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Interview with Ruban Phukan, co-founder of Indian job portal Bixee

October 21, 2006 · Posted in interview 

Bixee is a vertical search engine for jobs in India. Bixee crawls and provides the user a means to search for jobs posted across all the major job portals and job boards in India.

Bixee was founded by Ruban Phukan and Rajesh Warrier - ex-yahooligans from Bangalore, who now call themselves as RHR Networks Pvt. Ltd. They seem to be dabbling in quite a number of things : * PixRat - Bookmark and Tag Photos from the Web * ApnaMarket - Bangalore Classifieds * QuestionBank - Job Interview Questions and Answers

Here’s an interview with Ruban Phukan about Bixee:

1. Can you tell us more about Bixee ? Also, does “Bixee” signify/mean anything ?
Ruban: Bixee is a job search engine for India. It crawls and indexes jobs from various leading job portals, company websites and newpaper websites and provides an advanced search interface to users to do their research for jobs available in India. It is very similar to a web search engine, just that it indexes jobs instead of webpages. The users can do a search, get the most relevant results from across these various websites with a snippet of the job description and then click on a result title to go to the destination website (job portal, company website etc) where they can view the complete details and also apply for the job.

Regarding the name “Bixee”, we wanted a name that was unique and cool and also easy to remember. The product that we were building was to enable users get the best matching jobs from the “big sea” of the Indian job market. Bixee is phonetically similar to “big sea”.

2. How and when did Bixee originate ? How did you get the concept behind Bixee ?
Ruban: We launched Bixee around the last quarter of 2005. The Indian job market was growing exponentially (it still is). And there were many jobs portals getting launched (there still are). Also the job consultants were coming up with their own websites and the companies were listing jobs on their corporate websites. All these resulted in an increased fragmentation of the online job listings market, making it difficult for a job searcher to keep pace with the new opportunities in the job market.

We wanted to provide the job searchers a unique tool that provides them an aggregated view of jobs available across these various websites. Hence we came up with the concept of a job search engine for India.

3. What audience are you targetting ?
Ruban: Our target audiences are all professionals irrespective of whether they are actively seeking for jobs or not. This is because Bixee is not only a job search engine for the job searchers but also a great tool to research for the new opportunities and demands in the market and also to keep an eye on the growth of the industry in general.

4. What technologies are used on Bixee?
Ruban: In Bixee we use a combination of open source and our proprietary technologies.

5. What is Bixee’s business model ?
Ruban: The primary business model for Bixee is advertisements. We are working on several different models which we would be rolling out soon.

6. How is Bixee doing so far? Job market in India is currently on a roll. Have you been seeing a spike in the user base ? Any new features in the works ?
Ruban: Bixee is doing quite satisfactorily. We have seen a steady growth in our traffic throughout. We are constantly working on improving the coverage of jobs and the relevance of the results to help the job searchers get the best matching jobs. We would also be rolling out several features to aid and improve the overall search experience.

7. What are some of the sites Bixee covers/crawls ?What are some of the most popular job searches ?
Ruban: Bixee covers most of the leading job portals and companies in India.

We get a fairly distributed searches happening on Bixee across various job categories. Most common searches happen for jobs in the technology sector.

8. Any significant milestones / accomplishments so far ?
Ruban: Comprehensiveness is definitely one of the most important milestones for us. We have a very good coverage of jobs in India now.

9. Recently, there were some legal problems related to Bixee’s crawling and deeplinking of other India based job portals. What is the status of those legal problems ? Any changes that you needed to make to Bixee to accomodate the legal bindings ?
Ruban: They have been resolved.

10. Could you tell us more about your team and their roles? Before founding Bixee, what did you guys do in your previous life ?
Ruban: Bixee team now comprises of just the two founders – Rajesh Warrier and Ruban Phukan (that’s me). We were working with Yahoo! prior to starting Bixee.

11. How is your startup being funded so far?
Ruban: As of now we are self-funded.

12. Any known competitors in this space ?
Ruban: Bixee was the first job search engine to launch in India. Our primary competitors in India now are Yahoo! and Rediff who have also launched job search.

13. Do you have any advisors / mentors whom you seek advise about day to day operations or strategy ?
Ruban: We have several advisors and well wishers both in India and abroad, both from the technology and the business arenas, who have been providing us with valuable guidance from time to time. We are currently working on setting up the Board of Advisors and bringing them onboard officially.

14. Where do you see Bixee going forward? How do you plan on accomplishing your goals? Any exit strategy on mind ?
Ruban: The short term goal is definitely to continue to improve the service offered by Bixee and provide the best value to the job searchers in India. We plan to expand the team and continue to innovate and improve on the technology that powers our job search.

We plan to expand our coverage globally in the long term.

15. What are some of the key challenges you face and how do you plan on tackling them?
Ruban: The primary challenges for any web service provider are: user acquisition, retention, engagement and monetization. So far we have been moderately successful with acquisition and retention. But we still have a long way to go. We have some clearly defined plans and strategies for tackling each of these key challenges.

16. If this is your first venture into entrepreneurship,how has the entrepreneurial journey been so far ? What part of entrepreneurship do you love ? What do you hate?
Ruban: Yes, this is our first venture into entrepreneurship. It has been a roller coaster ride with a rich and diverse learning experience. What we love most, is to be able to offer a service to users that help them in their career growth. We hate the small distractions, of various kinds, which of course are quite inevitable while running a business and more so at the early startup stages.

17. Any advice for current/future entrepreneurs?
Ruban: This is something that we religiously follow ourselves – “Great products that cater to urgent needs of consumers, build great businesses”. So focusing on building a great product and solving urgent needs of users will automatically build a great business. And this can only be achieved by thinking like a consumer while building the products.

18. What is your daily schedule like ?
Ruban: We don’t have a fixed schedule. We are still a two person startup and we wear different hats at different times. So our schedule varies much according to the hat that we are wear.

19. How has entrepreneurship affected your lifestyle ?
Ruban: It definitely has affected our lifestyle to a certain extent. We now can’t really tell a weekday from a weekend :-)

20. Anything that you wished, you would have done differently ?
Ruban: Well, there are many things. But this is very nature of entrepreneurship. You experiment a lot. Some experiments go right and others go wrong. For all those that have gone wrong, you always wish that you had done it differently. But the good part is that every failed experiment brings with it a rich learning. And we believe that success that is built on the foundation of experience learnt from failed experiments is much more sustainable and replicable.

21. Any question you may want to answer and no one has asked so far?
Ruban:Q: Which came first – chicken or egg ?
A: Chicken. Do a whois lookup for chicken.com and egg.com and compare the creation dates :-)

That was Ruban Phukan, co-founder of Bixee.com. We wish Ruban and Rajesh good luck with their venture.


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Comments

3 Responses to “Interview with Ruban Phukan, co-founder of Indian job portal Bixee”

  1. suraj kumar sharma on December 30th, 2006 3:11 pm

    Ruban was my one of the best friend and guide before semester exam when we were at REC Surathkal. He had always a passion for opening his own dream company. This guy has vision and never say die attitude and i strongly believe that’s all is required to be successful as an entrepreneur.
    Also he is a great human being and has lots of integrity .I wish him good luck for the path he has chosen. All the best Ruban.

  2. Startup Dunia - Indian startups and Entrepreneurship » Blog Archive » RHR Networks - owners of Bixee, Pixrat acquired !!! on February 24th, 2007 5:01 am

    [...] Here’s my interview with Ruban Phukan, one of the founders of RHR Networks. [...]

  3. mohit batra on April 25th, 2007 5:58 pm

    Bixee has another competitor in Gladoo.com an IT focused job search engine in India.