L Balasundararaman,Sandeep Bhaskar,Anenth Guru
My gameplan
At Ideophone,we build solutions and help commuters travel cheaper,safer and faster using location and other information drawn from their mobile devices. Our first product 8216;Suruk8217; targeted autorickshaw passengers. It is a GPS-enabled application that allows passengers to keep track of the distance covered,the rate charged and detect if the driver is over-charging or taking a wrong route. It received more than 25,000 downloads from across the world. Our other application 8216;One Touch SOS8217; allows a user to send an emergency SMS to a contact with a geographic location attached. Also using the txtWeb service,8217;Suruk via SMS8217; was able to reach millions of SMS users in India and has got more than 2,500 requests within a month of release.
The best advice I got8230;
Phanindra Sama of RedBus told us,8221;A single application can never be a viable and scalable business,you need to think of a broader focus area,identify all pain-points faced by commuters and solve them diligently while building a method to run a sustainable business. Things will then start falling into place.8221; Indeed things did fall into place for us. And thanks to him,we didn8217;t get carried away by the success of our mobile application.
The defining moment
We are yet to stumble upon 8220;the defining moment8221;,but we hope that moment is not too far away. However,what keeps us motivated is the passion to go out,test the waters and struggle to make things work.
What keeps me awake at night
Everything about a start up: the uncertainty about tomorrow,the challenges we face,the algorithms we develop,the customer satisfaction and happiness we work towards
I thought I would give up 8230;
Never. We believe and practice 8216;Never say die8217; attitude
My word of advice for others8230;
Make all efforts and always strive on diligently