Faagio is a hyperlocal discovery platform that caters to four lifestyle categories, namely Shopping, Restaurants, Automobiles and Beauty & Wellness. It is a user experience website wherein a user can look up detailed information about the outlets listed with in Delhi and NCR. It is also a rating and reviewing platform, where one can share their views, experiences and suggestions about the outlets of their choice.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Tarun Bhargava, Co-founder & CEO, Faagio And Spoke To HimHow It All Started:Faagio, a hyperlocal search engine, was a concept born out of a fruitless shopping expedition made on a typical Delhi summer noon. The founders, two Delhi graduates - Tarun Bhargava and Arnav Vashistha were in the pursuit of locating a certain Tommy Hilfiger store in a posh market place, which according to Google, was supposed to be in the area, but upon reaching the said location they found an outlet that catered to an entirely different clientele altogether.
Later, the duo mused over the incident, and realised that very often many retail outlets lack a mention on online portals, be it details about the outlet, reviews about their merchandise or just directions to the place. This was especially prominent for smaller businesses in the lifestyle sector, making it difficult for them to reach out to their customers in the digital age. While bigger brands have an online existence, smaller brands are still struggling with the digital revolution and its consequent effects. Hence, the conception of Faagio.
Key Features:What makes Faagio an inimitable proposition is the way they’ve gone about their listing process. Not only have they listed the bigger and more well-known brands, but they’ve also listed the smaller and more obscure vendors found along the back lanes of Delhi NCR markets. Even though there are a lot of small scale outlets in Delhi and its outskirts that provide great service and are run by talented and creative people they lack recognition; getting them their due credit is one very important aspect of Faagio.
However, their unique selling point is the fact that they’ve housed four major categories in the sphere of lifestyle, under one name. Making it easier for users to locate, review, compare and select their destinations. The aim is to be a one stop solution for all lifestyle problems, hence the tagline “Decisions Simplified”.
Milestones:Although it has only been a year since Faagio started, they’ve listed more than 12000 outlets in Delhi and NCR, catered more than 300 internships to college students, reached 5000 people through Facebook and launched a website. The website was launched in the first week of February 2016 and has more than 2700 registered users, with 4000 people visiting every month. The company has also recently launched their iOS and android apps that have over 2000 downloads. This is one start-up that is not leaving anything to chance.
Competitors:Some names that come to mind are Zomato, FoodPanda, Cardekho.com, Zakoopi and Purpelle.
Zomato, possibly being the biggest, considering they started and maintained Food Outlet listings along with introducing a reviewing platform in India. So, technically Faagio is competing with 5 different start-ups in four different sectors.
“There are five different platforms, with 5 different websites and 5 different applications. That’s the idea here. You download one app or open one website and you search for anything under the sun in any of those four categories. Though right now we’re mainly focussing on the Shopping Sector as that’s the bigger and relatively unexplored market.”
Challenges:Coming up with a user friendly website and mobile applications. Outsourcing of the Tech team and the ultimate consequences of that decision. Delay in the website launch, leading to the delay of the android and iOs applications. “Outsourcing my tech team was not one of the best decisions I made, it becomes easy for people to fool you when you don’t have knowledge about something, I soon realised that the technical aspect of my business is indispensable and I started educating myself as much as I could, and soon enough we had our own in-house tech team.”, said Tarun
Retention of Interns at high prices for quality work. Constantly looking for and maintaining relations with clients. “Customer acquisition is something that almost all the start-ups face, it’s a constant process, not a phase, and it’s something one should never put on hold. Our start-up works on an internship model and initially, it was difficult to make the interns believe in our start-up. We had to pay heavily to our interns to get quality work done but once we had some recognition, our problem was solved and we now have an extremely diligent and passionate team.”
Future Plans and Funding:When asked about their intentions to extend to other cities, “Well that’s the plan. There’s a huge untapped market out there. There over 225,000 possible outlets that we can add to our database.”
“We see Faagio incorporating a few more categories such as Hospitals and Schools because we believe that in order to succeed, we must continue expanding as well as evolving ourselves. The business was started with our own investment and have not received any funding as yet. Failures of other successful startups have made it difficult for us to get funded. In this case it becomes even more difficult for us to beat our competitors but once we do get the funding, we’ll take Faagio to the next level.” elaborated Tarun.
So, the next time you’ve got a flat tire or a mechanical failure in unfamiliar area, don’t know which salon to use or what spa treatment to book; or simply want to try out that shop your friend was talking about but don’t know the address try looking them up on Faagio, their endless lists and comprehensive details might just surprise you
The Market Size:The market size that Faagio is targeting amounts close to 60,000 lifestyle destinations in Delhi and NCR alone. With over 30,000 Shopping Outlets, 10,000 Restaurants, 10,000 Automobile Outlets and over 7000 Beauty and Wellness Hubs.
