Startup Village incubatee Mocioun gears to disrupt local fashion with new app
Ameen Rashad, Salmon KP and Aby Mathew are Co-founders of Mocioun, a mobile app development startup. They were earlier classmates and co-workers respectively during their engineering and brief corporate stints at Tata Consultancy Services. Once over a weekend, the trio were on a stroll through the streets of Kochi after a pizza hangout and spotted fashion boutiques showcasing products. This triggered a discussion about an opportunity in extending power of mobile to local fashion boutique owners.
In the first half of last year, the trio deserted their corporate stints to start Mocioun, a mobile app development firm. The startup’s flagship product -- MetroStreet is a social m-commerce platform which will connect fashion shops (clothing, footwear and other fashion accessories) and buyers in each city across the globe.
“Our vision for this platform is to deliver a better experience for shopping enthusiasts as well as for the shop owners by integrating advantages of offline shopping with the ease of mobile shopping,” says Ameen. The Cloud-based platform will be available as a mobile app for users, which will help them know about different fashion flavours and hot-spots in their city.
For fashion boutiques, the platform gives a new channel to interact and engage with prospective customers. “Our intention is to
help the fashion boutiques accelerate their sales by leveraging the power of mobile. Besides MetroStreet, the startup had developed MarketWatch (a consumer app) to improve state of e-governance in the country. Mocioun is incubated at Startup Village, Kochi.
MarketWatch won #OpenDataApps challenge conducted by the National Information Center (NIC) in association with NASSCOM to encourage data-driven innovation. With the help of 'Data Portal India', the MarketWatch app gathers live price details of thousands of products from around 3000 markets all over India.
Mocioun had developed an initial version of MetroStreet for Android and amassed feedback from customers who are based in Kochi. “Now we’re in the process of tweaking the initial product based on the feedback and are piloting a private beta testing in Kochi. We plan to release the MVP version of the product in Kochi by mid March,” adds Ameen. For MarketWatch, the startup has a combined user base of 30k+ users spanning across different platforms.
MetroStreet will be free for users as well as fashion boutiques and the trio targets to bring on board at least 5000 fashion shops and 100k plus users in a limited geographical location, mainly over one or two cities. “After validating our business model and tweaking our platform, we will proceed towards scaling, during which we also plan to raise venture capital funding,” adds Salmon.
“Creating the biggest fashion shopping mall on a smartphone is our future plan. This big dream is what’s driving us,” adds Ameen.
Mocioun’s play with MetroStreet looks promising but how it competes with local business discovery platforms like NowFloats and JustDial would be interesting to watch. The startup has a strong focus on one niche -- fashion boutiques, but it may have to explore other verticals to scale.
What are your thoughts on MetroStreet? Do comment.
