BWDisrupt interacted with the core team of YourQuote to know more about the startup and its businessmodel. 1. Brief us about your business model like how did the idea came to start and how does YourQuote work?YourQuote is an Instagram-like platform for writers. It's a mobile-first microblogging platform that lets users post their short writings (such as poems, shorts stories and one-liners) on beautiful wallpapers & garner followers with their creativity. We turn writers into artists, by making them utilize their artistic sensibilities to decorate their literary creativity. We are live on all three platforms—web, android and iOS.
The idea came primarily because one of us is a writer and felt the dearth of any good writing app. We being two cofounders, Ashish Singh & Harsh Snehanshu, IIT Delhi graduates of 2011. While Ashish is the tech-whiz, Harsh is a writer (having published books & freelanced for all major magazines) and a marketeer. As a writer, Harsh felt there was no way to inspire the layman to get into the fulfilling habit of writing everyday.
2. What are the special key features of YourQuote?Our website is search engine optimized in such a way that every time a user posts anything, it gets searchable on Google (by "Your Name Quotes"). Our vision is to empower every common man/woman who writes to have their writings one Google search away. Imagine how people search for Abraham Lincoln quotes will find your name quotes on Google. It's already in action. You can see "Harsh Snehanshu Quotes" or "Ashish Singh Quotes" on Google.
3. What are the challenges YourQuote facing in running the business?Right now, there are too many feature requests coming from our users and our lean team is sort of overburdened with tasks. We are raising funds to ameliorate the process.
4. What's your funding status and monetization model?We are currently bootstrapped, however in advanced talks with some of our seniors from IIT-Delhi to close an angel round now that we have demonstrated an early product-market-fit, with early users still sticking with us. We make money by running brand contests for crowdsourcing content and ideas, besides digital advertising.
5. What is the market size and opportunity?We estimate the current market size of 500 million users worldwide, as we are a language agnostic platform. Our business model of digital advertising is a 100 bn dollar industry worldwide.
6. What has been the biggest learnings so far?Just after launch in August, we left the tech hub of Delhi and moved to a village called Solang near Manali armed with an internet connection. This was triggered by saving costs besides past disenchantment with the start-up folks, which is very funding driven rather than innovation driven. The move proved to be fruitful as we have built a robust product in the Himalayas and have attracted some awesome talents besides garnering a hooked user-base for our product with a lot of focus.
Users come first is our greatest learning till date. We have an active feedback loop where their bugs are reported and quickly sorted out. We are just three people running the entire show by dabbling into multiple things together. Ashish, my cofounder, handles the entire tech part. I steer the growth, community building and design of the venture. Pushpak leads our iOS.
7. What are you future plans and expansion plans?Being a community driven product, our focus is on user gratification more than noisy marketing. We really want to crack the viral loop really well, and our past three months shows that we have made tremendous progress. From just 40 odd people we had invited on the first day, we have grown to 10000 users organically. We just want to build more features to reach that inflection point where user churn reaches its bottom point and stays there.
8. What are the traction details?Without spending a penny in digital marketing, we have crossed 10000 users across our android (8k) and iOS (2k) in 2.5 months just because writers are loving the outcome and are steering the viral growth by inviting their friends. Our DAU is around 1500 and WAU is around 6000 across platforms.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
