Donning the hat of a businessman and underlining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign, former cricketer and Indian captain Kapil Dev unveiled SlopPho — a social gamified collaboration platform on Wednesday.
By Anirban Ghosal
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“This social platform is truly for everyone and is our contribution to the Prime Minister’s Make in India initiative. Our aim is to take it to every smartphone user, corporate and professional in the country and then internationally by providing ease of use, accessibility on smartphone OS platform as well as availability in different languages. Since mobile is fast becoming the preferred mode of internet access, we built the final product as a mobile application. We believe the mobile application will help us achieve our target of atleast 5-6 million users and 25 large corporates in the first year,” Kapil said at the app launch.
The platform is targeted to engage users by allowing them to win prizes daily by participating in games, contests, polls and quizzes. “Participants also earn points that accumulate on a leaderboard and can eventually be redeemed or transferred/gifted as prizes or bartered for advertising space on the platform,” Aman Sahani, CEO of SloPho said. The cumulative average daily prize money to be won ranges as much as R25,000 and will go up significantly during special promotions’ and festivals. Additionally, users have their own page where they can segment their followers into different customisable categories such as friends, family and colleagues among others; to share text, pictures and video. Users can also monetize their page by allowing advertising on it, a first in the world.
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Further explaining the concept of SloPho, Kapil said that it was a platform that would not only serve castle gamers but would also let corporates and service providers gain benefits out of it. SloPho also allows businesses to target campaigns by region and language. Registered businesses (corporate, SMEs and self-employed entrepreneurs) will be able to put up gamified promotions directly and engage users around their brand and proposition to build long term communities. “The business can either put up contests on the main games feed page or create their own corporate/professional corner, which can be tailored to their specifications and managed directly. This also provides access to data and the benefit of analytics dashboard for their corner to get regular information around their campaigns,” Shailendra Haruray, director of marketing and sales at SloPho.
Further explaining the revenue model of SloPho, Shailendra said that the main revenue would be from registered corporates who are looking to advertise their products in an interactive manner. The second part of the income would come from service providers who would be able to sell more data via more user interactions.
“Currently SloPho has 5 lakh users registered and there are expecting to reach the target of 50 lakh users within the next three months,” Kapil said. When asked about his decision to launch a digital venture, the former cricket star said, “I see Facebook, Twitter generating a lot of income and engaging users but these firms are not Indian so with the concept of developing something similar to them and from India we started this venture.” Also, Kapil revealed that he holds ‘a huge stake’ in the company but did not quote a figure. Revealing future plans for SloPho, he said that the app will be launched in more scheduled Indian languages and will also be introduced internationally in United Arab Emirates and Africa. Outside of India, it will launched in partnership with the telecom ecosystem players like operators and handset vendors.
Asked about their marketing and growth strategy, Shailendra said that Slopho was looking to use a multi-pronged approach. Aprart from regular tools like advertising and CRM, it would try and get the registered corporates to advertise about the platform helping it get more traffic. The co-founders also didn’t give a figure for investments or estimates. “I would like to walk first before I start running so currently we will not speak about lofty targets,” Kapil said. Further explaining the reason for not giving up figures, one of the co-founders said that SloPho was in the middle of business discussions and revealing the figures could jeopardise them.
Though the company was silent on figures, it seems to have taken into account the fear of loss of privacy into account. A regular user is supposed to sign up using existing social media accounts or an e-mail and subscribe openly to corporates on the platform. “This roots out the problem Facebook has with the ‘like’. Our users are identifiable and there cannot be any corruption when it comes to data. The user has complete choice to unsubscribe the moment he wants,” Shailendra said. He added that this model would also authenticate the modus operandi of the firm by making it more transparent.
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