eChai with Ashvin Savani, Co-founder, Connectly

How did you come up with the idea of 'Your venture' ?

WhatsApp and eChai :-) WhatsApp is so popular that people started finding their own ways to use it to solve their needs. Group communication is one of such case. But we've noticed that it was seriously hurting the user experience when it comes to groups. People spam it with good morning quotes and ads. Very few groups with disciplined protocol like eChai survived from this syndrome. Other important thing we noticed in such Whatsapp / facebook groups was, people just add you in such groups and due to cultural values of India; you simply can't leave it. All these resulted 4 digit unread messages and even with numerous features for custom notifications per group, people started missing important communication in the thunder of other unwanted messages. We also noticed that as group communication was not primary intention of creators of such popular social messaging platforms, they were not focusing much on group communication use case.

What problem are you solving?

We are solving a problem of "Being in touch with like minded people via mobile first approach". We wants to build a messaging platform that focuses on group communication, better members management and most importantly chaos free community. We want to focus on those small but crucial use cases of group communication like on-boarding experience for new group member, more ways to super charge communication like announcements, polls, threaded messages and sub groups within a group to avoid chaos. We kept 3 things as our core focus areas like People, Messages and Engagement. We are trying to solve this problem by keeping user interface similar to existing apps to avoid learning curve and faster on-boarding.

How does it work? 

Basically there are two type of users for our app. Community managers and community members. When someone downloads Connectly, they can either browse through all listed communities by location and interests or they can create their own community. Communities can be open, closed (needs approval to join) or invite only (hidden for people, must be invited to join). Managers can also opt for Joining forms, which members need to fill up at time of joining or requesting the community. It allows to capture specific information related to purpose of the group, validate it before accepting request and then display the same information as part of member profile.

Once you are in the community, depending on how the community is configured by managers. You may have limited ways to express your thoughts by just reacting on communication initiated by managers or you can react as well as post new content that others can react on. Connectly provides lots of ways to express. Everything you find on WhatsApp or Facebook along with new ways to engage the community. We have Announcements, Polls, Events, Rich Posts and Surveys, to ask and obtain real-time responses that we represent in visual form. We also have personal and group bookmarks. That helps members to harvest the knowledge from community engagement for individual or community needs in a categorised manner.

Apart from this, we also believe that there will be always scope that Connectly as a platform, may not address for specific needs of special use cases. To cater that, we opened our platform with APIs and custom module development. Developers can build bots, custom modules for specific needs and integrate Connectly with their existing apps. We also have content bots that can auto-curate content from internet based on certain keywords and hashtags and to pass it to community managers. Managers can review such content and can edit or just pass it to community to start discussions on such engaging topics.

We also have Pro version of the app, where we build separate app for a specific community.

What is your target market?

We target communities or group of people that is larger than 20. We want to begin with India and then we will scale it for global markets. To be more precise, our target market is communities like association of photographers, chamber of commerces or people living in the same apartment etc.,

What is your competitive advantage?

Our competitive advantage is our sharp focus on those small small things, that matters a lot for community. Another advantage we got is the least learning curve required.

How much time did it take you from conceptualization of 'your venture' to actually launching it in the market?

It took around 8 months before we started private beta to selected customers.

Tell us more about your team?

Ashvin Savani is a solo founder. He is having 15+ years in product consulting and running business. We also have a core team of non-founding members. Pritesh Kachhdiya is looking after all the operations and quality of the product. He is having experience of more than 5 years in product management. Jignesh Sanghani is leading our technical team, who is having 3+ years of experience of mobile apps development.

What is your technology stack?

In backend, we are using NodeJS for all the realtime socket communication. We are using PHP for the business logic. For database operations we are using MongoDB, Redis and CouchBase to store messages. We built native Android and iOS apps. Apart from this, we use AngularJS and ViewJS in web version of the platform.

How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?

Strategy is to market and acquire business associations first. They are already looking for such solutions to manage their larger member base. We already started on-boarding some of such customers for private beta. Goal of this strategy is to get bigger chunk of users quickly and users have to stay on the platform as their community is with us. On the other side, we are focusing our efforts to create and engage interest and location based communities and market us as best community management and communication tool via web and social media channels. This will help us to on-board individual users who can join communities of their interest or location.

What is the revenue model of 'venture' ?

We have multiple revenue channels. As the platform is built around group of people having common interest, its very suitable for advertisement revenue. Another revenue channel is Pro version of our app. In this model, we create separate apps for them with some customisation and custom modules even. We charge Pro apps on pay-per-month model. As our platform is open for developers, that could be also possible revenue channel later on.

What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?

Our vision is to uplifting communities. Apart from App features, we also planning to even work with communities offline to guide them in building, managing and growing communities.

What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?

As currently we are in private beta, we want more communities using our product. So they can use Connectly for their business or the whole community of eChai can use Connectly - who is one of our strong use case since inception of Connectly.