Are you annoyed by advertisements? Are you confused by the misinformation therein? Are you stressed out with all the choices you have when you shop? Do you miss shopping with your friends and their advice that makes decision making so much easier and faster?
Everyone does and so do a lot of our friends. One startup decided to solve these problems by getting to the root cause. Too many companies are trying to sell too many things. After a lot of contemplation, analysis and discussions the folks at Zwibe realized that the solution lies in going back to friends and family for unbiased recommendations to shop, what’s apt for you. After all they are the ones we trust the most.
Founders at Zwibe realized that there isn’t a single platform that exists for this. Of course there are ecommerce platforms that have little to no social functions and then there are social networks which have very little focus on shopping, but there is nothing that would solve the issues that everyone is facing.
So they went ahead and built a platform for it, Zwibe.
Zwibe was started a year ago, to build a system that would save time for people and help them seek shopping advice easily by taking social product discovery online. Every user on Zwibe is a brand ambassador of the products they love and create a network around friends and family to seamlessly share and talk about shopping, products, brands and trending commodities. And just to make the user experience more worthwhile, it gives monetary benefits to all users who initiate a purchase by recommending products to their friends on the app.
The founders ideated, spoke to a lot of friends, colleagues, random people at coffee shops, malls, colleges, schools etc. for first couple of months, pretty much anywhere they could find an eager audience. Based on all the info, they had a mockup of our product built and used that to talk to more people. Some more changes were made according to the feedbacks they received and went to a few conferences to get the idea and product validated.
Once they had a winner in hands, the iOS and Android app was built in 3 months. The team released it to friends and family, who loved using it. So they released it to a slightly larger target group and let them use it for a couple of months. They took all the feedback and improved our apps and released it to the market with an end to end platform. Since the launch the app has over 6500 users with over 20,000 posts.
The Zwibe team prides itself with builders, creators and travellers who love to explore, create and build new things. The team which started off with just four individuals is now a team of 17 passionate people.
The CEO, Keerthan Reddy, is a mountaineer and a traveler at heart, who is very passionate about wildlife and enjoys tracking snow leopards at high altitudes. He started his professional career with Fiberlink where he expanded the business to 18 countries across Asia, Europe and Australia. The company was successfully acquired by IBM, post that he served a brief stint at a tech support automation company and right after that he founded Zwibe.
The COO, is a Technologist, Pilot, aircraft builder, a passionate carpenter, and a farmer. He has worked with ThoughtWorks for 11years and has done Development, Business Analysis, Project Management, Product Management, Client & Account management. He has consulted with some of the world leading retail chains across US and UK while at ThoughtWorks. After Thoughtworks he was destined for zwibe. He goes by the name Sagar Reddy.
The MENTOR, is a cyclist, a horse rider, a foodie and a fitness freak. He loves to have things in order and loves to bring everything in line. He has had over 18 years of experience across 4 continents and helping multiple startups with their growth, and goes by the name Madhu.
The CTO is a technologist, geek, who has lead 30+ projects of Fortune 500 companies to successes. He has more than 16 years of experience architecting and designing next generation products. He has extensive knowledge in Agile, Scrum and Kanban. In previous avatar he worked as Principal Consultant in Thoughtworks and other software companies such as Cognizant, ANZ bank. He goes by name Venkatesh CM.
Along with the founding team, there are 14 awesome people who help them to make Zwibe happen.
“We haven’t really applied for any recognition or award, but we were selected by the Under 25 summit to feature using their list of innovative startups at their event. And we got selected for Surge2016. We even got selected in upcoming startups of 2016 that are solving unique problems by Office Chai. We have partnered with Flipkart and Amazon as their affiliates,” says Keerthan, the CEO.
“We believe that Zwibe has found a very good problem to solve in the most innovative way. We intend to change the way ads are being served by creating a medium where every user becomes a brand ambassador and every post becomes an opportunity for discovery,” he adds.
Zwibe is a place where users can post or recommend products they use or love to their friends; this earns them money for the influence they create. If you have a novel or a speaker or a pair of shoes that you recommend to your friend then you will earn money in your wallet. The startup is building a community for users to have their one stop shopping destination, where they discover amazing stuff through their friends and get great deals and also make quick and reliable purchases.
Sounds amazing? Download the Zwibe app on Play Store or App Store and start exploring.
