Online space to power startups

“It is really an issue of digital businesses catching up in scale as larger number of people turn to digital platforms for information across all financial and consumer products,” said Gaurav Roy, a co-founder of BigDecisions.com.

Digital has empowered the consumer and their demands are growing. It is estimated that 80 per cent of searches online relate to financial products across the board. “About 70-80 per cent of home search happens online which prompted us to take a step further and offer the option of selling homes online,” said Mr Hitesh Oberoi, CEO Info Edge, whose 99acres.com, portal has partnered with Puravankara Projects Ltd to offer online booking services for their homes.

Start-ups, however, face big challenges such funding, team building and positioning, said Mr Ritu Kant Ojha, founder-director PRoact BrandComm. “With a significant chunk from thousands of engineers and MBAs churned out every year from various institutes across India turning to entrepreneurship, really novel ideas are hard to find,” he said.

While there are definitely innovative ideas in the market, mostly it is about improvising on an idea that already exists. “It becomes even more important in such a scenario to focus on creating key differentiators and based on it, a strong brand recall,” he said.