Personal Finance Startup, Zibika shuts shop
Started by IIM alumnus, Zibika was focused on insurance space (earlier coverage) and had tie ups with Swiss-based VIG Insurance brokers, ICICI Lombard, Future Generali, Reliance Life and Bharti AXA insurance.![logo[1]](http://www.pluggd.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/logo1.png "logo[1]"){kind=logo}
The startup, owing to financial issues (lack of funding, it seems) has shut shop.
This is what the homepage reads:
—
Dear Zibika Users,
On account of financial issues, we regret to announce that Zibika.com will be offline on an indefinite basis.
Under more conducive market conditions, we intend to make a comeback and serve you fully online to meet your insurance and banking needs.
With Regards
Vivek Doraiswami, CEO
on behalf of
The Zibika Leadership Team
—
Hat tip
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
I would never buy a financial service online, so would most of friends, in-spite of being in higher income groups, financial services are still best consumed through word of mouth
@ Gowthaman
Any particular reason why not online?
your last coverage of them was in may 09…closing down in less than a year…that is sad…not a shortage of funds…shortage of ideas.
@ Rohit,
Shortage of funds as well. Zibika was going primarily B2C. Funds are of prime importance, when the product/service is nascent and the distribution medium (online) not very popular. Unless it goes viral.
going into a business without planning for even a year sounds immature to me. Irony is these same guys will now go join some large corporates and harass small entrepreneurs like me with their demands for documentations, projections, 3 year diagrams and shit
whenever we approach them for a joint project…
believe me i understand their pain, just too difficult for me to sympathize with IIM trained mbas…
@ Rohit
Interesting ‘expected fallout’ you have stated.
Would rather not generalize and stereotype the IIM trained MBA’s
btw, what business are you in / starting ?
I had written this earlier on a comment in your blog only that india is a different market.People are afraid to transaction online, people are afraid to read their financial info online.
Only pure opensource solution or paid solution with Support and proper Ad system will work.The solution should run from the owners machine.
Checkout this product http://www.letthebucksgrow.com.Its an opensource personal finance tool.
Regards
Rajat
Quite unfortunate. It is true that the market of online financial solutions is still native, and needs a few more years to mature and convince the customer, and needless to say that would mean deep pockets.
WEll.. for me the real fear of people is that people do maintain bank accounts in major national and international banks, but coming to this type of online financial services companies, people fear of providing there complete financial details to company
Because a person can have 1 crore but he cant put that 1 crore amount details before a company. there might be some amount white and some amount black ( which is not taxable ) so how many people can tend towards to put all documents before a company to provide them a financial plan??
Let me know your views
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
[...] Personal Finance Startup, Zibika shuts shop [...]
I happen to chance upon some of these guys and the CEO was a real idiot..I am not surprised at all