By Srinath Srinivasan
With growing information nationalism and a shift towards a seemingly sovereign cyberspace, more and more Indian businessmen and computer software developers are coming up with social networking platforms that aim to capitalise on the energy of information generated by a billion Indians and their need to keep connected with their neighborhood and the world. Bharatam, which requires the likes of Facebook head on, is a bootstrapped enterprise and a social networking platform that has some features akin to a complete-fledged significant tech social platform correct from its release. Coming with a prepared to use marketplace, a messenger with finish-to-finish encryption, paid membership features and a lot of customisable profile features, the app aims to provide a localised expertise, enabling discovery and engagement for men and women and companies that are nearby.
“Social networking is a competitive space. We wanted to build Bharatam tailored for Indian users. We will be aggressively marketing the app in the coming months,” says Neeraj Bisht, founder and CEO, Bharatam. He plans to raise about a million dollars in the next couple of months, with an aim to expand development and promoting teams and to strengthen the technical teams. “Our revenue channels include advertisement, marketplace and paid memberships and features. As of now, some of these are free and once we cross a few hundred thousand users, we will begin monetising them,” says Bisht.
Having owned a tech venture previously, Bisht aims to make the app totally localised following crossing a specific user base. “With that, all data and infrastructure will reside in India,” says Bisht. For this, the algorithms will use information collected from customers. “We want to focus on helping users find the nearest services, people, products and to make them more connected with their circle of family and friends. We are creating algorithms with this in mind,” says Bisht. He expects this to be the crucial differentiator for Bharatam with a guarantee of protected and safe information localisation.
However, the journey is not with no challenges. “Capital is a huge factor in this business. Established players have lots of capital. This will also decide who is going to stay when others run out of business,” says Bisht. “While creating and deploying an app seems comfortable at early stage, while scaling, it also becomes a challenging task. We need the right kind of data and teams to tackle that,” he adds.
Bisht comes with an knowledgeable technical group to tackle the tech issues in residence. “If you take countries like America, China and Russia, they have their own social giants. By 2025, there will be over 800 million internet users in India and they will need to connect with their community. Why can’t India have its own social platforms with such large user base? We want to be early in that journey,” says Bisht.