We need a Social Angieslist for India

Angieslist of India. A problem awaiting true disruption!

   

 I had moved from NYC to Chennai with my wife and 6m infant. Chennai was the place I had spent 22 years. My mom/dad and few friends were there. Thought the move would be easy with friends and Parents around. Unfortunately my friends were busy and had spread across different parts of the world/country over time. My mom/dad and relatives totally had different preferences. They were more cost conscious while I was more quality conscious. I would any day trade-off price over peace-of-mind and dependability.

Thus, for me logistics of moving translated into few of the below incidents: (just quoting a few)

1. Finding a good rental home, close to my parent’s place. Which inturn meant, reaching to Sulekha.com or finding trusted-Rental Brokers. I ended up just asking the road-side-shop-owners who doubled as brokers and just had to trust them with no option. Atleast having Sulekha-ads was a definite savior.

2. Finding an Invertor and Water-Purifier Company as electricity-shortage and water-problems were acute in chennai. This inturn meant asking around and looking at THE HINDU classifieds and JUST-DIAL. Both gave a list of providers, whom i could hardly trust.  I ended up just randomly going with one vendor and till this day regret for having done business with him. The product was of bad quality and the problem aggravated due to false-promises and bad customer-support. The vendor would hardly care to respond or rectify the issue as all he cared was to sell it and forget the customer.

3. Finding a good BabySitter or Maid and Cook, Finding a car-driver — No online option existed that I could trust. This time, I did not want to play with the plain Justdial approach; I ended up finding someone just by asking friends and co-workers but with a month of asking around.

4. Finding a trustable-knowledged Paediatrician and Gynaecologist — Asking around friends, co-workers, and family over many days and narrowing down to 1 or 2 did the trick. But still wished I had more time to ask around more co-workers and my contacts, those with similar profile and preferences. I knew there would be someone who would know and who would be in a similar boat to help me… Unfortunately I had only limited time and went with half-researched-solution.

And the list of such incidents is long! All this made the relocation tremendously painful. I wish there was a magic wand, which had said, X and Y are the trusted Service Provider/Business for the needs i have, among my circle of Friends/Co-Workers/Family/Neighbors who share similar preferences as mine.

An eye-opener on this problem is that, I was not ALONE! And it was definitely not limited to RELOCATION.

Every week, i get atleast 1 request from a co-worker or a friend or a neighbor asking me to REFER him/her to a business i trusted .  Because life throws at us so many newer situations and problems for which we seek a SERVICE PROVIDER or a BUSINESS to help us and we are set on a path of researching and finding them.

Some recent referral requests from my friend/co-workers:

  1. A Dentist for my colleague’s brother
  2. A Dance class Tutor for one of my friend’s 4 year old girl
  3. A Personal trainer for a colleaue,
  4. A Business-Card printing vendor, an office-rental-space-broker, a corporate-lawyer and a tax-planner for a friend who was starting-up,
  5. An Event-Planner/Magician and a Party Hall for my colleague’s kid’s first Birthday party.

In all these cases, they reached me not because they could not find someone online. They did have a long list of businesses/service-providers from the local-search-websites, but it was the question of TRUST, PEACE-OF-MIND and quick DECISION MAKING. More importantly it was also about the question of SUITABILITY and PREFERENCES match.

There is no doubt that the problem of discovering and deciding on right local-business or service is severe pain; more severe in Indian ecosystem with unorganized service sector, no customer-accountability-system and little to no trustable online presence.

Good thing is that the local-search-solutions like Justdial, Google-places,  Asklaila,  Getit, Sulekha and others have at least made a start:

  1. Have provided online presence for these local-businesses
  2. Have made them searchable(over phone, web) &
  3. Have crowd-sourced reviews/ratings around them

I feel the true break-through and pain-killer for this Problem will only happen when local search engines make it possible to not only search and list but help users discover and decide on the right business instantly. In my view such a solution has to revolve around a Social Angieslist - A PERSONALIZED CURATION of the ServiceProvider/Business list from these listing sites combined with the natural phenomenon of how we go about self-curating the information from friends and colleagues to add the trust layer.

Simply put: From the list that Just-Dial and Google-Places generates, effortlessly narrow down to those whom I can trust and those who are suited to my preferences’.

This is the exact premise, with which we at TURING Research are trying to build FRILP – Friends Help!

After all, there are much better things to do in life than worry about and working with painful service-providers/businesses. After all we dont need 100 choices and 50 reviews, we simply need that 1 or 2 names who made our friends/co-workers happy which kind of guarantees the TRUST and SUITABILITY elements and gives us much better level of confidence to make that quick decision. Will FRILP be able to help users discover & decide on that 1 or 2 Providers/Businesses with minimal effort is something to wait-n-watch.

 

Other interesting read on this:

1. Another person who faced similar issues when moving from Boston to Bangalore [ Link ]

2. Comprehensive view of TRUSTED SOCIAL Recommendations Space [Link]

3. Social Reviews and Ratings [Link]

4. Why current ratings and reviews Suck and How to Save Them [Link]

5. How Big is this problem – 150 lakh Searches per month measured using JustDial 2011 Numbers [Link]

About Shyam Anandaraman

Shyam is the Co-Founder of Frilp and currently takes care of product design and other open challenges at frilp.

  • ksenthil

    Hey good article man.

  • Dhanya Sridharan

    Wow… So much detail as to what the use cases of frilip is , explained with your own experience. Introduce an “Ask Frilip Buddies” Mobile App and facilitate all of the above more simple! Kudos to the team!

  • Shyam Anandaraman

    @dhanyasridharan:disqus - thanks for the nice words. One minor correction its Frilp not Frilip. This is just the truth and reason which motivated us to start Frilp. So the write-up is not made to fit the Frilp use-cases..but Frilp is made to support the use-cases that existed in our lives when we had to find services/businesses which we can trust.

    Regarding the Mobile app, We definitely want to do that, its just a matter of time before we get there.

  • Brian Miller

    You are right, this is a huge need and here in Austin I get requests all the time, via email forums and Facebook, for referrals (I relocated here 7 years ago and am always looking for recommended providers myself as well). So it’s a big need here in the US and I’m sure everywhere else. Frilp is going to be huge because of the need, and I know Senthil so that means you also have the right team to suceed! Best wishes.

  • Guest

    @disqus_LkRrIu6faV:disqus - thanks for sharing those thoughts. Infact this is not about just US or India, it is the nature of human beings that we have been over years and years relied on word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources to simplify our decision making. It is just that the tools have changed to ask and exchange this data….earlier it was via phones and in-person… later it was via emails, yahoo-groups….now it is via facebook-groups, whatsapp, texts…and this behavior we believe is always going to continue however much crowd-sourced-review-ratings are provided for local-business-listing. Our efforts in frilp is to aid this natural human instinct with a slightly intelligent tool which can get the job done faster and much efficient. Will strive our best to make frilp much better in the coming months using feedbacks from users like you and others who would love such a tool… Your encouragement will go a long way, thanks for your nice words, do keep using frilp and letting us know what you would want in frilp as a user who asks and shares referrals of local-businesses.

  • Shyam Anandaraman

    @disqus_LkRrIu6faV:disqus - thanks for sharing those thoughts. Infact this is not about just US or India, it is the nature of human beings that we have been over years and years relied on word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources to simplify our decision making. It is just that the tools have changed to ask and exchange this data….earlier it was via phones and in-person… later it was via emails, yahoo-groups….now it is via facebook-groups, whatsapp, texts…and this behavior we believe is always going to continue however much crowd-sourced-review-ratings are provided for local-business-listing. Our efforts in frilp is to aid this natural human instinct with a slightly intelligent tool which can get the job done faster and much efficient. Will strive our best to make frilp much better in the coming months using feedbacks from users like you and others who would love such a tool… Your encouragement will go a long way, thanks for your nice words, do keep using frilp and letting us know what you would want in frilp as a user who asks and shares referrals of local-businesses.

  • ksenthil

    @disqus_LkRrIu6faV:disqus , Thanks for your support. We have been hearing from many people about this discovery problem and that has been one of our biggest motivation as well. We will keep you posted on the progress. Do keep giving your feedback and we will keep you posted on the development. Do pass on my regards to other of our friends as well!

  • Saravanan G Rajasekaran

    Wow!! I just read your article and you have covered most of the problem which I faced last 9 months for my new house set-up. Still lot of things needs to be done but I keep postponing just because I didn’t get a proper person to do business with. It is not about losing money, for me always losing peace of mind. Frilp is a very good initiative and I love to refer some of the services which it worked in right at the first time. Our people are always try to do right at the first time. I believe Frilp will help lot of people/friends to do it “FIRST TIME RIGHT”. All the best.

  • Shyam Anandaraman

    @saravanangrajasekaran:disqus - You right said…in our generation of internet savvy slightly quality conscious crowd…weightage for PEACE OF MIND is high and COST of choosing a wrong person is just too prohibitive. Hence many people take lot of time to figure out the right vendors, right shops, right services.. those who can’t wait….many a times end up having really bad experience but they grow wiser and make minimal mistakes in next time choosing but still all the work they do to find someone good and trustable never percolates to their kins and good friends…that is what we are trying to achieve via Frilp…the good shops, good service providers and trustable customer-service oriented busienss owners however small or boutique they may be must get visibility and have an awesome opportunity to spread their good work.. to a whole lot of new friends and colleagues of their happy customer.. We have a really long way to go, but good wishes from people like you will keep our fire glowing…and make us give our best to keep delivering real value to users from day 1…wait for our september launch and feel free to spread the word about frilp asking your friends to nominate such trustable businesses and services happily on frilp so their peers can discover it when they need it ..and the good deed will stay forever.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDkWaeqTls recycling certain

    Hi there, I check your blogs regularly. Your writing style is witty, keep doing
    what you’re doing!

  • Abhishek Bindal

    @shyamanandaraman:disqus : this was such an insightful article. I have not used Frilp but really liked the angle which would help the consumers to make a decision.
    Can you tell me do, you provide any ratings to the services provided by the service provider based on the user experience with that Vendor. Also when are you people planning to expand it to other cities of India?