Agony aunt for your computer

How many times have you been in a situation where your computer developed a snag and you wished for technical assistance right then and there? In Bangalore, employees in red and white t-shirts can be seen resolving your laptops complaints- whatever be the make. eTechies.in, launched in April 2010 by Rohit Chaudhry (CEO), Siddharth Bhatia (COO) and Samarth Goyal (CTO) can be called the Cartridgeworld (a company that sells printer cartridge refills regardless of its brand) of the computer world.

While the service itself is not new, eTechies.in aspires to organise a disorganised market, where small shops provide the same service. Services differentiation is what the companies markets as its key USP.

All a user needs to do is to make a phone call or request for help online.

Need for the business

“Most tech support does not offer any guarantee of the authenticity of the parts, or whether your problem will get resolved successfully. There is a lack of trust and therefore people are not ready to give their products for a day or two for repair,” asserts Chaudhary.

eTechies.in sees an opportunity here to deal with the customers in a detailed manner . This includes details such as the contract and login that is provided to them. “To help the users know the status of their requests, we have a real-time tracking mechanism that furnishes all the required information on our website,” he says.

Issues of data leakage and using fake parts are common in most of the small shops. Chaudhary’s company focuses on providing genuine parts and make sure that the users’ data are not misused.

To understand why Chaudhary is gung ho about his business, one can look at the laptop landscape sales in India. It is estimated that in FY 2011-12, there are an estimated 7 million laptops in India, according to MAIT. Even though it is small when compared to the 850 million mobile phones, with tablets and Ultrabooks coming into the market, the company sees a lot of scope for repairing old devices.

Although bigger companies have their own support IT departments, an individual or a SoHo cannot afford such an expense. Towards the close of 2009, Chaudhary realised that while everyone is focused on making a quick buck off the US consumer market, there was no focus towards the Indian consumer market, specifically the huge out-of-warranty support market. This gave birth to the PC tech support and repair services concept branded as eTechies.

Initial Challenges

One of the problems faced by eTechies was cost of setting up a business of this kind. “The cost is very prohibitive and coupled with poor infrastructure, lack of availability of skilled staff in the earlier stages of the growth and reasonable means to deliver the services and products were some of the issues faced by the company.

As like other startups, getting talent was an additional problem. “Getting good people has been a challenge for us.” One of the issues raised by him is the lack of basic facilities for incubating businesses like his. “Moreover, handling customers can be a tough task at times and services as a business is not well-understood,” he said.

“Almost anything that we attempt doing is a challenge; be it getting across to the customers with a value proposition or eventually acquiring them,” he says.

Raising money

The company recently raised $2 million from Inventus Capital in funding. Its idea has been backed by the likes of Rajan Anandan, head of Google India, who invested in the company back in October 2010. Others include investors like Kanwal Rekhi, John Dougery Jr., Samir Kumar and Parag Dhol from Inventus Capital Partners.

The company that offers on-call and subscription-based technology support for consumers and SMEs, wants to expand its services pan-India with the investment. The investment by Inventus is mainly going into hiring people, setting up infrastructure in new sites and marketing activities, explains Chaudhary.

"Also, with this funding, we intend to go ahead with team-building, develop marketing campaigns. We need to hire professionals for that,” he says.

Learnings

As an entrepreneur, it is not as easy and comfortable as it may seem to others from the outside and trying to create value has its own sets of challenges. "Our biggest learning has been that all plans don’t work exactly like you planned. Thus, you need to be nimble, ready to change and open to new learning,” he says.

The company plans to expand to the top 12 cities of India by March 2013 with a target of 1,500 small and medium businesses.

venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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