three member team with many pitching in part-time. Ashish admits that hiring the right talent is tough in today’s competitive market. ‘Hiring in India has been extremely tough. India is going through a phase where there are lots of opportunities for individuals. From our side, we will not hire unless we are absolutely sure about this person’. However, he is very enthusiastic about the quality of the talent he was able to get. “We have been extremely lucky to have some folks who have been helping us part-time, as well as some students to make up for our content and marketing team.”

He categorically states that finding the right talent is as important as hunting the right idea. ‘Talent ... talent ... talent. ..You could have an ok idea but with the right talent, you will build a great product (could mean adaptations to the idea along the way).’ Ashish wants to share his upbeat attitude with other entrepreneurs. Persistence and self-belief are what worked for him. ‘It's what finally rubs off on to everyone (not just the team, but users, clients ...,)

Ashish compares the Indian and other ecosystems. ‘It is the attitude of folks. While you see start-ups in India, the thinking is still different from say the Silicon Valley. In the valley, it is not extremely difficult to find folks who will work with a salary cut or for that matter, no pay and only for equity. However, in India, it is still a foreign concept. But answering your question directly, when start-ups start being bought and wealth is made, it will change the attitude of folks. So, I guess we need a few big acquisitions or IPO(s) for India based start-ups.’

Whom does he attribute to his achievements till date? Ashish does not want to commit any specific person. ‘There have been multiple role models in my life at Y!. Would rather not take some names because I don't want to miss out on any.’

Ashish we hope you will turn out to be a role model for quite a few others!!