Brain child of Lucy Gadkari and Vaibhav Sinha, Moodoo is an app which facilitates users in arranging impromptu meet-ups with your friends, based on the mood.It encourages people to spend more time offline with friends and the team Moodoo believes that nothing can replace sharing experiences in person. Thus, it harnesses technology to help people meet up with friends more simply, more often and more spontaneously.
The tech expert Sinha holds 15 years of experience in software programming. He has a supporting team of two developers: Jitesh Wadia and Nirav Sanghvi, who work as the Senior Architects for iOS and Android, respectively. On the other side, Gadkari as the CEO manage the financial, design and marketing aspect of the company.
Aimed at decoding the idea behind Moodoo, IndianMediaBook gets in conversation with Lucy Gadkari, Co-Founder & CEO of Moodooapp Ltd.
Edited excerpts.
How big is the opportunity for get-together apps in India?
Currently, people turn to messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Messenger when it comes to coordinating a get-together with friends. But these apps were never designed to help you make social plans. As a result, there is a lot of room for improvement and a big opportunity for someone to own the get-together space in India, and coincidentally the rest of the world.
It’s hard to quantify how big this opportunity is exactly. But we believe that Moodoo could have wide-reaching appeal to any smartphone user with a social inclination. Given that the smartphone audience is growing so rapidly in India, the opportunity size is increasing each day.
What was the idea behind the launch of Moodoo?
The idea for Moodoo began very organically: it was a reaction to the frustrations we were repeatedly facing ourselves when making social plans.
Today we live in a world of social opacity. When you’re in the mood to do something, there’s no way to know which of your friends are nearby are in the mood to join you. It is only after individually contacting people that you find out whether or not they are free. For example, if you were to step out of work early and fancy going to a restaurant, right now it’s much easier to head home and order food in than to figure out who’s nearby and up for catching up over a pizza. That really shouldn’t be the case.
Then there’s the total inefficiency when it comes to the actual coordination. The way we coordinate plans hasn’t significantly evolved since the days of SMS. Typically, there’s an avalanche of messages just to figure out the what, where and when – particularly when a group of friends is involved.
We realised that there simply has to be a smarter way to connect with friends offline and so Moodoo was born.
Please shed light on the key features and highlights of Moodoo.
Moodoo is the simplest and quickest way to arrange impromptu meet-ups with your friends, based on your mood. Available on both iOS and Android, it allows you to catch up with friends within your existing Facebook contacts. Unlike other go-to social platforms that are used to coordinate plans, the app is designed to take you from mood to meet without needing to type a single letter.
Moodoo facilitates impromptu get-togethers via the moodcast functionality. moodcasts are a status system that let you know what your friends are in the mood to do and where, providing transparency into potential meet-ups around you. These statuses automatically disappear after 5 hours so any meet-up suggestions remain relevant and mood-based.
Additionally, you can discover nearby venues based on what you’re in the mood to do, collaboratively vote on where to go, check who is coming and update your ETA – still without typing a single letter.
What are the major challenges Moodoo is facing? How are you dealing with them?
I suppose one of the biggest challenges for Moodoo is that we require communities of friends to download the app for it to work. For us, 10 isolated downloads is not as valuable as a group of 5 friends who download Moodoo together.
This is something that we are tackling strategically through our marketing strategy. While this represents a challenge now, this same factor should contribute to organic growth further along our journey once we are more established.
Please take us through your funding journey.
So far, my husband and I have put in approximately £35,000 of our own savings. In August 2015, we also received seed funding worth £20,000 from the University of Oxford Said Business School Seed Fund.
After several rounds of interview, we were selected as one of 3 successful candidates out of the 60 Oxford alumni companies that applied. This was a fantastic moment for Moodoo, not only because of the perfectly timed financial injection, but also because it gave us the product validation we were looking for.
We’re now on the investment trail again, looking for an investment round that will allow us to push marketing behind the product and to build the backend to initiate our revenue channels.
What is your business model?
Moodoo has the ability to revolutionise the way brick and mortar businesses advertise. Currently a restaurant, bar or shop can define their target profile accurately with digital advertising, but the approach is much hit and miss when it comes to timing.
Moodoo, on the other hand, can provide visibility to your target customers at the most relevant time: when the decision-making process is taking place. For example, a restaurant in Bandra could promote itself to a group of friends who are deciding where to go for dinner in Bandra that evening.
Given the efficiency of our backend, we can very quickly break even at the point that this advertising platform goes live. Moodoo’s direct connection with the real world (unlike most “social” apps) also opens up revenue channels such as commissions from ticket purchases or table bookings.
How dense is your user base? What are the popular demographics witnessed?
Since January, we have acquired 1,500 users, growing at over 100 per cent each month. It is still early and we expect this number to increase significantly once our marketing strategies kick off.
We have seen the most downloads from the 25-34 age group, with a pretty equal balance between men and women.
Which is your biggest market? What kind of response is Moodoo receiving from non-tier I cities?
Mumbai is our biggest market, London our second biggest. We are focusing our efforts on Tier 1 cities for now because this is where we feel Moodoo can add the most value, both in terms of facilitating impromptu get-togethers and by suggesting venues based on your mood.
What are your future plans? Where do you see Moodoo two years down the line?
Moodoo is not geography-specific so our aim is to become the global go-to app for meeting up with friends. It will obviously take time and a lot of hustle to get there, but we are very determined! And we are already seeing the app used in the UK, India, Sri Lanka and Australia.
