Looking for Agile and Real time communication- Flock is the Answer

Flock, founded by Bhavin Turakhia in Sept 2014, is an enterprise messaging and collaboration tool for teams looking for agile, and real time communication. It has proven to be a powerful addition to the product suite for big enterprises, tech companies and startups that are looking to boost workplace efficiency by ditching email, and moving to a more collaborative communication model.

In an interaction with BWdisrupt, Bhavin talked in detail about his Tech-Startup.

Ideation

The idea to startup on my own came up during school. By the time, college was over, I started experimenting with a few ideas and that led to some business ventures. Some worked and some failed. Eventually, with a loan of Rs. 25,000, me and my brother Divyank co-founded Directi in the year 1998.

Our belief in the vision of revolutionizing the Internet services industry was strong reason enough to set up. Currently, Directi Group comprises of several portfolio companies - Media.net, Skenzo, Radix, Ringo, Flock, Zeta and Codechef. Each business is run independently by their respective management teams.

Hurdles

As with all disruptive technologies, Flock also had its share of challenges. The prominent difficulty was getting organizations to make the switch from email to a real time and mobile communication and collaboration too.

Competitors

In India enterprise messaging is at a nascent stage, thus we consider instant messaging apps such as Whatsapp, or Skype as our competition. Having said that, enterprise messengers like Microsoft Lync, IBM Sametime, are also competition for us. Globally, there other startups in the same space like Hipchat, Cotap and Slack.

Business Model and Point of Difference

Flock is free to use for as long as you want and for as many members. You can easily upgrade to our premium plan to enjoy more features and user controls.

But there is a crucial difference, our competitors with their subscriptions and paid options require organizations to pay for all users on the platform. On the contrary, our paid plans only require organizations to pay for those users for whom the premium features are activated and not for ever team members.

Clientele and Expansion

Some of our marquee clients in India include Gojavas, 1mg, Gini and Jony, Yepme, and Hinduja Hospital. Flock can be used by small to large enterprises across all teams, thus the growth potential is immense. Startups and tech companies have been our early adopter, thus we see huge prospects there.

Traction details

Since our launch in Jan 2014, we have seen over 25,000 unique domain registrations and over 200,000 app downloads (across mobile and PC). Currently on an average we have 27 new companies signing up every week.

Monetization

Flock is self-funded, and currently has a free model. The pro plan is priced at $3 per user per month and teams have the option of upgrading selected users only. We do have an enterprise plan, which includes everything in the paid plan plus one time cost for setting up an on-premise deployment.

Marketing

PR and event participations have been very crucial for us. We have participated in various events in Indian and US. We are also planning to create our own series of events for CIO and CTO of other companies.

We use our social media assets to communicate with our clients and influencers. Unlike many other brands, we use also use these platforms to celebrate our clients’ milestones.

Market size & opportunity

Flock as a product is suitable for all teams irrespective of the size of the organization. We have seen adoption within startups with a team of 6-8 as well as large organizations with employee count of greater than 1000.

However, our institutional sales team is actively focusing on organizations in India which have employee count greater than or equal to 500. Roughly the total employee count is more than 40 million.