Shree Kant Bohra and Paras Kuhad, Founders, iddhis

Cut the Noise

Hailing from Phalodi and Balotra in Rajasthan, Engineers by education, strong supporters of Open Source platform, with Coding and programming in the DNA as they started romancing with Computers from Class 8th onwards, meet Shree Kant Bohra and Paras Kuhad, young and passionate Founders of iddhis.

YourStory in Conversation with entrepreneurs Shree Kant and Paras

YourStory: Congratulations on the lauch of Iddhis.Tells us what is Iddhis?

In a nutshell, Iddhis is one to one and private space to share and communicate with your other half. No friend's requests, no groups, just you and your other half. Iddhis is a Buddhist word which means Super natural powers which one can not use for oneself but for others. We hope to make iddhis a powerful connecting place for relationships.

YourStory:  What is the value propostion and differentiator of Iddhis?

The problem of communication and privacy is global. Iddhis addresses this problem. Iddhis is about thinking beyond social networks and dating websites. Twitter is doing a great job in bringing realtime thoughts and opinions. Facebook is doing great job in helping you keep up with your friends. We can't imagine a world without them. What Iddhis addresses is something more specific. It's the need of having a place for your relationship since relationship is too private to share. Right now, due to the lack of such service, people unwillingly post too private updates on facebook,twitter and get in a very embarrassing sitatuation. We are trying to solve this problem. We believe that every relationship ever happened need to have an identity, iddhis is for that. Every person enters in a relationship at some time. There are phases of relationship, at some point the relationship is at top and too verbose, with time, it becomes mature and later we can't believe that we did all those things, the intensity level of relationship changes from time to time. Iddhis preserves all those precious moments of your life, logs it. When later you browse your iddhis account, you just can't top smiling.

Iddhis let's you share your day's summary, make a complaint, share a poem, photographs and much more. Iddhis simulate the feel of being together even more by something we call 'activities' . When you are on iddhis, your partner would know what you are doing, browsing an album, reading a past poem, iddhis generates activities from your actions and updates them in your timeline. Also you can create more activities on your own, such as reading a book, having food, by syntax like , "me is reading a book" . These activities can bring lots of fun and feeling in your relationship.

Going one step further, we created an email interface for iddhis, that means you can use iddhis right from your email. By posting to [email protected] from your email account, you can udpate to your iddhis. This can be a status update, photo update or an album. You can attach photos in the email and they will become an album in your account. That kind of simplicity we are providing you to get started. You can customize iddhis to get email notifications for new udpates on your iddhis and you can comment on them by replying to the email.

The whole idea is to make it simpler for you to log your relationship, as it's such a special part of life.

YourStory: How did the idea for iddhis come about?

I spend 20 hours of my day on internet and web, what frustrated me was the mapping between the real life and virtual life isn't right. While on my facebook profile I have more than 300 friends, in real life I barely have 8-10 friends. There is such a huge difference, you see. Twitter started with a service for keeping in touch with your small group of friends with small updates but now it has more become a service to discover new people and get connected. I was thinking of this problem in my head since long. But problem with starting something in social web is that you are always compared with facebook or twitter. Because they are so huge. I thought which is the most important relation in a human's life? It's the relation of love. I wanted to map that on web. I wanted to create a place with no margin of becoming a market place ever. Then this idea of iddhis can in my mind, a social place with just two people. Just two, no search, no friend requests, no groups, just you and your other half.

I told Paras about this idea and his first reaction was…just for two people? Are you crazy? After brainstorming he became excited, even more than me actually. This is how idea of Iddhis came about.

YourStory: Tell us about your users? Is it getting market acceptance?

One of our users is from US military and he is using Iddhis as medium to be in touch with his other half, while he is posted away from her. Other Users are couples in long distance relationship, people who are working in other countries like gulf and meet each other for very small time every year.

YourStory:  How are you planning to scale up?

Scaling is relative to users. We can't think of pre optimization unless we launch and get traction. But our system is designed to scale. We can add up resources on go. Right now our main focus is on making iddhis a product people would love to use and let people know that iddhis exists. Rest would be the word of mouth publicity which would help in longer run. So focus of scaling is actually on scaling the reach. There are lots of great tools and services which we are using, twitter, reddit, HN are the communites where we are focusing  as these are the places where we can get early adopters.

YourStory:As a Startup entrepreneur, how has it been till now?

I love this line I heard somewhere, "In a startup highs are very high and lows are really low" That line pretty much sums it all. We have just started, it's a long journey to go. For the small period we have been entrepreneur, joys are the feedback from users, joy is of getting some idea in the afternoon, coding it over night and getting feedback on it by users by the morning. That's kind of joy it is. I think that the fun of creating a product for the end user is unmatchable. Challenges are of creating, iterating and breaking, making, all on your own. As an entrepreneur you are on your own. You have to do it, no matter what. Joy is you have your destiny in your hand, you don't have to look for some boss to promote you or approve a feature or you don't have to show up with a certificate to do a particular job. You have it all in you, that's kind of liberating feeling.

We at YourStory couldn’t agree more.. Shree Kant and Paras, ably supported by their colleague Vivek ( he is an avid photographer) are raring to keep your romance alive online. An online love affair which we should check out and be a part of. What say?