Startup Review : VoiceTap – Search and Connect with Experts !

Voicetap is a young startup – and yet a veteran. The fact that it is only a year old makes it young and the fact that it is the youngest ever Red Herring Global Top 100 company makes it a veteran. Earlier, Voicetap focused on education, career, finance and health. But now Voicetap is expanding to tons of new services. Earlier – it was limited to inbound voice calls but now you can connect to experts through SMS and the Internet. I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to Beta test this startup’s new and revamped platform.

So what is Voicetap ?
Voiceatp lets you connect with people relevant to you. You have a query? Want to talk to someone? Want to sell something? Have knowledge and want to share? Just SMS or search via Internet and it will automatically connect you to relevant people. This service is extremely easy to use. You just need a mobile phone and thats it. Lets take few examples, my friend just passed 12th grade. He has no idea of what he wants to do in future. What would he do? He will ask his friends or his parents but what’s missing here is something extremely important – expert guidance. Voicetap comes to the rescue here – you don’t need to go anywhere – just SMS and you will find experts relevant to your interest. So basically, Voicetap is simplifying stuff in many ways. There are millions of use cases here and I could see this service being used by tons of people in the near future.

I have embedded the Q & A with Voicetap CEO Mrigank Tripathi – this would give you a better idea of their startup, the idea behind it and their future goals.

1. Explain Voice Tap in laymen terms

Voicetap is a unique service that allows people to connect with others on topics of mutual relevance in three simple steps – SMS, Call and connect. All this at the time of your choice, from the location of your choice and the handset of your choice.
Everyone wants to talk to others on topics of relevance. An MBA aspirant wants to talk to an IIM alumni, a patient wants to talk to a doctor, an entrepreneur wants to talk to a mentor, a marketing person wants to talk to a marketing guru – and like this, on a day to day basis each one of us wants to connect with others on topics that are relevant to us. Voicetap just enables you to connect with the people who are relevant to you without having to scrounge around and search for them (over the net or your extended family and friends network) – live and over the phone.

2. How did you come up with the Idea ?

An incident sparked the idea. In 2008, my niece got a 90% in her 12th – but was crying because she couldn’t find someone relevant to talk to. The people around her (including me) could give her advise which was dated. With more than 400 Million mobile subscribers (at that time) in India alone, the irony of the situation was not lost to me. Why is it that people should be able to connect only basis a phone number? Why not basis a mutual topic of interest? Thus the concept of Voicetap came into being – allow people to connect with others of mutual interest directly, anonymously and over the phone – live.

3. Is your startup self funded or are you approaching VCs in the future ?

Voicetap has a seed stage commitment of SGD 1 Million from a Singapore based consortium. We are in talks with some VCs to raise a next round.

4. Is your service free ?

At present, Voicetap does not charge the end user anything to use the service. The user’s standard tariff rates will apply to him in terms of SMS and Voice.

5. Tell us more about your team developers behind it

We have a stellar team that looks after technology. Sandip Dutta and Sudhir Mor are the architects of the platform, with me and Arpit Rai being the product designers. Both Sandip and Sudhir come from hard core telecom technology backgrounds and bring with them the one thing that every startup dreams of – a never say die attitude. To have setup the complete platform in a span of 6 months is no mean task, and has been done primarily by the two of them.

6. How can your startup make an impact ?

What we have is a simple Consumer to Consumer voice based interactive platform. The applications of this platform are immense. Businesses can use it for soliciting leads. Youngsters can talk to others and grow their network. People can discuss their problems with ‘phone friends’ – anonymously. People who wish to meet prospective spouses can leave their profiles and allow people to connect with them (and we will fine tune this as we go along). People who wish to buy and sell can do so over the same platform and that’s just the beginning.
With over 600 Mn mobile subscribers in India now – it is clear that Voice is the major force in the mobile world. Our platform just allows you to play out various use cases over voice. My sense is that we haven’t yet figured out what all are the various things that can be done over the platform – but we intend continuing our evolution and providing more and more services to our users.

7. Do you have a marketing strategy – Digital / Social / Print?
Yes, we have a strategy in place for Social. In fact – for starters, we are giving out a 10 Voicetap t-shirts, 3 ipod shuffles and a BlackBerry to the users who help spread the word and get others to register and use the product. Apart from that – we have a fairly extensive marketing effort lined up, which will be focused more towards ‘helping our partners generate perpetual revenues’ rather than ‘One time advertising revenues’ only. We will be launching such initiatives soon.

8.What is your aim for the first 6 months?
Our aims for Voicetap over the first 6 months are straightforward:
1. Acquire a significant user base for the service
2. Launch a one to many model (you can choose to hold conference calls and invite your people to the calls)
3. Launch a deferred speech model (You can leave a question to be answered by others)
4. Launch a completely location based service in conjunction with the operators (You can search from where ever you are – and get the most relevant and closest results to you)

9.What do you aim to achieve
Our vision is to create a truly networked world – where people can connect with others, share their views, talk, discuss, transact, advise, help, connect and much more – all over a simple phone – all this while creating a sustainable business.

I have been playing with this service for several days now, being a beta tester. I am actively involved in helping them out with some issues. Being a beta service, bugs and issues are common. At this point, this service can upgrade from beta pretty quickly. Little polishing and this service can leave behind its beta tag. Since I just passed 12th grade ( with a descent percentage ) I am doing the traditional college hunt these days which keeps me busy. A service like this is a boon, and there are three ways in which I can use it: First – I can find a relevant person by just SMSing my topic of choice. The service provides me with data stating the available experts. Follow the instructions and once connected – you will be provided with the Bio of the experts which is immensely useful – they have IITians and coaching classes teachers which are experts in their field – a simple and satisfying experience. Second: Search over the Internet. You can search on the site and choose the person you wish to speak with. The benefit? You get to choose experts. You can directly connect the chosen expert or try connecting with multiple users. All it needs is your number and then you can connect with the relevant person. The third (and one that I can see this happening a lot – in the beginning at least) is – deferred search. Suppose you message ‘search ‘ to the Voicetap number and you get a reply that no experts are available at the moment. Don’t get disheartened, Voicetap will automatically message you once the experts are available. Overall – A great user experience. There might be some bugs, but you won’t know until you give it a spin yourself.

The few challenges Voicetap faces at present is something that Voicetap is based on: Telecommunication network. We here in India are lucky to have cheap calling rates and SMS plans (btw – your standard SMS + voice call rates will apply) – but we don’t really have strong network in India, so network congestion is something Voicetap might wanna escape and live. Since Voicetap is also giving a platform to corporates to build their brands and interact with people or their potential customers, this becomes a great way for brands to raise awareness about their product and help people out in this process. There are some disadvantages too – When we talk about brand building, first thing that comes to my mind is advertising. I had one bad experience where instead of answering my query – he (anonymous) led me to his website and asked me to register for further details – which crushes the whole purpose of communicating with experts and experts sorting our problems out. But Voicetap has a rating option. So you can always rate them according to their level of guidance / expertise and how much actually they are giving out to help you. This will automatically help the system clean itself. So do rate in case you speak with someone! For feedbacks and queries – shoot an email to Mrigank at m@voicetap.in.

We have something interesting and exclusive for Watblog readers :

Watblog has managed to get exclusive access to Voicetap’s promotion scheme for 48 hours. What that translates to in material terms is that over the next 48 hours, you have the first right to actually win Voicetap t-shirts, iPod shuffles and a BlackBerry by registering on the platform and getting others to do the same. The way it will work is this: Log onto www.voicetap.in, put in the code ‘Watblog_1’ and get access to the site. Once in – register and invite your friends to register. The contest is aptly named ‘The 10 – 30 – 50 contest’. The first 10 registrations to get 10 others to register will get a Voicetap t-shirt. The first 30 to get 30 of their friends to register will get a chance to win an ipod shuffle (3 to give away) and the first 50 to get 50 others to register will get a chance to win a BlackBerry.

If you want to get your startup reviewed -> Contact info@watblog.com or contact me directly via twitter – twitter.com/weemundo.

p.s – Special thanks to Rachit Dayal, who introduced this startup to me.