PriceShred, Integrating gaming with buying & selling online

Based out of Bangalore, PriceShred is a new venture co-founded by Abhinav Sarangi and Karan Kunal. Abhinav comes from the group which dishes out the maximum start-ups; the IIT-IIM graduates and Karan has a MBA degree from Xaviers Institute. Currently, the team consists of 5 members. YourStory.in caught up with the founders to know more about their startup PriceShred.What are you aiming to do with PriceShred?

With PriceShred.com we are trying to redefine buying and selling online. Anyone who has ever used olx.in or ebay.in to buy or sell stuff knows they are not easy or fun to use. At PriceShred.com, we are tackling this problem, and trying to take a radical new approach to this industry which has remained essentially the same for the last 10-15 years. We are going to make it easy, convenient, and most importantly, super fun, to buy and sell online, and in the process shred the cost of ownership of products.

How much capital was invested into setting up PriceShred.com? Did you bootstrap or fund-raise?

PriceShred.com is an angel funded startup. We have raised a small round of INR 10 lakhs till date, from an individual investor, and are actively seeking funds for the future round of investments.

Tell us a little about how you plan to make the process of buying and selling online more effective as compared to olx or ebay?

One way is to make the process simple, easy, hassle-free, something like our plans to have a "1-click listing" of products for sellers, and an "intuitive UI/UX" which makes searching for products extremely easy for buyers, so having the users (both buyers and sellers) do as little as possible, and the platform doing the bulk of grunge work, and hence making it fun for users. The second aspect to it, is we will have game mechanics in place, to actively reward users who interact with the website, with rewards like badges, positions on leaderboards, and on-going discounts. This makes the process more effective and this is supported by a recent research:

Interpret’s New Media Measure™ data highlights the power of the gamification paradigm showing that a gamer is 20% more likely to be an online shopper than the average non-gamer and 50% more likely to be an influencer among his or her friends. The report further found that “shopping-gamers” are 70% more likely than the general population to buy within a gamified environment.

Can you please illustrate with an example?

What people can expect from PriceShred.com is exemplified by our landing page. Traditional landing pages have a blurb and an email submission form. But our landing page is radically different. Keeping with the PriceShred.com’s intended image of a easy, convenient and super fun way of buying and selling online, it has a fun and addictive game called “Kill the Bill”. The score of our users in the game gives them a discount on our listings when we launch. This gives our users a compelling reason to actually engage with PriceShred.com even before we launch. The game also makes it amply clear that PriceShred.com is going to help you shred the price you pay for stuff. The game helps in associating less price with the name PriceShred.com, which is our intention with the landing page.

How has the response for KillBill been?

In four days, we have had more than 1050 visits, more than 2100 page views, and more than 250 people have signed up to know more. We have also managed to get, at last count, 141 Facebook fans already.

Are you looking at fund-raising? What are your immediate plans at PriceShred.com?

We are looking to raise $1M in the next round. Our immediate targets are hiring people and scaling up the team, setting up the tech infrastructure, and investing in establishing a logistics/supply chain support structure. So we will be investing money on these.

What is your projected revenue for this year?

Our basic revenue model will be to charge a commission from the seller for each product sold through the website. As such, we project revenues of approximately INR 1.1 crores in the first year, with rapid growth fore-casted for the 2nd and 3rd years. We realise that this is a miniscule percentage of the INR 2700 crore e-Tailing market in India, but we hope to make rapid strides in the coming years.

Kill some bills at: www.priceshred.com and let us know your experiences by writing to us at [email protected]