Why d2i ?
“You love to do the things, which add purpose to your passion”
Why d2i? This was definitely not the first question when we planned to create d2i. It got its purpose with time.
Initially it was fuelled by our passion in the fields of EAT, DO (hobby ideas) & VISIT. d2i just provided purpose to our passion, and that’s why we love it !
And as the significance in the name “Doors to India” suggests, we wanted our users to enter and explore the many facets of India in terms of EAT, DO (hobby ideas) & VISIT.
There are many web portals, which offer information on eateries; in fact whenever I try to search or Google for eateries in Pune or Delhi, the search results upto the 3rd page end up displaying results and reference to another portal.
It implies that there were at least 30 portals offering infotainment services and the results definitely surprised me. But there were two things which surprised (read disappointed) me even more; first, the fact that almost all of them had more or less same & very limited info; and second, all or most of them had info either of only eateries or of everything in the world, from real estate to insurance product. It’s like over 30 portals which are mere classified or yellow pages but claiming themselves to be infotainment.
You could blame it on our (my fellow founders/thinkers & I) disappointment with ‘this too little info in too diversified a sector’, that compelled us to visualise a true infotainment portal. We didn’t want to try to be
next Google local or plain Just Dial of the world.
So that’s how the concept of a dedicated portal limiting to EAT, DO and VISIT segment in a city was born, with a vision to offer detailed information of the `places to EAT’, `things to DO’ and `places to VISIT’ in a city, without the malaise of the info being stale &/or unverified, as was our experience with the existing portals.
We conceptualised a portal which could provide verified & interesting info on all sorts of ethical entertainment in a city. And Yes, the data was to be supported with images and more importantly, reviewed by experts ! This, along with interesting facts in form of articles & inside stories; events and offering of the places or venue, was to add value to the users.
When this idea germinated way back in 2008, we started to build a structure, classifying the category for EAT, DO & VISIT and portal’s offering, etc. The biggest challenge was, of course, Data collection.
Our experience was that most data/info on the net was either limited or stale and also skipped most small but interesting joints. So we evolved a multi-pronged strategy for data assimilation – from trawling through the net as well as out-sourcing the data collection to a competitive agency, to ground surveys & visiting the venues, and ultimately managing the whole activity by our own.
It surely took a few hit and trials before we gradually developed a process of fast & efficient collection & verification of data.
Going by the spirit of high speed parallel computing, we simultaneously burnt a lot of midnight oil (more likely to be many precious units of electricity !) to work on the design of our infotainment portal and it was only after 7th version that we actually got convinced to start coding.
There were multiple rounds of discussion, debate and also pressure from other stake holders of d2i, but end product didn’t satisfy us and thus, we put off the launch.
In fact, we developed the whole portal and scrapped it totally not once, but three times and finally it was 10th internal version which was launched released on 1st April ’10 ! Now, who would select such a date for the launch ?! Passion driven Entrepreneurs are fools, so we choose 1st April or `Fools Day’ to launch `Doors to India’ the portal with Pune.
And being proud & patriotic Indians, we added Delhi/NCR to an improved version of d2i on 15th August’10, India’s Independence Day.
Our next target is to add the happening cities of Mumbai, Goa, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, & Bangalore by March’11.
But once again we are not jumping the gun and not rushing to create quantity. Our prime focus is to achieve a high level of satisfaction in d2i and its content. We need to first to establish d2i as a truely infotainment portal, which was what we had set out to create !
The feedback that we are getting from our users, not just those who are clicking & exploring d2i but also from those who have actually visited the joints & places listed in our pages, is what keeps us motivated !!
We see no point in getting into a race to max the number of cities on our portal. We are sure that with time, our passion -coupled with the unique Indian spirit of our users in exploring new ideas , will help to answer why d2i ?
“This blog was originally published in blog.d2i.in in mid 2010; republishing here with permission from D2i team”
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