Are there others who Share your Wishes and Opinions? Wishberg lets you Know!
Wishberg is a Social Wishlist which enables users to share wishes for their desired purchases and discover like-minded people in their social circles. Users can also showcase their experience to help their social circles make an informed purchase decision.
Wishberg’s belief is to mimic buyers' offline behavior into an online product. “As customers, we always turn to our social circle for advice, reviews and first hand experiences as they are from people whose credibility is already established,” says Kulin Shah, the co-founder of Wishberg.
Starting off
The idea of a social wislist was realized when Kulin and Pravin Jadhav (co-founder) launched Tyche’d (which later was rebranded to Wishberg) in December 2011 amid very positive reviews, on different aspects of the product including its features.
Kulin was a Senior Investment Manager at Reliance ADAG's corporate venture capital arm and Pravin has previously worked with Rediff.com and Ohana. Owing to the diverse backgrounds of the co-founders, it is no surprise that they have been able to successfully manage operations so far. Currently they operate with a team of seven, all of whom are into product engineering and development.
An interesting fact is that they have launched the product in 12 countries simultaneously. “Our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter span multiple countries - we talk, interact and communicate with them sans any limitations. As a social product we don’t believe in limiting ourselves to single geography,” exclaims Kulin.
With users in each of these countries able to view wishes that are also geography specific, the approach has paid off well, and the company is on track to expand to a further 10 countries in the next 24-32 weeks!
Marketing Strategy and Revenue Model
“For a social consumer product like Wishberg - our marketing strategy is bundled in the product itself. Being a very unique concept, there are challenges when it comes to user awareness and adoption, but we have crossed that hurdle. Many early adopters have already joined Wishberg and have started sharing their wishes and experiences,” informs Kulin. There are also multiple inline sharingoptions for users to explore.
About the pricing model, he adds, “We are at a stage where our energies are completely focused on building the product. We know exactly how our revenue model will work, but it is too early to discuss that. Whenever we hit the critical mass of users, we will start working in that direction.”
Areas Of Strength
Being very choosy while recruiting talent, Kulin feels that the team and the product are his two trump cards.
“As founders, we did multiple mistakes in our early days; however our ability to accept failures, learning from mistakes and our undivided focus on building the product keeps us going. We are happy to see the same attitude with all our team members.”
We certainly expect them to hit a few chords and make it huge in the social arena. Take a look at them here and we’d be happy to have your say.