askLaila is one of the few startups who have managed to build a balance between speed and perfection – they have mainly grown by WoM (i.e. word of mouth) and have pretty much defined the distribution strateg
y for other local search services to follow (for instance, DTH).
We will be interviewing the team and thought, why not collect questions from you as well (credits shared) – after all, we are more about community.
So here is your chance to know the secret sauce – if you would like to ask them questions related to product, entrepreneurship, founding team, shoot them here, mail us (ashish @ pluGGd.in) or tweet us.
hi
is asklaila a profitable venture? If they can share the avenues of how they make money and the potential growth.
akshat
Do you think mobile application for local search in India is important?
when are you planning to sell the company
How is the SMS uptake? Also, would be great if they share some DTH numbers.
Monetization strategy – they need to rope in small advertisers. So are they launching their own version of adwords? or will hire tons of sales guys to go after advertisers?
What are the plans for starting in other cities.
Q1. What kind of traffic do they see from Airtel for local search?
Q2. The new feature launch for user to get business to call you for your query (i.e. online lead generation for retailers) – how is it different from what sulekha or justdial does?
Q3. One of the best things that asklaila offers is its quality search (technology) – how many direct hits and searches per user do they see i.e. user stickiness?
Q4. Why cant a new local search player, put 10 guys in office and start copying asklaila data. How do you protect your data?
Q5. All articles on asklaila are sponsored. is it just for SEO and attract traffic from other search engines, apart from some value add to the user? How is it different from getting paid reviews in place?
@nitin 4 Q2.
I am wondering why they need to do it differently if the existing things work properly. A feature should solve a business problem rather than just being a cool new toy.
Alok – what you said is what I want to hear from asklaila. The intent of the question is to confirm whether they have anything different in mind. And as a follow up question, I would have liked to ask why do they think it will work if Sulekha is loosing revenues on this front and according to several people, JD is still bleeding. Does it make sense for a 3rd entrant – are there enough paying merchants?
The big question is how to revolutionize the Local Search in India so that every end user gets to use it and the business pays for it