This startup lets you know how your business is perceived online, and what your competitors are up to

Konnect Insights offers integrated analytics on web forums and social media to its clients for intelligent decision-making.

A career spanning seven years in the software industry as a developer, programmer and analyst was enough for 37-year-old Sameer Narkar to realise the potential of big data and social media in business growth. Social media now serves as one of the key marketing tools to bring remarkable success in business. This inspired Sameer in 2011 to play around with ideas and figure out how to build a business.

Sameer brainstormed until he came up with the idea of Konnect Insights. He developed a 'web listening software', which gleans insights from social media and all online sources. Sameer, who is an electronics and telecommunications engineer from Pune University, says,

“We also developed a search engine that crawls through 25 million websites and pulls near real-time results. Over a period of time we created customisable dashboards that take reporting to a new level altogether. Today UI/UX is our strength, in addition to rich data, and that makes Konnect a very powerful social listening tool.”

The startup claims to have an integrated approach for online crisis management, industry benchmarking, social media analytics, social CRM and integrated response management.

Bootstrapping

Sameer says the initial few months saw the bootstrapped firm burning an average of Rs 3 lakh a month.

Sameer's flair for assembly language programming, C and C++ since his college days made him keen on starting a career in software. The seven-year stint in the software industry offered him the opportunity to write code for software products in derivatives, mutual funds and insurance.

Helping business grow through analytics

Konnect Insights' social listening and analytics software helps businesses gauge public perception about them online. It gives insights culled from all web sources and social media, and classifies them according to voice, sentiment and products on dashboards. Users can also get to know what influencers are talking about, and what impact each conversation has made. Konnect Insights allows users to get information through its own search engine, by pulling out results from over 25 million websites. The analytics engine then does parsing of this data to offer real-time analytics on their dashboards.

“In simple terms, our search engine crawlers are like elevators in the building and we have some 25 million buildings and even more elevators (processes or threads distributed on many servers) to pull this data. Our software architecture is horizontally scalable, which makes it possible to store such huge data. On top of that we use Lucene search to load results and charts really fast. The underlying technology makes all the difference,” Sameer explains.

Konnect Insights pulls out insights based on keyword search, and it also offers insights for companies for their social channels on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Instagram and a few others. These insights help companies learn from their own campaigns by measuring their impact, and also by understanding what the competitors are up to. The social CRM and workflow features of Konnect Insights help clients resolve issues without having to set up a big customer care team of their own.

“Today, we have close to 60 clients. Konnect Insights is a SaaS product and works on a ‘pay as you go’ model. We acquire on an average about six new customers every month, which translates to close to 16 percent increase month on month,” says Sameer.

Building team and generating growth

Mumbai-based Konnect Insights has a team of 15 employees. Its services are being used by brands across automobile, telecom, BFSI, entertainment, IT, pharma industries, among others.

Konnect Insights clocked revenues of Rs 1.6 crore in the last fiscal and this year it is expecting to net Rs 4 crore.

Globally, the social media analytics market, which stood at $1.60 billion in 2015, is expected to grow to $5.40 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 27.6 percent. Transition from traditional business intelligence (BI) techniques to advanced analytics techniques, and the massive surge in the number of social media users are strategically driving the social media analytics market.

Some of the companies betting high on social media analytics in India are Simplify360, Germin8, BlueOcean, Frrole, Unmetric, Infinite analytics, Abzooba and Konnectsocial.

Website: Konnect Insights