Renjith from Search Indie: “There is no authentic Indian Restaurant in Sweden”
Indian restaurants in Sweden seems to be popping up everywhere nowadays. I caught up with Renjith, the man behind Search Indie with the aim to bring true indie experience to Sweden.
Renjith is from Kerala, India and currently works for Scania. The last ten years he has been employed by several of the major IT companies both in Sweden and India, amongst them are Mahinra Satyam, Tata Consultancy Services and IKEA. The idea with Search Indie began in 2011 after Renjith moved from Älmhult to Stockholm:
“In Älmult there is almost no events except some family get-togethers, where as in Stockholm there are lot of Indian Restaurants and events. When we enquired about to our friends we found that there is no common platform to share these events.”
The food culture
Renjith explains that India is such a big country with so many different cultures from North to South, a good directory to find all these various restaruants and events was something that was truly missing.
“When we investigated about the possibility of having a platform, we found numerous forums/Facebook Pages which share information, but in a very un-organized manner. Thus the idea of Search Indie was born. There are some business directories in Sweden and worldwide , say Yelp , Restaurangkartan, Allt om Stockholm to name a few. All these directories has its own advantages and disadvantages since it concentrates mostly on Business Listing.”
“With Search Indie , we are aiming on a platform with both Business Listing, of Restaurants , Shops , Dance Schools or say any Business Organizations related to India and Events which are very important.”
Renjith also launched Search Indie Blogs, a platform where they will tell and share stories about people who does interesting works related to Indian cultures , food , travel , business.
The user base is quite modest as of now, with around 22,000 visitors on the website in last 10 months , however, around 50% of them are returning visitors. The Facebook page is quite active with more than 1500 users.
How to monetize the platform
Regarding monetization, Renjith explains that they are working close with different events to give them better reach and bigger audience.
We have promoted around 150 events in Stockholm in 10 months. Asian Festival 2013 , Stockholm Sangeet Conference 2013 are 2 of the biggest events for which we were working very closely. We also run advertisements in our website for Restaurants , Shops , Events. We hope that our App platform will help us generate more revenue, when we introduce ads in the coming months.
“There is no authentic Indian Restaurant in Sweden”
Search Indie is more than just listing Restaurants, however, Renjith says that there is no authentic Indian Restaurant in Sweden , most of the Restaurants follow the Curry Culture from U.K and Swedish people think that Vandallo or Tikka Masala are the real Indian dishes, which is wrong according to Renjith.
Very lately the new Indian Garden and Liljeholmen, Renjith tasted some good dishes with authentic flavor from India, say Chicken Chettinad and Kerala Fish Tikka.
“There is no authentic Indian Restaurant in Sweden, most of the Restaurants follow the Curry Culture from U.K and Swedish people think that Vandallo or Tikka Masala are the real Indian dishes, which is wrong”
The next step for Search Indie
Renjith is already planning on expanding the operation and they are already available in Netherlands, Finland, Denmark and Norway. They’ve launched their iOS and Android app last month and received a lot of good feedback and are now working on improving both of them.
“In the next coming months we will be launching in more European countries. We are expecting to cover whole Europe by August 2014″
Thank you for your time Renjith!
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