Videos for photos —wait for the app

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video surely is worth a lot more. And for a team of four entrepreneurs from the city, this realisation is worth tons of money. “The idea came to us out-of-the-blue,” says Irfan Baig Mirza, who has been working on an app that acts like a social network for the past two years along with Saritha Jhawar, Mohammed A. Waseem and Aashish Raj Bidkikar.

“For e.g., your friends or family who might be living abroad or in another city. If they share a photo and a video, which one are you most likely to check out? The video, of course,” he says. And it was this idea that the team started working on.

They have come up with an app through which you don’t just share photos, but also make 15-second videos that explains what the photos are all about. “Keeping in mind the low attention span of users online, brevity is the key. So five photos will have only a 15-sec-long video giving a description as to what they are looking at. The photos will be shown as a slide show with the video acting as the caption,” says Irfan.

The app is called ‘Describe’ and is scheduled for launch in the US market this week. “Our start-up is very design oriented and that’s why the budget is high. Keeping our target audience in mind, we will be launching the app for iPhones. During the first month of its launch, we will be inviting 20 people from the US — journalists, photographers and people from different walks of life to try out the app and give us feedback. We have a member of our team in the US who will be taking care of the marketing there,” says Irfan.

Till January, the team was working on a budget of Rs 15 lakh, mainly raised with the help of family members. But now, there are five investors on board, three from the city and two from the US.

Though the team members have known each other for a long time, it’s their first when it comes to building a start-up together. “In 2011, we took part in LeWeb Start-up Compe-tition, which is the second largest competition in the world. We had to build a prototype called RadikHub, a social networking alternative, which lets users support multiple identities on a single platform, much like Facebook. From 600 applicants, we made it to the finals where we had to give a demo of our prototype, but we weren’t ready for it. ‘Describe’ was one of the features from that prototype that we decided to work on,” says Irfan.

“All four of us have a background in marketing or designing, so the biggest challenge was to get technical engineers on-board. The start-up world is very competitive and in the beginning, when we didn’t have a lot of money, we couldn’t hire and pay the staff. Things are better now,” adds Irfan.