eChai Showcase - 11Beep
Here is the insightful and candid conversation with Bimal Maharjan, CEO, 11Beep. Bimal breathes, eats, sleeps, talks (and whatever else he could possibly do) about start ups. He loves the process of product design and development. For last couple of years he has lived in 3 countries. India, where he worked with Infosys. Nepal, where he started on his entrepreneurial ventures and turned into a start up yogi, and Italy, where participated an accelerator program, Techpeaks and co founded a start up. Don't be surprised if he recommends you a book to read when you talk to him.
How did you come up with the idea of '11Beep' ?
connecting the 3 dots
Competitive analysis: We have been trying to do a startup in the blog aggregation space. So I had already studied about the machine learning usages, semantic analysis usage and how machine can actually make use of data. I was doing a competitive analysis. For that I analyzed the social media feeds of the competitors, I could find out so many things about them by doing a simple analysis in the excel sheet.
Personal social sharing: This led me to think about why i do not share anything political, honest opinions and several other ideas which could be really personal. I realized that i am scared of people snooping my data and making judgement on me. and i only wanted to make good image of me. I always got annoyed about that i am just using the current tools to share good things, braggable things and things which i could only get support from. Until this point, i didn’t know could solve this self censoring problem which would allow me publicly broadcast my every possible thoughts without worrying about future.
Read about snapchat and hatching twitter: it was 3rd quarter of 2013, i was reading hatching twitter and also about ephemeral tech. Suddenly, all of these dots connected. hence started thinking about the idea and product in more detail.
What problem are you solving?
Let me share with you one of our users shared with us.
“so the existing social networks we have like facebook, i have 3 major problems with them,
- I fear people judging me so I have to censor myself when writing something there, I fear I am being used as a product
- The machine learning algorithm at facebook is parsing every word that i write to find me a possible ad suitor.
- The government and a lot of other people are snooping my traffic.
11beep solves all 3 problems. But the thing is like when I post something in facebook, and if I don't like it, I have the option of deleting it. Its not really like tattoo...The only thing is, its troublesome and sometimes embarrassing to delete what you wrote. People will be like - "he just deleted what he posted yesterday". With 11beep you don't have to worry about it...the beep melts on its own”
This is exactly what we are trying to solve.
How does it work?
There are few important things. You can post your status. ( we call beeps in 11Beep). While beeping you can select how long you want the status to last, you can choose to be anonymous and you can choose the audience( public or all your connected friends or your selected friends). Then, your beeps will be visible for that period of the time to the people you selected. People would never know that it is you who beeped if it beeped anonymously.
You can use #hashtag functionality to beep for a certain topic.
The unique ness about the product is about the user control in three important aspects of a social network.
- control over time to self delete your beeps
- control over your identity. you can really easily beep anonymously
- control over your audience
Therefore, you can beep whatever you want without worrying too much about the future and without fear of judgement from anybody.
This video very well explains who 11Beep works :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds8pYD52u9w
What is your target market?
We want to focus on the Indian sub continent market. we are starting from Nepal. We want to expand to India.
What is your competitive advantage?
There are few things:
Understanding of the market. We are team of those, who are avid user of social networks to who are living life reclusive life from social networks by understanding the evil of current networks.
Our team:
We have a team who understands the need of the product. Because we are building this we want to use this.
We have a team member who deleted all the social networks accounts because he felt the current social networks didn’t add value to the real conversation about the real topics.
We have a team member who can quickly build products.
Our product is unique.
It is about convergence of ephemerality, real identity, anonymity and privacy control to the user.
We are really proud of even the back end technology stack we have developed. The way ephemerality and anonymity work is simply cool.
How much time did it take you from conceptualization of '11Beep' to actually launching it in the market ?
Actually, we had to progress of testing of the products. From the day we started working on, we released the web version with the name “babblr.com” in two weeks. After launching we realized that in the web version, true ephemerality is not possible then we took down the web version and then we started working on the web. Then we started working on the android app. We released the app in the 2 months. It was really basic. After that our developers left.
Then we took around 6 months to build the team. After the team is build we released the private alpha of the product within 3 months. We took 2 more months to iterate on. And we are still iterating.
We have not released the iOS app just yet.
Tell us more about your team?
Bimal Maharjan ( Co founder and CEO)
He is a hustler, product manager and the idea man. He understands business, technology and design from his more than half a decade working experience with startups and big companies. He has grown mature with the failures from his previous two start ups.
Ankur Sharma( Co founder and UX design)
He is a UX designer and director at boutique designstudio, expresivstudios. He has been support from the beginning of the 11Beep. He has experience working with media, non profits and collaborating with MIT media labs and google.
Swapnil Acharya( UI design)
He is a UI designer and direct at expresiv studios. He has been support from the beginning. He has experience working in the Nepali Movie Industry. He is the guy who revolutionized the trend of movie poster design.
Santosh Dhakal( Android app developer)
He has one of the pro android developers in Nepal. He has been working with android app development for silicon valley start ups for years now.
Diwaker Ghimire ( Full stack backend developer)
He is a python ninja. He has been hacking more than a decade as technical architect and programmer. He has interest on security, algorithms and cryptography.
What is your technology stack?
We are available in android app.
For back end we use: python programming language, we use pyramid framework, for database we use postgres json data. We use the right mix of RDBMS and No SQL.
How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?
We need to be more creative on marketing our product. As we have zero budget to work on marketing. Right now we are relying on word of mouth. It is increasingly difficult to acquire users. Therefore, we are relying the blogs and other mechanisms.
We are in Nepal, so we go to events to recruit users. However, Nepal is the not innovator markets. We are finding it difficult to penetrate.
Therefore, with help of blogs and prominent media platforms in India we want to acquire users.
Ideally, we want to travel to universities/colleges/events recruit the users. It is unfortunate that we can’t invest on money physical travel.
We are contacting those who write about privacy, ephemerality and anonymity to write about our product.
We are trying to get into facebook groups for confessions, anonymous. For example: every university and every companies have confessions groups. I think with 11Beep, it would be a lot easier to share opinions.
What is the revenue model of '11Beep' ?
For this we have to work on. We have been so focused on validating the value to the users. We want to focus all our energy on product validation, iteration and user acquisition.
We have subscription model on our mind. Right now, it is pretty premature to think about that model. Because it does not make sense without a huge critical mass.
We do not want to make money out of advertisement. However, we may go into loyalty platform business for location based impulse buying. This business model needs to validated once we have a huge critical mass. This should happen in 3-4 years from now.
What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?
Our vision “ to build a platform where people can enjoy uninhibited freedom of expression”. People need to share their opinion fearlessly. We want to remove the need to self censor which came to people due to fear of future repercussions of their opinion.
What sort of support and feedback are you looking ?
We would love the community to:
- use the product
- talk about the product
- give feedback on the product
- introduce to investors who are interested to invest on social consumer product.
- suggest marketing channels and strategy
You can download the 11Beep app from play store : 11Beep on Android
