Renomania was founded in September 2015 by Architect couple Ritu and Navneet Malhotra who have 26 years of experience behind them and Rahul Lodha, the technology spearhead and ex-VP technology at 99acres. The startup is based out of New Delhi.
Team BWDisrupt Interacts With Ritu Malhotra, Co-founder, Renomania And Spoke To HerWhat is your product or service / offerings to customer?Renomania is an online platform that helps homeowners discover a million new ways to make their homes more beautiful. We have built the largest catalogue of beautiful Indian homes, helping homeowners get ideas and inspiration for designing everything from a room or a corner to an entire house. It also helps homeowners convert their inspired vision into reality, by connecting them with an ever-growing community of millions of other homeowners, interior designers, architects, contractors and product providers across the country. Whether you’re looking to renovate a room or a corner or an entire home, Renomania is everything you need to create a beautiful home. Get inspired by over 70,000 high-resolution inspiring photos of home interiors that you can browse, save and share. Connect with over a 2000-member strong verified active professional community, from architects and contractors to designers and more, who can make your dream home a reality.
What were the challenges you faced while setting up the business?Most professionals in the industry have not documented their work and are offline. It took a lot of research and work to track all the architects in the country, reach out to them and explain how Renomania would actually prove to be beneficial for them. We hired photographers who documented the homes for these professionals across geographies. To get access of thousands of designers and create a library of curated high definition pictures of real Indian homes was a big challenge. But, this challenge has actually turned into an opportunity as we are building up this asset at great speed and of course our content is not copied and is our copyright.
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To build a discovery platform is a challenge in itself. There is a lot of back end coding that is required to be done in order to give the best experience to the user. When we started, we knew that we want to be a platform where users can search for anything related to homes and the search results they get are most relevant. Tagging and associating relevant and multiple keywords for each picture has been a task, something we knew will pay off well and it did!
Who are your competitors?Anyone or everyone in the Home space is our competitor - The old players with miniscule traffic like Zingyhomes, Urbanhomez or Nestopia alongwith large Furniture sellers like Urbanladder, Livspace and Pepperfry.
How is your business model different from the existing ones?Home owners are always on a lookout for ideas and inspirations to make their homes more beautiful. Our idea is to provide them with these ideas through relevant and curated content.
Most other players in the home sector are in the transaction space or in the home service space. These platforms are transaction oriented. We are into the business of selling ideas. It is a community of homeowners and professionals where they can easily discover each other and interact. It is not a usual eCommerce website that sells furniture or a readymade look. It aims at attempting to maintain the fun and ease factor in homebuilding and home décor experience and take away the hassles that come with it. It is helping people ‘discover’ – the kind of house they’d like to live in and the professionals they would like to work with.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?Any homeowner who needs inspiration for decorating, renovating or building their home, a room in their home or maybe just a corner of their home is our client. In this aspect we have a large audience base and thus there is a huge scope for growth and expansion.
We are coming up with a mobile application for both Android and iOS users which will increase the accessibility of the content that we aim to reach out to as large an audience as possible. We also noticed that our blogs had actually turned into a communication platform where homeowners and professionals were interacting with each other sharing their problems, finding solutions and getting new ideas. Hence, we decided to come up with a discussion platform on our website where we would encourage such discussions to help the users.
The best and worst memories while setting up …When we started, digital platforms were a new territory for us. While we were sure about the need for the content we were providing, we were not sure about how intensively would we be able to reach the audiences. in this regard, our social media growth in just a couple of months of starting up has been one of our best memories. It was a big boost for the entire team as we relied exclusively on content and our reach was mostly organic! We used social media marketing (particularly Facebook) to gain a lead over our competitors (who have been around for years). We achieved over 300,000 monthly unique visitors and an Alexa rank of low 4,000s in just four months after our launch. We are growing our monthly uniques at 50% month on month. Our Facebook page has over a lakh like most of which are organic.
Your Marketing Plans so that world know you ..At the moment we are focusing on the mobile application and the discussion forum as discussed above.
What’s your plans for funding?We don’t have a plan formalized yet but we are not averse to funding. We would like to invite investment which would add strategic value to the company.
How do you monetize?Lead generation, Ad Sales, Native Advertising, Content Marketing, Affiliate marketing.
What is the next big thing in pipeline?We have just launched a mobile application for
Android and
iOS which is a very big step towards expansion.
What is the market size and market opportunity?The digital world is booming by the hour and everyone is perpetually connected to social media. This change has automatically resulted in the boom of the online home décor market as well. People go online for everything nowadays, whether it is to buy a product or to get ideas. We notice an increase in adoption of online purchasing by a younger audience. Statistically, Home interior is a $20 billion market currently and the growth options are immense.
