by Kunal Jain
SmsGyan co-founder Abhinav Sree
August 18, 2009 in Mobile by Kunal Jain
In this interview, Abhinav Sree tells us about startup company Innoz Technologies’ first project SmsGyan.
What is your startup about?
We are a young innovative startup working on the mobile domain. Our first product SmsGyan is all about empowering mobile users providing web services via SMS. We deliver up to a max. of 500 characters results giving users full value for their money. ET POI finalists, DFJ CISCO Global BP Competition finalists, Innoz is a promising student startup and is now incubated under the iAccelerator program at IIM Ahmedabad.
What is the story behind Innoz Technologies. What led to the inception of SmsGyan?
Innoz is a story of 4 college friends getting together and doing something different rather than joining the rat race of job seekers. Being Student entrepreneurs isn’t easy but it sure wasn’t impossible. SmsGyan took birth due to the need for getting quick information from various sources to your mobile. The fact that sms has a huge market also inspired us a lot.
What experience do the founders bring and what are their roles?
Our experience is nil when you take job experience in account. But we are learning through out this journey. The four of us bring in various benefits to the company. Deepak and I look after the management side whereas Ashwin and Hisam take care of the technical aspects.
How do you source your content? What are the advantages that content providers get by partnering with you?
Initially we were taking the content from free sources. Now SmsGyan is joining into partnerships to provide users with more accurate results. Moreover we are trying to do a step more than just provide information. We have already partnered with companies like LifeMojo, Sutrajobs, etc. So we also act as a medium for such companies to let their services get noticed and people interested can apply via sms!
Taking LifeMojo as an example, our users get to know about LifeMojo services on queries about health and if they are interested we let them sign up via sms.
Which is the most popular feature of your service and which one are you most excited about?
Each new feature is pretty exciting for us. But I should say the most promising feature even by stats is PRICE. On average, a user uses this feature 14 times! This is precisely why we are looking forward to tie up with companies who can provide us with accurate results and even opportunities for our users to get a fair deal for the gadget which they request for.
We have also introduced SmsGyan in Gtalk which seems very exciting. All one has to do is add smsgyan@smsgyan.com to their Gtalk and send help for the list of keywords. So it makes a one place for all information and even promoting the websites of our partners can be done effectively.
What made you expand your services from the sms domain to instant messaging? Do you expect this to affect your sms revenue generation?
The expansion move of SmsGyan from sms to IM was triggered by marketing reasons. Being a startup, we had to come up with something to promote SmsGyan among the more web friendly folks. There are a lot of people who are tuned into the web a majority of the time, for them SmsGyan on Gtalk will be one place to get instant gyan. Since I did talk about the partnerships we are building in, this will be a great opportunity for promoting our partners and increasing traffic into their site.
About this affecting our sms revenue, I really don’t think so because of 2 reasons :-
-This will promote SmsGyan and let more people know about it, so, whenever they are on the move, they will sms!
-It also promotes our partners which will only be good for us.
You provide several types of information services to users that can be accessed by using a combination of keywords. How do you educate your user base on how to use your existing and new services?
Keywords is always an issue in this kind of a scenario. We do have a help option to give the users a list of keywords. We do have the spell checks working and we are trying to reduce the hassles of keywords by accepting the requests and analyzing what the user actually wants. To educate users about the new keywords, we make sure the promotion of the new keyword is top priority.
SmsGyan was amongst the finalists of the Economic Times- Power or Ideas competition. Can you tell us about your experiences with this initiative?
For us personally it was a big learning point. Moving from just the technology to actually looking into financial points too. There were some good advices and we are working in too.
SmsGyan has succeeded in getting a lot of PR coverage from print and web media. Whats your secret?
The secret is the service. When we talk to people about it, they try it out and like it.
What is your revenue model? Do you charge for any of your services? Is advertising used to subsidize or completely cover your costs?
Each request costs the user Rs. 3. So the costs are covered if we mange to answer a considerable amount of queries per month.
Can you disclose a few statistics? What is your user base? How many of these are regular users?
In our beta stage we had around 25000 unique users and have successfully answered more than 3 lakh queries.
What are the future plans for SmsGyan and Innoz Technologies?
SmsGyan is already undergoing a lot of expansion plans. We are looking forward to building SmsGyan as a platform for a user to get any information whenever and wherever they want.
Innoz is also working on an exciting mobile application for file sharing and lots more. Right now its in a testing phase and looks very promising.
My thoughts
Starting up is hard enough for the experienced and its very inspiring to see students take this path and succeed. Abhinav and his team have followed the startup handbook closely and have focused on building a compelling product while committing resources towards establishing a strong network and making the most out of promotion opportunities. Definitely a model startup to learn from, I look forward to Innoz Technologies’ next great product.
Do you have any questions for Abhinav or his co-founders? Post them in the comments here and we’ll ask the team to respond.
Abhinav is an active member & blogger at theindianstartup.com’s community of entrepreneurs. Members can see his profile here.
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