Two New Facebook Apps from SocialAppsHQ: ‘My Restaurant’ & ‘Real Estate’

The app space is growing leaps and bounds every day, with numerous apps fighting it out in the wide space. YourStory recently featured SocialAppsHQ (click here to read that story) and since then, they have come up with two more apps. Sunny Sharma from SocialAppsHQ revealed more when YourStory caught up with him. Excerpts:

Tell us about the new apps, 'My Restaurant' and 'Real Estate'.

Both these apps are cloud-based plug-and-play Facebook apps. Our ‘My Restaurant’ app has been developed for restaurants to help them leverage social media to gain more customers and stay connected to their customers, even after they leave their premises. ‘Real Estate’ app is there for agents and real estate companies to derive leads directly from Facebook.

How has the response been so far?

Within just 3-4 weeks of launch, we have seen great interest for our restaurant app. Our customers include restaurants like EDS Bar & Grill from UK. Given the adoption levels, it is clear that there is a market need for it. Also, we have received some great reviews from leading experts in the restaurant industry.

We launched our Real Estate app and had our first customer within hours - Arabella Chambers. There are some very large players who have also shown interest in this app and are in the evaluation mode right now.

How much do you charge for these apps? Are you ringing in profits?

We currently charge our customers $29.99/month for installing our vertical apps on a Facebook Page. It’s still early days. But we are already profitable and are aggressively hiring designers, engineers as well as marketing folks.

The app space is really huge right now. What do you think of it? Is it a bubble?

I do agree that the space is huge especially, given the noise and clutter that exist. However, as we have seen, utility apps focussed on delivering ROI for businesses are still underserved markets. Apps that increase productivity, acquire and retain customers, push the usage of standard devices beyond current imagination (like using smart phones for heart monitoring, ECG etc.) will remain very much in demand. It is still a nascent market and I think you will continue to see a large number of players come and go with tons of innovation happening in this space.

Are there similar apps present? If yes, what differentiates you?

For generic apps, there are few companies that are competing. But when it comes to vertical products, it’s a wide open field. We don’t really have a direct competition in this space.

Our focus is to help small and businesses to derive measurable business value out of their social media campaigns. We have integrated viral features such as ‘join our mailing list’, comments, share and invite your friends to make them even more exciting and effective.

Just to give you an example, we boast of driving 1,500 email leads per day just from ‘Join our mailing list’ program to our customers, where as our competitors are still talking about number of fans and monthly active users which alone does not directly translate into any incremental revenue for businesses.

To know more, check out http://www.socialappshq.com/.

Jubin Mehta | YourStory.in