Big Decisions steps in to help users with making financial decisions
Manish Shah and Gaurav Roy are an experienced duo. Manish has been with the Citigroup for more than 10 years in the US and India in the unsecured lending, wealth management and mortgage businesses, while Gaurav is a technologist with experience across management consulting, software development, corporate M&A and private equity. From their experience in the financial space, both of them realized the potential of a tool that can help people make financial decisions.The launch
Joining forces, the duo started working on the product in January this year and came up with an MVP which they soft-launched in July. "We came out with this product but weren't really satisfied so went back to the drawing board and built it up from scratch," says Manish. Hiring four more people in various domains, the first stable version of Big Decisions was launched in September. This version has got good reception and sees more than 2,500 users on a monthly basis.
More about the product
Big Decision has built decision tools which help customers make smarter and more informed financial decisions regardless of whether buying directly or through a financial advisor. They have tools for five segments as of now - Retirement, Education, Rent or Buy, Life Insurance and Health Insurance. "We believe that all decision making should start with the right set of questions being asked of the consumer. Product choices should be based on the outcome/ answers. We have applied this approach to the important financial decisions in your life," says Manish.
I gave the 'Life Insurance' tool a spin and it was a pretty smooth experience where after putting in some information about my personality and financials, I was given a diagnosis from where I could go on and buy what was necessary.
"We are not someone who is looking for the user to put in their email id and contact details and then bombard them with things to buy. We just want to make the buying decision more comfortable and users would buy only if they feel compelled enough," says Manish. For insurances, Big Decisions has tied up with Policy Bazaar and similarly, they have deals with other companies to provide the financial asset to the user.
These tie ups are one part of the revenue model and the other is a long term play wherein Big Decisions will have the patterns in buying behaviour that can be used to apply in other scenarios.
Marketing and the road ahead
A small lean team, Big Decisions is bootstrapped and is in a game where the tools will have to reach as many users as possible. "Spreading out the word individually is obviously not the way to get large adoption. Our final consumer is an individual but we intend to go the B2B2C way," says Manish about scaling. Big Decisions has gone through one complete iteration cycle and the duo is satisfied with the current product on which they'll keep making improvements to make it more useful.
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