Why is hoppr hogging the limelight?

Wednesday July 18, 2012 , 3 min Read

hoppr is BhartiSoftBank’s bet in the field of hyper local commerce. Being completely SMS based, hoppr is a device agnostic location based service that targets the 900 million strong Indian mobile subscriber base. Co-founded by Md. Imthiaz and Kabeer Biswas, who have both had years of experience working with Bharti Airtel, hoppr has a strong steering force at its helm and is more than ably supported by BSB.

hoppr solves two problems, one for the local merchants and seconds for the users.

The local merchants are always on the hunt for ways to market themselves better. “They always want to brand themselves but what goes amiss is context. Also, every brand is looking for ways to retain customers. Brands are willing to give away goodies if someone ensures that their customers will frequent them repeatedly.” says Imthiaz. This is where hoppr comes in for the merchants.

Making it network dependent opens up a huge market and local merchants can provide offers to customers according to their needs. “hoppr will allow this via ‘checking in’. We want to make this a habit. It is already prevalent practice to update location but check-ins will incentivize the process and In turn make it a stronger habit.” informs Imthiaz. Currently having launched in 4 cities- Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata across 3,000 retail outlets, the traction has been encouraging. “We haven’t let out the numbers yet but it’s been close to a month and the response has been fantastic. Consumers seem to love the simplicity of the service.” says Imthiaz.

Whilst most of the coupons are action based i.e. a user can get a coupon for a place by checking in to it, a lot of hyper discounted coupons carry a small fee, which is a similar concept to what online mobile recharge sites have and hence a tested concept. Having a revenue model, a huge market and being one of the rare players who has been able to leverage location, **hoppr** has a very strong value proposition.

Talking from the customer’s viewpoint, lucrative offers and an easy to use service makes it a deal worth trying. hoppr has recently added the first social layer wherein a person can connect their Facebook account with their mobile number once, and then get the option to share every check-in on his/her Facebook wall with a simple text message. In this way, having a both a B2B and a B2C strategy, hoppr is set make some waves.

An android app is also in the pipeline which can be expected in the coming weeks. Go hopping with hoppr.

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