Clueless About What's Happening, Where? Brisky is Your Guide For an Eventful Night!
How awesome will it be if you no more have to search for places to party? To help you maximize your fun, Jatin Bhatia and Rajesh Bhutada, Co-Founders, Brisky have designed this app which is more like your friend who understands your preferences and accordingly suggests you events that you might like. BW Disrupt got into an exclusive conversation with Jatin to know more about their start-up and its features:
Q- Share your entrepreneurial journey with us?
A- My partner Rajesh and I are college friends from NIT Trichy. Brisky was born out of our personal experience when we couldn’t find the right Nightlife event where stags were allowed and one that won’t burn a hole in our wallet. We launched our operations in Pune and have now expanded to Hyderabad. We have witnessed explosive growth in the past three months with our user base growing by more than 7,500 users. Overall, it has been a life-changing experience, it has been a grind, but we are having loads of fun while doing it.
Q- Experience the best of nightlife in a city! What are the features that all potential Brisky users should know about?
A- Brisky is not merely an information listing platform, it is your personal concierge for Nightlife. Brisky is like your friend who understands your preferences and accordingly suggests you events that you might like. Apart from personalized recommendations, we also provide our users with accurate real-time information. Inbuilt social features provide an integrated experience. An interesting feature that we recently came up with, is, real-time hot places through which we inform our users about the most happening party places right now.
Q- Millennial’ being your major target customers, how do you attract them to your platform?
A- By being present where they are, we are present across all social platforms. Recently we have renewed our focus on Instagram, as it has become the de-facto social network for most of the Millennials’. We are also leveraging Music to connect with them, with plans to collaborate with artists in a big way going forward to expand the overall Nightlife ecosystem.
Q- In this business, you have to be on top of events, offers, new places, etc. How do manage it?
We strive to build a deep partnership with our business partners. Since we are in very nascent stages, there is a huge thrust on building a personal relationship with them to better understand the challenges that they face. Our proposition is to address these by using technology to optimize the entire process. So, I would say because of the value that we bring to the table coupled with technology, it gives our partners enough reasons to provide us with all the accurate information. As far as new places are concerned, reaching a critical mass helps, as that leads to inbound interests.
Q- So when we say you can choose the place as per your preference, what are the criteria’s a customer can choose from?
The customers can choose on the basis of varied attributes which includes their interests like EDM, sports screening, live music; types of Pubs like micro-breweries, sports bar, etc. We also take care of the specific needs of our varied user base by providing them with smart filters like stag entry allowed and free entry. With the ability to follow places, interests, and bands, we give our users a lot of power to personalize their Brisky experience according to their individual preferences.
Q- How do you market yourself?
Apart from the conventional social media channels, we put a major effort in reaching out to people through the offline medium by collaborating with event organizers, pubs, and artists. Another key area of focus for us is alliances, a big part of which is partnering with artists. We help them promote themselves on our platform, as a consequence of which Brisky also grows as a platform. We also occasionally organize events, the recent one was the Hyderabad’s biggest Battle of Bands, which gave us tremendous brand visibility.
Q- As a start-up, what were the major challenges that you faced initially and how have things changed now?
A- Initially, one of the biggest challenges was to how to get our priorities right. When you start off, you want to do gazillion things, which eventually lead to a lot of time getting wasted. We were no different, so identifying signal from noise was something that we learned over a period of time courtesy some amazing people who helped us. Now things are much better, a huge chunk of the credit for that goes to Spark10, which has been instrumental in shaping our approach towards building a sustainable business. Apart from some amazing mentorship, it has also given us a lot of validation.
Q- As a team, what are the different strengths that you both have that really helps in your business?
A- As individuals, we are very complimentary in nature which makes us click as a team. I am responsible for product and marketing, constantly iterating on our product and striving to replicate the real-world experience on our digital platform to achieve our ultimate goal of disrupting the hitherto highly unorganized nightlife industry using technology. Rajesh takes care of business operations and finance, he is focused on maximizing the value that we deliver to our partners keeping them constantly engaged and looking for new avenues to collaborate with them, in line with our objective to build Brisky as a sustainable business.
Q- As an entrepreneur, what drives you?
A- The love of building something that you have a deep belief in is a major driving force for us. Another thing that keeps us going is the tremendous customer love that we keep receiving, it just makes everything feel worth it. The fact that we don’t have to dread Mondays as we had to in our corporate life is an added advantage!
Q- What are you future expansion plans?
A- We are looking to penetrate the Pune and Hyderabad markets further. There is a lot of work that is going on at the product side, with a focus on delivering a seamless customer experience.
