Nepali entrepreneurs building a mobile social network that doesn't keep history: 11beep
Bimal Mahajan came to India from Nepal to study engineering and went on to start his own venture, 11beep. After completing engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, he worked in Infosys for three years before diving into the startup world. He went on to co-found two startups, one of them failed and the other took him to Italy for an accelerator program-- Techpeaks. It was here that he came up with the idea for 11beep.
“While taking a shower, I was thinking about the competitive analysis I had done for our startup. While doing so, I read through all the posts of our competition, I collected all their twitter and Facebook posts in an excel sheet and analyzed,” says Bimal. And this is what gave him the idea for taking -- what Snapchat had done to messaging -- to a social network. And thus was born the idea of a social network on mobile that doesn't keep history. On the personal front, his belief in the idea was reiterated when an incident really shocked him. “I am getting married soon but the parents of my fiancée wanted to know my past by going through my social network history!” shares Bimal.
Leaving the really interesting anecdote aside, Bimal has worked on the prototype and has launched a private beta. In this 11beep journey, Bimal is joined by Vivek Bhusal, who is the CTO. Vivek has a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Information Technology from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and has had experience building mobile applications.Talking about the name, Bimal says, “In TV, when something is censored, the words are beeped but you can understand everything. Similarly, with 11Beep you can express anything and your audience will know what you are saying but there won’t be a digital trail as it gets deleted automatically.” The user can select a time when the post will get deleted from history on 11beep. This is a rather ambitious effort to build a social network and is riding the Snapchat valuation wave but the idea is interesting. The current version looks pretty basic and the first impression points towards the need for a better UI but the thought makes the product worth trying out.
You can sign up for a private beta: 11beep