Exclusive WATBlog interview with Funpiper’s CEO Ajitesh Shukla
"How was your weekend?" is what Funpiper a new website wishes to answer. How do they plan to achieve the same? Ajitesh Shukla, CEO of Funpiper talks about funpiper and what’s to come. 
Q) What was the Rational Behind Funpiper, the name and the concept?
FunPiper.com, initially started as a portal to provide a place for users to let others know about all the fun they had in the weekend or planning for coming weekend. Idea kept evolving and our vision got clear with time. As most of the fun happens on weekends when we get two days holidays(29% of our life), we chose to pursue this idea to make a fun based weekend portal.
FunPiper.com is envisioned to be the weekend portal such that people start their weekend on FunPiper.com. We have chosen to innovate weekend planning in twitter style. As "How was your weekend?" forms the most heard question in any gallery conversation on Mondays in every office around the world, we wanted to take up this question on FunPiper.com and entice users to post about "How was their weekend?" With our coming up feature of "Planner", users would also be answering yet another question, "What are you doing this weekend?" by creating weekend plans and sharing it with their friends and everybody out there. Do checkout our homepage (http://www.funpiper.com ) to know more detail.
I have always been fascinated by the story of Pied Piper of Hamelin. As user shares their fun with everybody and in a way do his bit to spread the fun, I chose the name FunPiper.
Q) What is your current user base and how do you’ll plan to scale up in terms of users?
We got launched only 15 days back and have been able to gather sizable amount of users only from word of mouth. We are yet to make a formal press release in India and US. As per data, we have 50% of returning users out of all users.
Our target user base is 18-25 years age group. However, as the portal caters to wider need of weekend planning, we expect a lot more traffic from wider age group.
We have planned various strategies for scaling up the user base by using viral methods on our portal and press release/advertisement in news papers, hoardings.
Q) What is your staff strength?
We are currently 3 member team.
Q) Who do you consider as competition?
One of the direct competitors is Yahoo Local Weekender which is also a weekend planner, but primarily localized. We however also have indirect competitions from facebook, orkut like portals.
Q) Why would a user not post about their weekend activities on facebook or orkut or twitter for that matter and choose to post it on Funpiper.?
Orkut is more of a general “Hi, How/what are you doing?”scrapbook and Twitter is just limited to “What are you doing?”. Facebook however provides a proper platform for event planning complemented by social networking. FunPiper.com is different in the way that it has a single focus on weekend planning with a Twitter flavor which is the most current style of blogging also called short message style of blogging. Another differentiator is overall simplicity which has become one of the buzz words in Web 2.0.
Q) Are you planning to have any plugin’s in the future? If yes could you delve into details?
We are carving out engineering plans to have integration with FaceBook and Flickr and, would go live with these features in coming months. We also have plans for weekend videos to be placed with the weekend fun posts.
Q) Are you currently engaging in any marketing activities to promote Funpiper?
We have already started indulging in marketing activities such as working out PR news, promoting our portals to famous bloggers, taking part in startup portals etc. We are yet to release few important features which shall go live in next 10-15 days after which we will go full fledged in implementing marketing strategies starting in India and US. Till then, word of mouth and portal viral features are attracting new users.
Q) Could you please disclose your revenue model?
I would only be revealing the revenue model partially. Our revenue model is advertisement and subscription. Advertisement is basically like any high traffic portal which would automatically fetch you CPI and CPC based advertisement revenues. At a later stage, subscription based customer comes into picture. Shortly speaking, vendors interested in promoting customized weekend based offers would be ones who would be paying monthly subscription fees to avail this service.
Q) Have you’ll received any funding? If yes could you please delve into details?
We are self funded. However, we are planning to pitch for seed funding very soon.
Q) What are your future plans for FUNPIPER?
We are working on engineering front to come up with the “Weekend Planner” and other fun features. We are carving out the service portal for our subscription customers. We are also working out our sales and marketing strategies for scaling up our user base
While funpiper may be extremely centric to the “what one is doing on the weekend”, that is all it does. Its website stays restricted to posting textual description of weekend activities. While the interaction is limited to comments and a friend circle, hence the possibility of a person posing their weekend programs on the other platforms like twitter, pownce, facebook, orkut is very possible. If the user was given the option of showing exactly what their weekend was like with the use of Pictures and Videos it would be appealing to most users of the feature. With communities for remembering loved ones who passed away, and another for working mom’s, topic centric social networks/communities seem to be the next big thing.
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Very well documented interview. In India weekend concept is not there at level what is in US. It is picking up with tech guys. Funpiper seems to be good and it might get viral.
Hey amit, thanks
I certainly think Funpiper is a great concept. If they provide more sources of interaction it would great. May be a desktop API, or they could go mobile 
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Priya, you said it right. I think integration is the key point. Take the hallway conversation to a new level through whatever channels available i.e. Internet, SMS, Mobile Page, Off-Line integration via desktop applications, may be IVR (i)… Enwrap the user, and they would enwarp your website.
Rajiv,
i Liked your rational thinking on the product may be IVR is better and SMS too