Tap away with this sharing app
Is Facebook’s content too mainstream, or Instagram’s too irrelevant, to your social life? Is Twitter limiting your thoughts or is Snapchat not available in your city? Meet Pulse, a Delhi-based social media app that provides millennials a platform to access hyperlocal content and share it with a wider group within college and across college communities in a fun/visual manner.
The start-up, which recently raised $500,000 in funding from SAIF Partners, has incorporated a double-shot feature where you can take a picture from your front camera and your back camera. For instance, on a friend’s birthday, you can take a picture of the friend cutting his birthday cake and your expression at the same time. Text doesn’t play a huge role as the mode of communication is primarily visual, including photographs, videos and stickers — in different languages ranging from Hindi to Punjabi.
Founded by Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee alumni Karthik Vaidyanath and Prakhar Khanduja, the startup claims to be the world’s first mobile app where live streaming to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter is a click away. The app utilises minimal internet bandwidth, and one can view content and post offline.
Pulse is gaining traction and it already has some 10,000 users, but it is yet to adopt a revenue model. It plans to get sponsored content once it grows to a few hundred thousand users. For the same, its next milestone is covering every one and two tier cities in the country.
Although the company kicked off just as Facebook did in 2004, it feels to be in a “winwin situation with no competition in India” where every millennial on the Indian internet is its market, which is close to 300 million users / $2-3 billion market. With presence in some 60 colleges in Delhi, the start-up aims to expand to at least 300 universities in the next one-and-a-half months, and is also in talks with investors in India, China and the US for a larger round.