SocialE- ASK. EXPLORE. DISCOVER

SocialE (www.sociale.co ) was started with the intention of making the decision- making process easier for people and a vision of becoming a global platform for opinions. Typically, people take many decisions every day and they seek social opinion before they can decide. Be it choosing a phone to buy, deciding where to travel or which dress to wear, we either ask our friends, family or go online and read multiple reviews. We wanted to make the process easier, faster and fun! and that's how SocialE was born.

Realisation 1: Social polling is engaging. Period. 

To test our assumptions & need of the product, we decided to develop a MVP and get hands-on feedback from our initial users. Being new to android development, both the founders got their hands dirty and after three months of rigorous coding we launched our app on Google Play. It was time for feedback. After talking to our initial users we realised that people loved giving opinions & they were spending almost 6-7 minutes per session voting on an average of 30-40 polls. However, only a few were interested in posting questions. The app wasn't really being used by people to aid their decision making process, but to discover new questions & share their opinions. 

Realisation 2: There was no reason to restrict SocialE to app only.

As the app stores are overloaded with millions of app, it is getting more and more expensive with every passing day to get app installs. Being a bootstrapped startup, we did not have big marketing budget to promote our app. Moreover, it is no-brainer that the resistance to install an app is much higher compared to signing up on a website. And hence we decided to replicate the experience on a website 

Realisation 3: There was no reason to restrict SocialE to app & website only.

 It turned out that marketing our website was far more cheaper than predicted. Our typical marketing strategy was to create and host a number of social media campaigns and we got overwhelming response from these campaigns. After running a few of these, we soon realised that when number of polls are stacked together and presented to a relevant audience , it not only triggers engagement, but multiple shares over social media . We also realised that such content can enable publishers and bloggers to significantly improve engagement and interaction of their readers. 

Embeddable content has been used by publishers for a while now, however, social polling is still in its nascent stage. Content is becoming shorter and people are getting more interested in interactive content than plain text. We are currently testing SocialE's embeddable poll widgets. Once released, it can be used by publishers & content developers to embed existing polls (or to create their own) within their articles to trigger a 2-way interaction with their reader and increase engagement . The widget will be available for public beta in July 2016 for free.