HonestCollars, a place to discover the best domestic, was founded by Nischay Nahata and Rajat Garodia earlier this year. They help the users discover the right helpers around them for their daily needs. HonestCollarshas its headquarters in Bangalore, India and they have recently launched an Android app for their service.

Nischay Nahata completed engineeting in Information Technology in the year 2013 from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka.

In an exclusive interview with CrazyEngineers.com, we got Nischay to talk about his experiences at HonestCollars, his educational and professional background, how he got in touch with Rajat Garodia - his co-founder at HonestCollars, the customer base for HonestCollars and marketing strategies and a lot more. Nischay also discusses about how to generate revenue and the expansion plans of HonestCollars. Read on!

Rajat Garodia (left) and Nischay Nahata

CE:  Hi Nischay. Could you tell our readers something about HonestCollars that is still unknown?

Nischay: I think engineers would be most interested to know the technology behind our site. Our website is based on the MediaWiki platform (software behind Wikipedia) and uses custom extensions like SemanticMediaWiki, etc. Therefore we are about 99% open source ?

CE:  Could you tell us a bit more about your educational and professional background?

Nischay: I did my undergraduate from NITK Surathkal, where I studied IT (which is same as CS ?).

I worked with Wikipedia for about 8 months part time while in college after that I have worked at Akamai Technologies.

CE:  How did you get in touch with Rajat Garodia, your co-founder at HonestCollars?

Nischay: Rajat and I studied together in school and have been good friends since then.

CE:  How big is the customer base for HonestCollars? How do you plan to advertise it?

Nischay: The customer base for us are the city dwellers who have a hard time managing their work and personal life. Our aim is to make their life easier by minimizing the time spend on hiring and working with helpers for day to day activities. Currently we are only relying on word of mouth to reach out to everyone which works very well for a startup like ours.

CE:  What would you prefer - a free trip or money? Why?

Nischay: I would definitely prefer a free trip. Money is temporary, experience is permanent.

CE:  If you could do anything you wanted right now, what would it be? Why?

Nischay:

I guess I am already doing what I want to, startup.

CE: How does your business generate revenue? What are your expansion plans?

Nischay: Currently we aren't generating revenues, we are trying to solve a problem first. We want to cover all of Bangalore in coming months and soon start in other cities.

CE: What is your biggest success up until now? How far  you set targets for yourself?

Nischay: Our success is users saying they are happy to use our service. Every response to our survey has been positive and encouraging with requests to cover more areas and categories. Collecting profiles of helpers is our biggest challenge and we set daily and weekly targets on the number of people we get onboard.

CE: What according to you is the one thing that should be taught in school that is not already?

Nischay: I think colleges should teach about open source.

CE:  Thank you for your time. Any message for our readers?

Nischay: Please try using HonestCollars for your needs and do tell your friends about it. Also do reach out to us if you have any thoughts, we are always happy to talk to people.