Blessy Mathew Prasad finds how faayda.com's founder Prashant Parikh is trying to get students to not be broke all the time
It's not very often that you have a name for the idea before the idea itself. But that's how Prashant Parikh's faayda.com came into existence. He registered faayda.com about seven years ago, and only after that did he start thinking of a concept that would do suit the name. Faayda.com is an app that lets users (mostly students) manage their finances by giving them complete information on what they are spending their money on. It also sends out alerts when bills are due.
Prashant believes that financial management is a crucial skill that students need to master, which is unfortunately not taught in either schools or colleges. "Small financial decisions taken early on in your life can entirely change the course of your financial future. Since students don’t think too far ahead, the Faayda App can help them keep a track of where they are spending and on what and then can help them make small financial decisions which can better their lives."
Eventually, what inspired the idea was Prashant's own experience during his time spent at DePaul University in Chicago where he majored in Finance. "I learnt ‘financial management’ in the true sense of the word only outside the university. When you come from a middle class family and have very limited resources to manage your daily activities, you have to think on a very micro level about how you can make every penny count. There have been many days where I have survived the entire day on $3 which is the cost of a Cappuccino at Starbucks," he recalls. Every startup has a struggle, especially when it is bootstrapped. Talking about his initial days, Prashant says, "I was almost breaking even but did not have much money to grow and advertise. For a couple of years, I concentrated on making the website very user friendly and so I constantly made changes to better the user experience — like optimising the website for search engines so that faayda would rank in the top 5 of some highly sought after keywords. It took about 2 years of doing this and then the clients started coming," Some of Faayda's competitors are MoneyView, Gullak App and Walnut App, all of which have been launched before Faayda, but Prashant is 'ready to take on the competition'.
"The response has been wonderful so far, we are still testing the app with beta testers and getting feedback on how we can make it better," he adds. Prashant's goal for faayda is for it to be known in the financial space as Naukri.com is known for jobs and Shaadi.com is known for matrimonials. "Faayda.com is one of the most able domain in the financial space and with an amazing app being created, the future looks bright," says Prashant confidently.