Founders of eTechies.in
December 21, 2012
By V. Ganesh
How many times have you fought with a schizophrenic computer, only to lose the battle due to lack of tech support? In Bangalore, employees in red and white t-shirts can be seen resolving laptops complaints of every stripe.
eTechies.in, launched in April 2010 by Rohit Chaudhry (CEO), Siddharth Bhatia (COO) and Samarth Goyal (CTO), aspires to organize a disorganized market where small shops provide such services. All a user needs to do i s make a phone call or send an online request for assistance.
A much needed 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 transparent 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 adds.
Dishonesty and overall lack of integrity in the form of data leakage and fake parts are common in most of the small shops. The eTechies solution focuses on providing genuine parts and protecting user data.
To understand why Chaudhary is gung ho about his business, one can look at the laptop sales in India. It is estimated that in FY 2011-12, there are an estimated 7 million laptops in India, according to MAIT. 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 realized that while everyone wants to make 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 rise to the PC tech support and repair services concept branded as eTechies.
Initial challenges
One of the problems faced by eTechies was the cost of setting up this kind of business. Bad infrastructure, lack of availability of skilled staff in the earlier stages of growth and reasonable means to deliver the services and products were some of the problems faced by the company.
“Moreover, handling customers can be a tough task at times and services as a business is not well-understood,” says Chaudhary.
“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 adds.
Funding
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. “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 adds.
Lessons learned
As an entrepreneur, things are not as easy as they appear, 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,” says Chaudhary.
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.
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