Amit Jain: The New Shark In The Tank The new addition to the Shark Tank India Judges' team is Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of CarDekho.

The new addition to the Shark Tank India Judges' team is Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of CarDekho. The IIT Delhi alumni's start up story began in 2006 when he and his brother, Anurag Jain, converted their garage into an office and started their software outsourcing company, called GirnarSoft.

The scorpio brothers, both born on November 12, had worked in Texas, US and then in Bangalore. And it wasn't as if they had struck gold at the first go, along the way there were a few bumps too. Of the multiple ideas they came up with at first, many failed. Their shot at taking their father's gem stone business online didn't work out. Similarly another one on astrology services (their grandfather being an astrologer) eventually wasn't a favourite since they didn't want to give people advice on life decisions based on fractional knowledge.

In 2008, while touring the Auto Expo in New Delhi, the brothers got the idea for CarDekho, a portal where people could come and find information and reviews of cars before buying them. The company, currently valued at $1.2 billion, was completely different from most other start-ups in one major way. They became super successful, without any advertising. "We knew how to get traffic through content, while most other people spend on marketing. For the first seven years we did not spend a single rupee on marketing. We didn't make any accounts on Facebook, Google or Instagram, neither did we do any brand advertising. Our content was our marketing strategy," says Jain.

They figured that what the customer wants is an unbiased website which gives an understanding of what would be the ideal buy for them. So they invested completely on their content team and cracked the SEO code. If you ever search for a car on Google, CarDekho comes right on top. The marriage of technology product with search engine optimization turned out to be a winner. Then they continued to do natural extensions around the customer, like connecting the dealers with the customers and went on to create a marketplace which dealt the finance and insurance of the used cars. Their lending platform is called Rupyy and the insurance platform is InsuranceDekho. Part of it involved hiring and training people who would be selling the insurance, and the stupendous success speaks through their impressive numbers. The insurance vertical does a premium of 200 crores per month, with 70,000 agents across India who cover 93 per cent of the pin codes.

But how did this car behemoth fit into the role of a Shark Tank India judge? "In the 15 years of being in business, for seven years we were bootstrapped, so I have an excellent understanding of how to run a business from scratch," Jain told us. His experience has taught him what needs to be prioritised and how to lessen customer acquisition cost.