BANGALORE: Twenty-one-year old Shashwat Pradhan’s work experience at Pune-based MaxSecure Software as a Product Manager, helped him when he quit his job to become an entrepreneur. His knowledge in Product Management and ability to pitch ideas to investors at the company, gave him the confidence to build Emberify, his technology startup. A Computer Engineer from College of Engineering, Pune, Shashwat’s startup deals with new age technologies like Cloud Analytics and Mobile. Founded in July last year, the company has five employees as of today and it took a team of three to develop the Instant app over a period of four months.
A smartphone user would agree that he or she is addicted to at least a game or Facebook/Whatsapp to share messages, images and video. Shashwat created the mobile app, Instant, to track your smartphone usage, app usage, fitness and travel time. A user can get the data on the number of minutes that was spent on a particular app, time spent on travelling, number of times the phone was unlocked, and so on. It is integrated with Google fit, Google’s health tracking platform, to track your fitness. The wealth of data that you receive from Instant will help you gauge the time spent on various apps.
The basic features of the app are available for free. If a user wants advance app tracking and history, one can get it for approx `63. They are also working on integrating the app with smart watches along with adding features like sleep tracking and exporting of data, apart from creating a new tablet user interface.
A bootstrapped company with an investment of $20,000 (over `12 lakh) that has already broken even, they earn revenues by selling yearly subscriptions of the app and are looking for new ideas that will help them earn a profit. Shashwat says that building a good team and penetration into the app store where there are more than one million apps is a tough ask. “With over three million apps on the app stores combined, it is tough for an app to get visibility. By pivoting our strategy, making Instant into a complete life logging platform from a device usage tracker, we took over most of our competition and penetrated into the quantified self niche,” says Shashwat.
The company also has productivity apps Reminder Now and Follow Mail. As of date, the app has more than 18,000 downloads. Shashwat aims to earn about $40,000 (over `24 lakh) by the end of the year. He says, “I want people to think of Emberify as the go-to place for creative contextual apps for enhancing their productivity. We hope to make the life of our users slightly simpler and more efficient with our products.”
— mathew.maniamkot@gmail.com