Imitation Games: Coverfox Vs PolicyBazaar

I’m the first employee of Coverfox — An insurance broking platform based out of Mumbai, India.

If you have ever tried to purchase insurance online in India, you would know that I do not exaggerate when I say that it’s one of the most exhausting experiences one can have. The websites remind you of the times when Yahoo Chat groups were a rage. You would rather listen to 10 hrs of Rebecca Black singing “Friday” than speak 10 minutes with one of their Insurance agents. And if you want to understand what you are buying, a five page document full of technical jargons, will be shoved at your face.

We saw this as a problem we could solve with good design, and technology.

Starting out in the online Insurance Broker/Aggregator space, our biggest competitor was PolicyBazaar. It’s a 7+ year old company that has set the standards for selling insurance online in India. It is a giant corporation with big name investors backing them up, and a solid revenue channel too.

Credit goes to them for starting out and fighting their way to set up an Insurance aggregator platform at a time when the inertia was too damn high for the Insurance firms to take the online market space seriously.

Unfortunately though, they ignored the customers in the process. I was a Policy Bazaar customer till we started Coverfox, because they were the best in the business. But even the “best” made it mandatory for me to give them my phone number before I could see my buying options. The “best” had its insurance agents call me 6 times a day, pushing sale down my throat. Finally, I’d had enough when they called me 3 times to sell me a policy after I purchased a policy from them, because apparently they didn’t have a centralised database.

It were these practices, that gave us faith that we could take on a giant like that with a team of four, working out of my apartment. For us, these weren’t even problems to be solved. These were just bad practices to avoid.

Even before we raised funds, we had invested in good design. We debated for hours over how we can make every tiny feature more useful. How can we cater to both segments of our target group of customers — One who wanted a quick and easy purchase, and the other who wanted a detailed understanding of what they were buying.

We started off with Health Insurance product on our website and the beta release looked like this:

Following The Lean Startup mantra — Design and functionality wise this was just an MVP that we released . It was well received by our customers and other Insurance firms we had ties with. Everyone hailed it as a fresh new approach to the Indian insurance space.

Apparently, our biggest competitor PolicyBazaar was quite a fan of our design too. For two months later, they came up with this on their website:

It’s still running on their website under the “Ask Terry” section.

With the above design concept and a solid business plan in place, we raised funds from Accel Ventures and Saif Partners. With their backing we had resources to improve upon the product. We had complete overhauls of existing product and also launched new ones on our website.

A few months back, we launched Car Insurance product. I don’t have to write much to lay out what happened next. This image should suffice -

And if you struggle to spot a resemblance there, here’s how overlays on both the websites look like -

They didn’t even bother write their own messaging when they were copying ours. So much so, they copied the errors we had made on our end too.

Thankfully, we have already moved on to much sleeker and more intuitive design, which in give or take another month, I’m sure PolicyBazaar would again copy.

They say — Imitation is the best form of Flattery. We at Coverfox, truly are flattered. There are days when the new hires of our team feel intimidated about how we hope to defeat a giant like PolicyBazaar. For when we try to explain what we do to a stranger — half way through, most respond with — “Oh, so you are sort of like PolicyBazaar?” That’s the kind of brand recall they have.

But when they stoop so low, as to blatantly rip off our design, or resort to cheap marketing gimmicks like this one —

it helps us a lot to inspire our young team. To show them how afraid the competition is of us, and how rapidly we are changing the landscape of Indian insurance industry.

Here’s what our Head of Design had to say about the design rip-offs on his Facebook account-

It’s a bit flattering when your biggest competitor starts blatantly copying your UI and user flow (among other things). But then its also a little sad. With such uninspired competitors the game gets boring very quick. Fortunately we have plenty of other problems to solve in the insurance industry (apart from UI/UX), some of which they helped create and I am glad we are off to a great start. Our product has miles to go and so do our services, and its again reassuring that PolicyBazaar is looking up to us and following close behind. Together we will clean this mess for everyone.

P.S. The second image is laughably damning. They copied our old discounts popup verbatim, along with the mistakes and the text. We have since reviewed and corrected our mistakes, but they are still making them.

He is a bigger man than I am, for my knee jerk reaction was to be super pissed. But on some level, I understand and agree to his sentiment. Every Batman needs a Joker, every Bellerophon a Chimera, and every David a Goliath. Right now, the way PolicyBazaar is fighting back — they resemble more of a nagging little brother, who just keeps on repeating what you say, in an effort to irritate you. Certainly not worthy of being an arch-nemesis.

On the other hand, I quite appreciate how BankBazaar is taking a different approach UI/UX wise in an effort to give better experience to their customers. I still think we are doing a better job in design, but I can’t help but throw them a hat-tip for doing something interesting and innovative.

I guess, I’ll look to them for seeking a worthy nemesis, than PolicyBazaar. The way PolicyBazaar is acting… to me, they have already lost.