Hangoutt – get instant local rewards by playing games

Hangoutt is a product of 135 Tech Labs Private Limited, which was started in November 2012. It is headed by Apoorva Kakkeri and Sameer Mehta, both MBA graduates from ISB, along with Vineet Kulkarni, a PhD from North Carolina State University.

Hangoutt is a unique mobile application that lets users earn hyperlocal personalized rewards by playing mobile games, chatting etc. It is a reward platform which engages with a user through games, surveys or other activities and rewards them with coupons or discounts focused on instant personal gratification. It has a SDK that allows third party game developers to integrate their games on Hangoutt so that users can play their game and get access to real world rewards from the nearest store of their favorite brand.

It also has a simple web tool that lets any business create its brand's hangout in a matter of minutes. This helps businesses engage with consumers by creating their instant mobile surveys, discussion forum topics and provide interesting games from the library of mobile games in Hangoutt application. This is bundled with an analytics engine which gives detailed information about consumers such as demographics, time of day engagement metrics, reward redemption metrics, and store level engagement.

Talking about their competition in this space, Sameer says that any business with a reward delivery is their competitor, but real differentiator is their focus on enabling consumer engagement for businesses and gratifying their users instantly. They have already signed up 15 big clients from India and Philippines, including Cafe Coffee Day, KFC, Pizza Hut to name a few.

They have three revenue streams from the Hangoutt platform:

1. Monthly subscription fee from businesses

2. Advertising revenue from interstitial ads

3. Commission on every rewards for consumer

Their biggest challenge in their startup was when Google shut down Hangoutt service without clear reasons. "Though we did reason with them it was of no use. There is no use reasoning with a Goliath. So we backed down, went back to the drawing board and found a quick and better solution to the problem," adds Sameer.

By next year, they are ambitious about reaching out to at least a million satisfied / rewarded users across India and Phillipines from more than a hundred brands.

You can checkout Hangout here.