Peter Pham, VP of Business Development over at Photobucket(acquired by FIM last May) has resigned to head up a new company, BillShrink, as CEO.
BillShrink, which has been in development for the past seven months and largely under the radar, will launch in a couple of weeks with the aim of helping users save money. Its strategy lies in suggesting better service packages for select verticals, starting with cellular phone plans.
Consumers will answer a set of cell phone service-related questions and optionally submit their wireless account username and password. The service will then extract your usage habits, assess your answers, and suggest an optimal set of wireless package configurations from the wide range of plans and add-ons that providers offer. This Orbitz-like result set can be tweaked by changing your preferences, for example, in favor of more coverage over lower prices.
Much of BillShrink’s power will come from its web scraping and normalization engine that will gather and make sense of the deals provided by the various cellular providers. The company aims to improve on suggestion services like LowerMyBills by moving beyond comparison grids and making clear suggestions that have been generated by the analysis of many factors.
BillShrink will eventually move into other verticals, such as credit cards and insurance plans, with the end goal of becoming a destination that consumers can trust and return to frequently for spending advice. The company will primarily generate revenue from lead generation, similarly to Mint.
Schwark Satyavolu and Samir Kothari co-founded BillShrink, which has taken funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.
I love it. Why not get suggestions on the best plans…. many people are unable to digest the different plans with different carriers and just settle anyways…. same applies to insurance and the like…. and after all if that is one less thing that you have to worry about then it’s a valuable service….
Good luck to Peter Pham, savings and planned industrial investments are important for economic growth. I like the concept applied to save money.
nice idea, but if you want an iPhone for example you do not have many opportunities i´d say.
Yapta’s done a good job with saving on booked air fares by checking for daily price drops. It makes sense that this model could be extended to other domains. Clearly there’s a gap for cell phones where no one can track all cellular plan options as new deals are introduced from month to month.
Peter’s developed great relationships with all the Web 2.0 company in the Bay Area and beyond. I wish them good luck!
considering lowermybills got a 330MM exit, this is probably a good idea.
Decent idea, not sure this is the right guy to run things. He forgets that Photobucket was a mini-bubble buy that had little to do with Peter Pham. He may not realize that.
hey thats a great concept. good luck Peter
Good luck Peter.
–Anish
http://codingweb.blogspot.com
India already has a web service similar to this called http://www.yourbillbuddy.com for quite sometime. The user can export his/her bill, they will analyze it and recommend you the best plan. Its a new service and is still evolving but their recommendations are really good.
Going vertical will open new door hopefully.
Peter Pham is a tremendous guy and great entrepreneur. I wish him the best of luck!
Brad Hunstable
http://www.hunstable.com
Congratulations Peter!
Easy target: these people should immediate partner w/ ConEd in the northeast to help consumers navigate through the utter confusion that is “poweryourway.com” In the deregulated energy markets, consumers are asked to use alternate suppliers but the process is awful.
Low hanging fruit!
Lowermybills started out doing the same thing but ended up switching to generating leads for mortgage lenders when they realized there was no money to be made in lowering cellphone and utility bills.
By the time they got acquired they were generating 99% of their revenue from mortgage leads and only managed to sell out so high because of the housing bubble.
Congrats Peter! All my support – with you, this is going to be a total success!
Peter, Schwark and Samir — great team and good guys. This looks promising. Good luck guys.
Very needed service. Good luck Peter.
Great idea – Congrats Peter!
Peter will know how to focus and execute – something a lot of startups are lacking. I think he’ll be a great asset to this kind of company…..
It’s pretty bizarre to state that he had nothing to do with the success of Photobucket – he helped drive a lot of revenue to the company, and provided strategic and execution guidance. Proof is the pudding – Alex (CEO) promoted him.
Congrats to Peter – love the concept. I hope Billshrink will also identify those pesky/sneaky termination fees and let you know about those hidden taxes/surcharges!
Peter, who’ll do your bizdev with you running the show?
Good luck to you and BillShrink
There are successful services like this already in europe. in spain we have http://www.doctorsim.com which from what i’ve read is doing pretty well. they say to have savings of 2million euros in a few months…i think this is low for market size of 50million phone lines but there is big potential..
Online comparison sites are not new in europe. we also have hipotecagratis.com form mortgage comparison which is quite succesful.
revenue models however are complicated when it comes to selling savings..
Marcos
Good luck Peter! I look forward to checking out the new site. Best // Michael
http://michael-...n.stunmedia.com
Congrats Peter on this exciting new venture! BillShrink looks like a relevant and timely tool as the economy forces more people to scrutinize their bills and improve their domestic bottom line in the midst of dizzying arrays of pricing schemas.
To the person who was asking for a place to buy cheap china flights, I’ve been booking my flights from http://www.bamboobookings.com for the past 3 years that I’ve been living in China and have had great reliability. Other companies end up never booking what I want and I end up wasting time and money going to the airports.