VOIZD, Voice Without Fear, venture of Sameer Agarwal & Pooja Daswani is an audio based anonymous social networking App - a new place for India's social savvy youngsters. The mobile app allows people to record 30-second audio clips on any topic. Whether it’s speaking up on national and international issues or giving vent to personal or professional frustrations, its users are feeling empowered to express themselves in their own unique ways.
The application has been built with an aim to provide everybody with the basic right of free speech and to create a social space and community where everyone can share their real thoughts without the fear of ever being judged, labelled or trolled.
The app does not have a signup, when users download the app, VOIZD’s system generates and give them a username which they can personalize as they want. Users can either listen & respond to other people’s thoughts or post their own thoughts in 30 sec audio clips. Even for Voice posting, the company has provided a single swipe voice changer to morph your voice for the added comfort of Anonymity.
Team BW Disrupt interacts with VOIZD’s Founders and spoke to them
Differentiation FactorsVOIZD is the only social space at the intersection of audio and anonymity, giving its user power to share their most intimate thoughts and issues without the barrier of language and education, as everyone can speak and Listen. Purely Visual and text based social spaces often leaves a huge mass of people, with powerful ideas on the sidelines. Text is limiting, and video is too bandwidth hungry and risky for countries like India. Besides, text lacks the emotive power of expression that voice carries, appealing to our very basic senses. It is also friction free and has no sign up onboarding.”
Funding StatusVOIZD is currently bootstrapped by the founders. We aim to start monetizing soon using Branded – “Ask Opinions”, Mix of High Value Engagement and sponsored ad units like Audio (ask opinion), Contests /brand games/surveys, Audio commercials in Play list and Sponsored Brand Voiz/Trends/Users etc.
Challenges Faced Indian startup ecosystem is skewed towards ecommerce/ transactions based business models and VOIZD is trying to build a social networking product with social impact out of India which is unheard of, plus it is easy to raise funds for copy past business models from western world but not when you are trying to do something totally out of the box. Even startup accelerators applications don’t have a column for mobile social, they have for everything from payments to commerce to food delivery but not for social startups.
On the product side while Audio is super engaging, UGC around Audio is hardly attempted in India which has both tech and acceptability challenges as with any new concept.
Traction DetailsVOIZD beta app was only exposed in mid September 2016, to a 100 people but since has organically grown to 2000 users, doing over five thousand posts and over one lakh public conversations, from topics ranging from Relationships, Gender issues, Fashion, Abuse. 70 % of our current users are women and highly vocal.
ExpansionVOIZD aims to become the defacto safe social space for people to discuss topics most close to their hearts and we are looking forward to onboard around 5 million users in next 24 months.
Marketing PlansVOIZD plans to:• Collaborate with media content partners
• Work on Social Causes (raise your voice for social causes like save the girl child, educate the girl child, marital rape etc.)
• Collaborate with thought leaders/influencers from startup ecosystem
• Partner with English and Hindi Journalist, more regional
• Work with poets from Poetry clubs (Hindi, English and other local languages)
• Collaborate with Stand Up Comedians
Biggest Learnings so FarOne of our biggest learning is that people feel more empathy towards user when they hear someone’s voice and hence are also open to discussing various topics.
As more and more people come up front and share their voices it will give confidence to others to feel that they are not the only one and share their thoughts too ultimately leading to a culture of free expression and speech.
As people start sharing and get response, it helps them to open up and talk about various topics like politics, relationship troubles, peer pressures, gender issues, their daily lives and everything under the sun with a twist that now they speak as they truly feel, people are seeking advice and sharing experiences.
Market Size The Market for social spaces is going through an interesting change with more and more young people feeling pressure of always being perfect yet unreal associated with identity driven networks, we believe that VOIZD can become the next wave of change. Also we are seeing many new user finding alternate use cases for VOIZD like posting their Audio poetry and Audio jokes which can grow into a category in itself.
