Relatas.com uses business intelligence to help companies and individuals better manage schedules and document tracking
Most entrepreneurs, business professionals, and startup founders have hectic schedules. On occasion, it becomes overwhelming and difficult to be up to date with meetings and also do background research about the person and organisation one is about to meet.
It can be awkward and embarrassing not having an icebreaker or knowing how to start a meeting if one does not know the person on the other side of the table. Even though it’s a cliché, first impressions do matter and can set the tone for the rest of the relationship. Relatas.com is a business intelligence relationship product that aims to solve these issues.
What is Relatas?
Relatas is a hybrid of sorts of LinkedIn and Google+ for business or personal meetings and document sharing. It provides intelligence about the important aspects that are needed to maintain a relationship and schedule meeting through smart calendars and intelligent page level document tracking.
“For example, imagine a situation where you are about to meet your contact at 2 pm over lunch and you receive a mail from Relatas giving you details about the contact, common connections, work history, school history and his or her latest tweet,” explains Sudip.
Pain points they are solving
- Enabling users to gather relevant information about their contacts in time crunches.
- Giving users more control over their documents and a better user experience in setting up and scheduling meetings. Most entrepreneurs, consultants, sales and marketing people end up hiring a personal assistant for the same, but for a startup founder this may not be financially feasible.
- Intelligence and silos are difficult to analyse, but Relatas has developed a product that builds intelligence across a whole range of scenarios, which is much needed.
Team
Childhood friends Sudip Dutta and Sumit Rampal had teamed up and to start a venture, Aporv.com, which was the first Indian online platform to sell Indian handicrafts globally. Sudip, with his experience in this sector, found a gap in the sales intelligence market and started Relatas.com with Sumit; their second venture together.
Sudip has spent 15 years with companies such as L&T, Infosys, Persistent Systems, Sourcebits, and Aporv across international markets like the US, the UK, China, Taiwan and India. He has also worked for about five years in Silicon Valley. He has managed sales teams across geographies in his role as CEO, VP Sales, Partner, Director Sales and also helped build the CRM system for a multi-billion dollar organisation.
He then returned to India in 2009 to start his entrepreneurial journey with Aporv.com.With the second startup, Relatas.com, Sudip plans to change the way people interact with their contacts and maintain relationships.
Sumit Rampal is a multi-disciplinary designer with 15+ years of experience in all aspects of digital media but focusing on design and usability. His role in Relatas is to use this expertise to create a creative and usable product.
Competition
There are players who are doing pieces and segments of what Relatas is doing, for example Google is into cloud scheduling, LinkedIn, RelateIQ is in the business intelligence sector, Dropbox into document sharing. But at present there is no player that has a singular product that cuts across all these verticals and provides intelligence across the same.
Features of Relatas
Users need to sign up and login with their LinkedIn and Google accounts, fill out relevant details and chose a relevant Relatas ID to use all the features:
DashBoard
The Dashboard gives users a bird’s eye view of all the relevant information they need and allows users to integrate their LinkedIn and other accounts, upload contacts, and send emails all through the dashboard. Also included is a ‘global interactions map’ to give users intelligence about the demographic of where their contacts are based and what their last interaction with them was, which could be useful while one is travelling to a new city and wants to know if any of their contacts are based there.
Profile and contacts
The ‘Profile section’ asks users to enter their contact details and customize their profile with work hours, password protect their calendar add multiple calendars. Users can also provide their scheduled work hours, link their Facebook, twitter and multiple Gmail accounts. Each user can also set a unique ‘Relatas Identity’ or public profile address based on availability.
The ‘Contacts’ section provides users in-depth details about their interactions such as designation, company, location, and date they last interacted etc. It also allows users to send mass mails to their LinkedIn contacts with a document attachment which can be tracked.
Calendar and events
Relatas allows users to sync up to four calendars into one single view and securely share their calendar with others. To facilitate better interactions in setting up meetings, users can make their calendars public or private and share their schedules so that prospective business partners or colleagues are always in the loop. For example, one can check Sudip’s calender here.
Most startup folks wish to attend events but can’t keep track of which event is happening where. Users can also subscribe to events based on categories and their interests and will be able to see them in their calendar.
Document sharing
Most of us share documents with our contacts, but have little control over them after we hit ‘send’. Relatas has a feature that helps users track the page level documents of who saw which page of the document and for how long. The users who uploaded and shared the document can also revoke access to it after a certain fixed date or anytime they wish.
Users can upload and share PDFs with their contacts and gather intelligence about which pages their contacts spent most time on and very likely interested in.
The use cases for this are promising. Imagine sharing your term sheet with your VC or sales proposal with your prospect and getting to know which page they spent the most time on and may be most interested in. says Sudip.
Success so far
The founders have been able to generate tremendous buzz and gain early adopters through word of mouth, social media and even guerrilla marketing at events. They found a business partner at YourStory’s 2014 TechSparks, where Relatas was among the Tech 30 finalists.
They won the Hot100 award in India, chosen by a panel of industry stalwarts as judges comprising of CIOs, investors, analysts, commentators and leaders from India. They were also recently selected for Startup Chile’s latest batch.
Future plans
Relatas is looking to increase their user base and get more enterprise adopters for their product. To speed up the process they are also coming out with a mobile app with more features like interaction during events, contact intelligence, and notifications etc.
They are also looking to build a team and hire Android, iOS, Windows developers interested in the intelligence space and also an experienced VP of engineering.
Website: Relatas
