Saturday Startups - Part One - Vakow On Your Mobile Phone
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Vakow is a first of its kind web-mobile service which is meant for the sms forward crazy janta. As different the name may sound so is their service. The website provides sms forwards which are user generated where users can post, share, comment and subscribe to sms forwards which is viewable on the mobile phone. Above all this users can also rate and comment on the forwards.
The content is pretty good on the website the founders have been able to keep the quality of the content upto mark. from Santa banta jokes to naughty to even Shayaris basically like i said its the typical ‘Forward’ kind of messages.
We had a few questions that left us unanswered, so we decided to ask the founders themselves. Rahul (RG) one of the founders of vakow tries to answer in-depth questions about his company.
How did you guys come up with this idea -
I can’t say that there was one event that resulted in the idea that Vakow! is today. Me and Amitu like to discuss Internet, Mobile (and what not); so probably one day over coffee we might have discussed user generated mobile content website for India and probably we decided to figure out what works, what doesn’t and what might and maybe that discussion ended up with “Hey! Let’s quit our jobs”.
How are you supporting the cost of sending the messages? How do you plan to scale it?
Currently Vakow! is self-funded. We plan to scale it by generating lots and lots of revenues and keeping the costs low.
Can you please share your Revenue Model with us OR how do you plan to
monetize it?
There are some ideas and not all of them could be disclosed at this point. One thing that we’ll be launching very soon is the concept of Mobile Fan Clubs. Brands will be able to create their fan clubs on our site. Our users, if they like a particular brand, will be able to Subscribe to it to receive ocassional alerts. Those alerts could be a plain advert, a contest alert, free wallpaper, ringtone etc. - it’s up to the brand to keep it interesting and not overload the customers with it.
Vakow! will provide this unique web and mobile platform to the advertisers to reach out to the youth of the country.
Do you have any competition? If you do, what sets you apart from them?
We don’t know of any direct competitor. But it’s fair to say that there are many companies in the SMS space and occupying consumers’ mind-space as his or her favorite destination for SMS Forwards is going to be a challenge.
What sets us apart is from others are small things that can not be explained. Like we love our customers more than they do (anyway, they only say they do).
If you were to insert ads, don’t you think the quality of the content would be lost? What do you plan to do then?
Quality of content is something that people may be able to handle. Our oncern with ad-insert concepts is that push-advertising on a non-rich medium might not find enough advertisers itself. we don’t plan to insert ads (how can we give our customers what we don’t like ourselves).
Here is a sample of the Sms forward -
Santa reads a poster outside a police station
“wanted for rape and murder cases.”
He goes in and says, “Sir I want to apply for the job on the poster!”
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