VCCircle

Four Interactive, a stealth company funded by Matrix Partners India about six months ago, recently unveiled its local information and social review website AskLaila. The company is building local information on food, events, lifestyle and shopping etc from scratch and making it available for search from its own database (instead of the world wide web). The content is supplemented by reviews too.

Konduri is a serial entrepreneur as he set up and sold companies like Zephyr Software (to Infospace for $40 million) and Cogniti, Inc. Adukoorie has been a veteran internet professional, and has set up MSN portal in six countries including India and South East Asia as a regional head for the company. Both have previously worked at Microsoft and Wipro. [See the team picture - from left to right: Kiran Konduri, Shriram Adukoorie, the co-founders, and Bal Krishn Birla, the CTO]. VC Circle chats up with Shriram Adukoorie on the idea behind AskLaila.

What has been the response to the launch of AskLaila so far?

It has been fantastic. There is at least one comment or reaction in my inbox every five minutes.

Why did you go stealth on this product?

It was one thing to make a statement and come up with a product with all fanfare. But both of us (he and Kiran Konduri) wanted to be sure (of what they were coming up with). In the last few months, both of us spent a lot of time discussing where the opportunity lied. Our question was what was the gap existing in the Indian consumer internet space.

I have seen the internet space evolving in India over time. Initially, it was bollywood, cricket and news. Then came in classifieds businesses like matrimonial, jobs and so on. So our quest was to see if there was a gap.

We found a gap in the local information space. A consumer cannot find local information on the Internet in India. There is high level information available, but not the actionable, local level information. Also, even if there is some information available, most of them are incorrect. So the idea was to launch a site for local information. For instance, which Chinese restaurant in your locality delivers food at doorstep, or which restaurant offered children’s play area, or where you can go swimming, and so on.

Also, people go to such places based on references or friend’s recommendations. Not one piece of information is good enough for people to take action. So we need reviews. We also decided to build the entire content ourselves simply because there is no correct information available on the web.

So how did you build out Laila?

First we spent a lot of time figuring out the coding piece. Then we had to decide what sort of content has to go in. Both Kiran and I are business people. So we had to even debate if a local medical shop listing should contain its picture too. We did make a lot of mistakes, but the last six months were well-spent.

The accuracy of data is going to be a big focus, besides social reviews. It’s a combination people will look for in making local purchases.

You have a gigantic task of building out content. As you scale to other cities, how do you plan to do it?

As we worked on Bangalore, our worry was the scalability problem. But we figured that out. We have a large outsourced team for content – about 75 people. They work exclusively on the data side. Now we are planning to launch in six metro cities (Mumbai and Delhi first) in the next 12 months.

What is your business model?

The local advertising market has never grown on the internet in India. There are tons of potential local advertisers. However, right now we are not taking any advertisements. It’s sufficient to say that we will be out in the market as we are ready.

How do you rate the competition in various forms in this space – like Burrp, Guruji.com, JustDial and so on?

We are the only company which is covering the local information space across all content categories (Ed: Burrp currently offers only restaurant reviews, while Guruji offers third party database for search, JustDial is a local directory search company). Our idea is to become a recommendation site, and not just a directory (like JustDial). Currently, consumers are getting only answers to two out of 10 questions they ask. If we can answer six to eight questions out of 10 they ask, then we have made it.