They say ‘You are born alone and die alone’ but in-between these two states of life, we engage day in and day out with many people in different settings, across different mediums to be rightfully termed ‘social creatures’.
On this path between the two extremes, it is not about what we are doing rather who we are doing it with, that makes our experience enjoyable. Whether at school, college, office, club or in a locality, on various occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, farewells, parties, housewarming, baby showers, weddings to activities like attending movies, events and so on, we like doing things in a group making our experiences more social.
In most of these cases, money is an inherent part to avail services and products we wish to consume as a group or gift to someone. In India, we have been pooling money since ages for temple donations to festivals and continue doing so every day for various reasons including the common parties, picnics and more.
Still, one of the less talked about things that arises often in most of these cases is something we call “Money Pooling Paradox”. To make our experiences social and enjoyable, we pool in money where usually, a single person in the group would take the lead, collecting money from all and accounting the money flow. This often leads to uncomfortable “You owe me” situations where one person chases others for their share.
The paradox stems from the fact that we need money for activities to be carried out, where on one hand we have the goal of forging social ties but on the other hand, chasing folks for their share makes one uncomfortable about it and leads to social awkwardness which in turn, many times stops us from going ahead with that group activity, whatever it may be, due to lack of initiative. We all have been there and the worst part is, we don’t admit it.
Paradox aside, tabulating all payees on mundane, non-automated spreadsheets, painstakingly updating them and the nightmarish net-banking with never ending digits ranging from account number to IFSC to MICR to card block and what not codes and imagine registering 15 net banking payees, this was a perfect recipe for something that has been too much of a hassle and was not something to look forward to.
Hence, we at Commerce Labs, have solved the problem for group-gifting, group travel, handling money for parties, events together as well as crowd funding with our partner sites and we felt the need to be addressed is much larger and in order to touch millions of people and their groups, we have released our platform – MyPoolin
For redemption of the collected money, you have the option of getting the money back into your bank account or getting a gift card or even a separate voucher code of equivalent value from our partners – FlipKart, Amazon and more (redeemable across them both online and offline as per the case)!
Pooling and settling money couldn’t get simpler than this.
Looking forward to keeping you all happy and delighted.
Previous post in category – Starting point from Group Gifting
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UPDATE AUG 10, 2015 (ADDED BY EDITOR):
MyPoolin secures $250,000 funding from Qualcomm Ventures & Accel Partners
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Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Cool.
How do you make money?
How does this scale?
Any other use cases?
Rohit Taneja
Hi Alok
Thanks for exploring it.
We make money through our merchant partners (when the collected money gets utilized online) – Flipkart, Jabong, Amazon, and almost all major online and offline retail/travel brands.
Scaling would happen gradually when we see more people pooling or settling money with their friends, colleagues or even flat mates. Use cases are various starting from going for parties/movies together to collecting for events to settling money for the college/office vacation apart from the common one of gifting an e-card or voucher to someone in a seamless manner
Anamika Joshi
It’s a cool idea Rohit!
Rohit Taneja
Thanks a lot Anamika!
It is already more than an idea now.
Do try the product out for any of the daily use cases. Let us know how you like it 🙂
Cheers
Anamika Joshi
Sure Rohit.. I shared the idea with my partner and it definitely means that next time I am planning to gift anything in a group, I would prefer to try out your product!
Best Wishes!
Rohit Taneja
Awesome
Thanks!
asha chaudhry
hey rohit,
many congrats team MyPoolin for the $250,000 funding!! all the best for the final competition. do keep us posted!
Rohit Taneja
Hi Asha
Thanks a lot!
Yup, looking forward to more awesomeness.
Cheers
Sunil Suri
Great!!!
My Best wishes.
~Sunil Suri
Vikram
Hi Rohit,nice product. Will definitely look at trying it out soon. We are building a chat based personal shopping assistant and would like to get some insights on how you’ll are building your product. I have sent you a friend request to DM you. Would be good to connect with you. Do check our FB page http://www.facebook.com/getmaple
Regards,
Vikram
Rohit Taneja
Thanks Sunil
Let us know how you like the app.
Rohit Taneja
Sure Vikram. Happy to connect.
Let us know how you like the app.
Rohit Taneja
UPDATE – We have now added Oxigen wallet as well in the growing list of payment and wallet partners.
Go on, try your first movie booking with friends via @mypoolin. Use the promo DEC100 and your Rs. 100 are on us 🙂
Rohit Taneja
UPDATES –
1. We are delighted to share that we just added Paytm wallet as well in the growing list of payment partners.
2. For those who have not yet explored our recently launched referral system, do check it out – https://medium.com/@mypoolin/launching-referrals-more-820aff6fae45#.c92jnrk28
3. We have changed the design to a new and awesome one.
Do share how you all like it. Cheers