Jeet Singh was the winner of 2 prizes in technical categories during a national competition held in his engineering college. Never did anyone think that one day the same ingenuity that won him awards would translate into entrepreneurship.
He had however already set his sights on his dreams. Jeet Singh recalled his motives saying, “The challenging journey of entrepreneurship inspired me to quit my Infosys job. I took this decision during my college time itself and had tried to quit my BTech degree back then and start a company around a banking product that I developed.”
His entrepreneurial vision came to fruition in 2007 with Matcoms Technologies Pvt Ltd. Jeet told us about his entrepreneurial undertaking saying, “Matcoms focuses on local search market. The company has launched a local search engine Samfra.com providing city search, movie timings, news and events information in around 20 cities for free. The company was established in 2007 with a vision of making finding information about a city easier.”
“The company believes in enhancing the content by partnering with content providers. This ensures the quality of information and reliability of the service. The company has partnered with some companies including a leading yellow pages company for enhancing the city search database.”
Jeet is in no doubt that his enterprise will find its place under the son. He proceeded to plead his case saying “Local search industry has great potential in India. Research shows that more than 60% searches performed on leading Indian web search engines are local in nature. This amount will increase as more people come online and cities expand. So there is a clear opportunity here and we are committed to make a strong position in this segment.”
“Business model revolves mainly around bringing local advertisers online. Apart from this, advertisement in Samfra.com is another opportunity that we are working on. The differentiator of a local search engine lies in the richness of the data. We are focusing on increasing the amount of rich data providing more details, maps, photos and more. Some of these efforts went into making trailers and wallpapers available in movies section for our users.”
Jeet has plans for developing his enterprise further, he told us about it saying “We plan to scale-up by reaching out to more users, expanding to more cities and partnering with more content providers. Addressing the needs of local advertisers in a city is a key challenging issue and needs to be handled before expanding the offline presence of the company.”
Jeet has faced the entrepreneurs’ nightmare too. Being the only one in charge meant that he had to shoulder all the burdens that came their way. However some burdens are heavier than others as he related saying “The biggest challenge so far has been in learning to cut the expenses, keeping the progress up in difficult times and lack of resources. For every startup, the biggest challenge lies in the management of the funds and utilizing its limited resources to maximize the output. We also had to reduce the cost factor by thinking of different ways of doing some costly things, reducing server costs and more.”
The venture got its initial transfusion of lifeblood from the founders who invested the required money. Family and a few friends invested in the venture and got Jeet on the track to success.
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