Just uploaded new website that makes buying decisions for mobiles easy – https://choiceman.in/

By Karan Ahuja on April 22, 2014 11 Comments / 1700 views

Hi guys

I am Karan Ahuja , based in mumbai . I like to code , and dream about making things to solve new problems in the one right way .

Rodinhoods is a great hangout zone for all entrepreneurs . I have learnt a lot and shared little bit earlier on discussions.
Thanks a ton to the creators of this awesome community.
5 years back i had started Kodeplay – an open source consulting company . we did well on some services projects , products and learnt a lot by doing , winning and failing 🙂

The realization to try and change the world , create an impact came about and i started to look for ideas.

A few months back – I was trying to decide about buying a mobile phone for a friend .
Analyzing specs and expert reviews was not at all convenient and i had to browse around for a few hours , watch videos on youtube , reading expert reviews on multiple sites before being able to make a convenient decision .

Also we were interested in data analysis , text processing so we decided to make a solution by mining , aggregating , summarizing specs , expert reviews.

Today we just completed making choiceman to make buying research easy and fun .

The problem we try to solve:

Buying research is not easy and fun today . we need to browse multiple sites to collect , analyze data about product specs , quality , user experience.

Introduction about choiceman:

you can easily compare expert reviews as well as specs of mobiles at one place .

we have collected reviews from multiple expert review sites and have summarized them.
Micro reviews can be posted easily about a mobile phone.

Choiceman – https://choiceman.in/

What do you guys think ?

Your feedback and support will be valuable as we try to iterate , add other product categories like gadgets , apparel , healthy meal plans soon.

Looking forward to hear your experience and improve fast to make buying research easy and fun 🙂

tc , cheers

Karan Ahuja

P.S – please please please give me feedback https://choiceman.in/

you can follow me on @karan_ta

Comments

Karan Ahuja

11 Comments

Ram Shengale April 23, 2014, 4:52 pm

Congrats Karan for your new website. Nice idea and it looks amazing.

I had this idea of a user review site in my mind for quite some time but never really got down to start building it. Now that you DID it, it was a big kick on my butt saying Doing > Thinking. So thanks for motivating me, giving me a push by your story, I should start executing all my plans or skilled developers like you will continue to DO it when I keep on just thinking. 😀
Karan Ahuja April 23, 2014, 5:31 pm

🙂 Ram i keep kicking myself too everyday for not being able to complete stuff and other ideas that i have started …

But patience is the key .

let me share how i am trying desperately to increase my own productivity now :

one of my entrepreneur friend once told me . building banane mai 4 saal lagte hai , aur pehle do saal tak kuch dikhai nahi detaa .
kyon ki foundation ban raha hota hai …

high productivity is an art that needs to be learned (fast :)) . some people like me are not born with it .

I am learning mind control techniques , meditation , yoga , qi-gong , tai chi to increase productivity as well .
i check out steve pavlina blog regularly to increase productivity .

Also read today that a developer is as good as what he uploads on the server .
so we ought to keep uploading stuff , blog regularly no matter how small it may be so that we know what work matters more .

the 80 – 20 rule is well used by many fellow hackers in mumbai and i stumbled upon it in tim ferris book .

you can also subscribe to mumbai tech google group / mumpy group to learn and share tech every sunday once a month – mumpy@googlegroups.com

emacs , discipline , shortcuts while working , automated scripts , multi window screens are good tools .

disable fb , twitter . many users of social end up being their slaves …

all other hackers – what do you guys do to increase productivity ?

cheers

Karan
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal April 24, 2014, 3:45 am

wow! loved the interface

This can be replicated for so many categories?

Ps, when I comment and it asks me for FB authentication, and I reject it, it throws up – https://choiceman.in/facebookhandler/?error=access_denied&error_code=200&error_description=Permissions+error&error_reason=user_denied&state=%2Fapple-iphone-5s-16-gb%2F#_=_
Jayesh Pathade April 26, 2014, 7:32 am

Hi Karan,

Congratulations to you for the wonderful platform you have come up with. I don’t know if this would qualify as a feedback but will go ahead with it.

There is a lot of effort ppl put in when they buy phones. They are happy with the choice for a few days. The problem starts when something better comes up in the market within a few days of them buying. Then they wish “Only if I had waited a few more days, I would have got a better deal or a better phone”. What I mean is that suggesting a buyer to wait a little longer or to go for it based on what is expected to happen in the market would be a USP for your portal.

I had thought about this a few months back but I am a reluctant entrepreneur stuck with the regular job. Hope this is of any help. Would like to hear more about your plans and vision. All the very best.
Karan Ahuja April 26, 2014, 8:58 am

Thanks a million alok sir for your feedback .
The day you gave us feedback – the three of us suddenly started believing more strongly in our work .
Thanks a ton .

we also got other feedback saying that fb is blocked in some offices so they couldnt log in .

so i am now working on this and will upload in a couple of days .

tc , cheers

Karan
Karan Ahuja April 26, 2014, 9:14 am

yes jayesh you have nailed the problem .

What you have mentioned is part of our core usecase .

there is problem of summarizing reviews , specs from multiple sources as well .

then being able to see a holistic summary , personalizing the report to make a decision based on whats important for buyers usage pattern .

Our plans are to build a technology stack so that we can do this across verticals of electronics , healthy meals , apparel , other categories on flipkart , snapdeal .

Finance products category also looks very interesting and an ocean on its own but i need more time to understand how financial decision making works as i do not have the required knowledge today.

we are using tech as the main leverage and trying to build out the following components :
1) a universal scraper – this should be able to scrape all products , features , reviews across sites , product categories .
(so far we have developed it to fetch products across sites , categories)

2) a universal language mapper to match , extract entities such as names , features from any web page – This will map a name of the product on some site to the product in our database . it should also be able to map a feature (example primary camera resolution) to the feature name in our database and also be able to extract the value of that feature .
from a review site – it should be able to figure out the product name present in our database .

3) a universal language summarizer – This should be able to summarize product reviews and associate it to pre created summary / quality features .
concepts of open question answering systems will be very useful in implementing this .

so far we have completed part 1 .

part 2 and 3 are done for few sites and not currently universal in nature and we are working on this .
research papers are a big boon . check out dl.acm.org
may the force be with research scientists 🙂

tc cheers ,

Karan
Jitendra Gursingh April 28, 2014, 3:48 am

Awesome site Karan! The intention behind the site is clear but however, it needs to show up more clearly on the homepage. Only once I go into the product detail page, that I realize the real value of the site. You need to feature the sites from where you are curating reviews & also I hope you dont get into any rights / legal trouble by taking their content?

All the best for your venture..I can see a lot of things you can diversify into & a lot more potential..great start!
Abey John April 28, 2014, 4:16 am

Nice. Still needs work but good start. When I change the phone in the comparison screen and hit enter it doesn’t refresh with the new phone, I need to click the comparison button. What’s your monetization model? Affiliate revenue? Need a buy button to take the visitor to the ordering page on the retailer’s site.
Abey John April 28, 2014, 4:18 am

I get server error 500 too when I try to add a comment and allow for authentication.
Karan Ahuja April 29, 2014, 5:57 am

thanks abey and jitendra for valuable feedback .

we will work on this and update .

(sadly my apartment is having leakage repairs so have to stay home and cant work today 🙁 )

tc cheers

karan
Amar Saurabh May 6, 2014, 2:59 pm

Hi Karan,

Kudos to you and your team for coming up with a solution which most of us face.

But, We already have such portals available ‘https://findyogi.com’ is one of them, there are atleast 5 more such products available . What is your USP, Karan ?