Simply, sweetly

Peacefulness follows once you've chosen a telecom service, even if it's the wrong one, to parody an American activist. For zeroing in on one among the myriad offerings from the legions of service providers is no small task.

Indian consumers seem resigned to the bemusing telecom tariff plans. But only till they've travelled abroad — after the shock of high rates, they are awed by the simplicity of offerings outside.

It was this awesomeness that convinced Ankit Chhajer and Jigar Doshi to leave their jobs at UBS and Amazon in the US, and work out a product that would help Indians trawl for a telecom plan best suited to them.

So a little more than a year ago, the two friends came back to Chennai and started Cheeni Labs that recently launched 3Gsimplified to help consumers do that “simply and sweetly”, as they put it.

Once you feed the usage data in the search engine on the Web site in orange, grey and white – www.3gsimplified.com – it gives you a list comparing 3G offerings in a region.

You need to have a rough guess of minutes/seconds you use, how much you download, etc. The duo says 3Gsimplified will help you make the most of a plan, instead of hopping from one to another to cut costs, making it easier to choose without being daunted by a telecom company's intricate brochure. If you find even this list tasking, then you can go by the Web site's recommendation: the best plan in a region and from a company are marked by a sash. Or go to the small colourful graph that throws up pointers on plans in a price range as you move along it. This is why, they say, the company's Web site claims that their product will make you go “sweet”; hence the name Cheeni, Hindi for sugar.

The germ of Cheeni Labs was laid when Ankit and Jigar first met at tuition in Chennai, in class eleven. That they wanted to be their own bosses was clear to them even then. But it was not until both went to the US – to study for two years, and then to work for three-four years — that they worked out what business they were cut out for. While working, they realised they wanted to start an IT-based consumer service. Besides discussing ideas with friends, they started thinking about how to tap their workplaces for support or inspiration.

Jigar says one lesson he learned at Amazon is the importance of being frugal — both as a business man and a consumer. The other idea that both of them swear by, and which they think Indian businesses haven't yet understood, is how much a consumer values simplicity. That mobile tariffs are the lowest in India is nothing but a marketing sham, they say. What companies offer here are complicated bundles — different charges for local, STD or ISD messages/calls, higher rates on ‘blackout days' (generally festivals and holidays), scores of plans to reduce your tariffs, etc.

You lose track of your spending in such labyrinthine tariff structure and end up paying more than, say, an American would in a month despite offerings being priced steeply there. For most of the companies have uniform rates there, making it easier for you to manage costs.

Also, finding a plan best suited to you is difficult from the company's brochure or Web site. For instance, during the test for internship at Cheeni, the 11 applicants were asked to find out the cheapest STD plan for calls within the network on a leading player's Web site. They came up with three answers.

Once 3Gsimplified was ready, they decided to piggyback on the launch of 3G services, and launched it around a month ago, even as they keep working on it. Within the first two weeks, people from 56 cities in India “responded”.

Being a “start up in stealth”, they didn't want to talk much about their product before the launch, so they depended largely on word of mouth, online tech forums, Facebook, Twitter and Google's Buzz for marketing.

Soon, they plan to offer similar sorting services for 2G, portability and direct-to-home.

But though the site is helpful and has a great interface, won't consumers find it irksome to feed in all that usage data?

Their response is, “to meet the need of prepaid users in specific, we have added a price filter on the results page where he/she can set an upper/lower price band and know his plan top-up options.

A prepaid user can choose to recharge for Rs 500 but end up paying Re 1 per call when he could add a simple top-up to reduce his call-rate to 50p per call. Budget helps him contain his monthly bill and our price filter helps him choose the best plan-top-up combination for that budget.”

But where's the dough in it? With a little reluctance, they reveal it will be something like how the Web sites selling flight tickets make money: you could buy plans and top-ups straight from the site.

What about documentation? They are talking to telecom companies so that someone could come to your place for that, they say, this time with more unwillingness.

What is puzzling is that they haven't come out with a similar mobile app yet, given that most 3G users are more likely to go online through their mobiles than through personal computers.

vipul.v@thehindu.co.in

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