What does local search in India  mean? How are Indian startups and companies addressing local search issue in India? We turned to engineer-turned-entrepreneur Anand Morzaria of tolmolbol (in beta), a Hyderabad-based startup. We wanted to find out how his company is addressing the local search business opportunity in India. Prior to founding tolmolbol, Anand and other co-founders founded Pennywise Solutions. So, tolmolbol is not their first business venture. Anand also shares his thoughts on the challenges of nurturing a startup in India.

KB:How did you up come with the name tolmolbol?

Anand:TolMolBol comes from the Hindi catchphrase Tol Mol Ke Bol. Translated, it means weigh, value and speak and it connotes voicing a carefully considered opinion. TolMolBol.com is powered by the community and customer reviews and experiences constitute an important element of the product. Since our goal is to help millions of Indians like us find dependable information about our cities, we felt the name tolmolbol fits the bill.

KB: What does tolmolbol do? 

Anand: TolMolBol is your friendly neighborhood guide. As a city portal, we help you find local service providers across a whole range of service categories be it a hospital, a restaurant, a dance school or any other business. Apart from local search for peer-reviewed businesses, we provide the residents of scores of Indian cities a forum to ask questions, share experiences, write reviews, post classifieds, discover events and connect to people in their locality. We also have maps marking local businesses in Hyderabad and Chennai with more cities scheduled to follow suit.

KB: What is your business model?

Anand: The revenue model is primarily based on providing sponsored listings as well as paid tools for business owners. Similar to Googles Sponsored Results model, businesses pay to be featured prominently in a box specifically meant for paid results. We are also exploring other proven models such as cost per customer lead and cost per customer acquisition. Needless to say, for the non-business users, all of the features will be free.

KB: How do you slot or label yourself? Are you a local search startup or a follow a hybrid model? What are the Web 2.0 features that you have incorporated?

Anand: We slot ourselves as a city guide portal. This by definition includes local search for businesses as one of the various offerings. The Indian market is quite unlike the US, where you have mature or successful products in specific verticals like CraigsList in classifieds, Yelp and City Search in the local social search space, Yahoo Answers in the question and answers domain and so on. Therefore, we looked at the bigger opportunity in India to solve problems at a city level. Rather than requiring users to make investments across portals for different local needs, we wanted to build a complete neighborhood guide on the web. In terms of web 2.0 features, we allow our users to discover relevant information posted by their friends or peers. We can do this because tolmolbol has a social network using which we can leverage the social graph of connected users.

KB: What are the pain points you are trying to solves or address?

Anand: We built tolmolbol.com because we found it difficult to use the internet to find information about our cities. Lets say, for example, you are looking for a new house in your city. On tolmolbol, you could ask others in your city ask for advice on the Bol forum and invite the community to share their experiences. You could also search for those service providers, say, real estate agents, that your friends have reviewed. Or you could write your own customer feedback about businesses youve interacted with. Alternately, you could search for classified ads or post your own free ad or two. Apart from all of this, if you are looking for something fun to do, you could also discover events in your city or even connect with interesting people in your city through a local social network. In one line, we help you connect with your neighbors as well as help you find a whole lot of information about your city.

KB: Who is your competition?

Anand: Because we are in an interesting space of providing users with local information, there are certain overlaps between our product and VC-backed companies like Sulekha, Guruji and JustDial. From a larger perspective, even biggies like Google, Yahoo and AOL are our competitors. Apart from this, there are few more competing products in specific spaces like classifieds, question-and-answer forums, reviews, events and not to forget, social networking.

KB: What are some of the unexpected challenges you have encountered in building this startup?

Anand: Pennywise started four years ago as a product company developing fleet management software in partnership with a US based company. However, after a few months, despite our best efforts, this partnership was shelved. So, rather than quit and go back to our previous jobs, we decided to evolve into an IT services company. Those initial days were particularly challenging as we were pretty new to running a company on our own. Another unexpected challenge we encountered was figuring out how to take legal recourse in matters such as non-payment of service fees when our clients are based abroad. One of the lessons weve learnt from running our company is that you encounter challenges on a daily basis. The best thing to do is to start expecting and preparing for them.

KB: Did it help financially that you had access to capital through your company Pennywise Solutions? What was the bigger challenge capital or finding people or getting your product right?

Anand: From the perspective of being able to fund product development all by ourselves, having a steady cash flow from the IT services business of Pennywise does help. I would also say that weve been lucky to have a great team. And in my opinion, great teams can get your product right. The big challenge for us has been in building an India-centric sales and marketing team around our product as this is a relatively new experience for us.

KB: How conducive is Hyderabad to do a startup when compared to Bangalore or Mumbai? What are the advantages that Hyderabad has over the other two cities?

Anand: There was a recent World Bank report that stated Hyderabad outperforms other Indian cities when it comes to the ease of doing business. From my personal experience, I would tend to affirm that statement. Hyderabad is a good, if not better alternative than Bangalore or Mumbai. The infrastructure costs are lower, the real estate cheaper (in comparison with the other metros), resource availability is a big plus, the government is approachable on IT- related matters, the traffic situation is better (although degrading) and most of all you can get good Hyderabadi biryani and cheap buffets even after 12:00 midnight at various locations in the city.

KB: Do you think working in startups means diminishing returns for those who work there?  What are your thoughts on this?

Anand: In terms of monetary returns alone, working in an Indian startup does involve a fair amount of risk. Fat or regular pay check does have its value in the Indian marriage market as well as in an individuals ability to support his or her family. I would say being in your early twenties is also the right time to do something because you can pretty much keep your costs low by living like a college student. That said, money is not the only criterion to measure returns from working in a startup. Regardless of the measure of financial success, an entrepreneurial venture always provides a lot of learning and experience that is quite priceless.

KB: Who is your role model? Why did you all decide to turn entrepreneurs?

Anand: I draw a lot of inspiration from Dhirubhai Ambani and Kishore Biyani. As for the chief reasons for all of us becoming entrepreneurs, we would pick two. The first is our collective dream of coming together and building a successful business. The second is creating an opportunity for ourselves to go beyond our individual limits in terms of imagining the future, exploring the unknown, facing challenges, learning from them and growing as individuals.