Ghoomify- A whatsapp-like app to plan your hangouts/meetups with your friends
Concept: A whatsapp like app to help you plan your social outings/ hangouts/meetups with your friends!
Problem: Generally when you’re a group of friends, it’s a big pain to plan your hangouts due to many problems such as where to go? How to go?(navigation) where to meet? etc. This happens mainly because in a group every one has different choices.
Solution: So we plan to solve this problem by creating a more interative app than any of those existing in the market. We plan to replicate the successful whatsapp model. So how it works is: While browsing the app when a person finds an interesting place, he can create a group and suggest going to this place to his friends -> Everyone joins in and have a look at his suggestion and add more. (Even better if nothing is planned, we can then surprise them by showing the trending places that day) -> Then each of them vote
on the place(s) that they’d like to go to -> Now finally once the place is decided on popular voting, we give them navigation! and all of this while chatting
on the place(s) that they’d like to go to -> Now finally once the place is decided on popular voting, we give them navigation! and all of this while chatting
The above can be used in 2 ways:
(i) When the friends go from a common location (like hostel friends)
(ii) When each of the friend is at his/her place. Then what we can do is track their individual locations, find the centroid and suggest places around that.
Initially we’ll focus only on the food sector [cafes, Restaurants, lounges] and later expand out to general places where friends hangout like malls, multiplexes etc.
The major monetization model will be location based deals advertizing. But that is for later.
I’ve presented the idea to investors on two events organised by the E-cell of our college and received good feedback. From what I know, we’ll have pains in data collection, so I wanted feedback on whether to use Zomato API or get our own data (initially from the internet and later have a dedicated data collection team) since we plan to focus only on Mumbai for lets say the first year, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem (?).
Team: We are a team of 4 undergrad students from IIT Bombay , with 2 having little coding experience and a graphic designer. We’re currently on the lookout for a tech lead, someone with experience in android app development. Once we have a B-Plan in place we’ll approach our college incubator (SINE- IIT Bombay) and are also going to attend the next weekend ventures event in Mumbai.
Ajay Dadheech
A good idea!
Suggestion is to use Zomato API, why? Because when you launch it, it should be grand. If users are convinced that app is much of use, giving better results and easing out the ways for partying, in the initial time of application, that will be THE BEST case!
Apart from that, as you have already said, an app like whatsapp, please keep it very very simple and fast loading. You may discard advertisements for at least 6 months. Build the awesome product, let it grow and then try to find out a new way of making money apart from advertisements. Users are your customers and always let them feel that this app has been launched just to reduce their efforts and not to make money.
Rishabh Bohara
@Ajay Thanks for your feedback! and I meant location-based deals for the users and not advertisements, which makes it clean and easy for the businesses to make money as well as keeping our users’ dashboard clean 🙂
Dhruva Teja
hey
https://www.wepopp.com/
take a look at this… a very similar idea… might help you in someway…
Rishabh Bohara
@dhruva teja Dude thanks a lot for introducing me to this app, you made my day! At first it looks very similar to my idea but there’s more to it than meets the eye. I definitely need some time with this app, want to fully explore it before commenting 🙂
Smit Ganatra
That sounds quite ambitious!
Now I don’t have much technical knowledge myself, but I am guessing that you will have to build or integrate a- Whatsapp-like messaging platform + Facebook-like events section + Burrp-like location directory?
Sounds a lot of work. Not to mention that it has to be location based. However, it sounds quite interesting and would love to use such an app myself
Smit Ganatra
Piggybacking earlier on would be nice, but then again, Zomato,at times, tends to be too cluttered. If I open an app looking for suggestions for nearby places to go to,I would like a brief,recommended list instead of the exhaustive one covering each and every place around me
Rishabh Bohara
Okay so I’ve explored Wepopp.
The problem that ghoomify and wepopp are aiming to solve is essentially the same but the approach is different. They focus more on the pre-planning part i.e. selecting the dates and time when people are free and meeting at a defined place. But my idea was for impromptu meetups focusing more on awesome place suggestions (for which I was thinking of using the zomato database).
The positives for us:
1)Wepopp has received a funding of €130,000 in november 2013 which shows that the idea has good potential
2) They have recently moved to android (earlier purely on iOS) and haven’t been able to cross the 5,000 installs barrier
3) No significant expansion even after being 1 year in the business (the only recent news is of a partnership with opentable)
4) have indians heard of this france-based app? NO.
5) Also the fact that we’re in IIT gives us exposure to a huge target crowd, boosting our initial numbers.
Expecting further suggestions and comments from Rodinhooders! 🙂
Rishabh Bohara
Exactly my pain-point some months ago which got me thinking in this direction! (my first idea was of a hyperlocal navigation app)
Nitish Mehta
My suggestion build very basic prototype (MVP) and launch asap , You r 4m IIT B , so you are going to get good support from them so dont go for monetization now, USE Zomato API build one screen to select location and time , then fb api to share to their friends( here u can use some growth hacking technique to promote urself) build this and Launch ,
Now u can ask ur user for suggestions and then built further changes
also don’t plan for global launch , target Mumbai first, in marketing ,then expand
once you have good user base then u can think of modernization
this will be my suggestions ,
Best Of Luck
Rishabh Bohara
Okay so I spoke to a very experienced person in the mobile space. He asked me why would somebody download and use your app? and he wasn’t satisfied with any of my answers.
I won’t reveal my answers right now, I want you guys to give me an answer for this and then we can discuss (so as to get a broader perspective)
So, shoot guys!
P.S. Thanks for the amazing response so far! Hope the same continues.
Abhishek Goel
My apologies for resurrecting an old thread.
@Rishabh: Did you move forward with this idea? I love this idea!
Thanks @Dhruv for WePopp. (Though, It has been shutdown now)
PS: I happen to solve the same problem. You can read more about us in this rodinhood post. For the people in hurry, We help in creating local outings. eg. If you want to go out for 4-5 hrs in Gurgaon, we would give you an outing plan such as “Watch Spectre at PVR, then have lunch at Farzi Cafe”. Checkout our Android App here.