How many times do bachelors move home every year? And every new job in a new city means new place to live and hours of precious time wasted going block to block looking for a decent place. Well, not anymore. 
HostelSearch.in is a hostel and PG search engine targeted towards towards students and entry level professionals. There has been effort in making the site go beyond usual listings based classifieds. Features like search by distance from particular landmark, search by rent range, search on map, sorting by popularity, rent, name, ratings and also availability status. All this does give the site an edge over the larger competitors. The site is rich in data with rent of the hostel, pictures of the hostel, video of the hostels, facilities provided, room description with its photographs, reviews, location on map and online booking as well. Generally the kind of details one would find for hotel booking. The startup does solve a major pain point and the move beyond the usual classifieds site is promising. A little more UI cleanup and attention to SEO can make it click. Here’s what the 22 yr old founder has to say: 1. How do you collect data? We have a team of marketing and sales executives who goes to hostels/PG and collect data from them. 2. What is the revenue model? Apart from the advertisements we take some listing charges from the hostel/PG owners. The listing charges are nominal which starts from Rs. 999/ annum for the complete details. 3. How do you tend to compete with large sites like sulekha, JD etc.
- Our USP is the detailed information that we give. JD or sulekha doesn’t give the informations like Pictures, Videos, Facilities etc. and the cost we are taking from the property owners is also comparatively lower than JD or sulekha premium listing.
- We also don’t take any brokerage charges from the owners or the users. Sulekha sometimes hides the contact numbers.
- We also make sure that the information given on our website are updated. The mobile numbers, phone numbers , facilities are updated when there are any changes to them. A team is dedicated for this purpose only.
- We would soon be targeting not only hostels but any rental property like Paying guest, studio apartment, service apartment , rooms etc.
Do give HostelSearch a dekho and let us know what you think.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
