Aimed at improving bonding and connection in the neighbourhood, Vishal Sharma and Sudhir Goyal founded Talluk. It is a social networking platform that not only connects the people in the neighbourhood, but it also
connects the small businesses and service providers in a neighbourhood
with the residents of the same locality.
It is one stop platform that helps the
Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), Market Welfare Associations
(MWAs), communities and other groups to share and interact with each
other thus transforming the way these associations work.
IndianMediaBook gets in the conversation with Vishal Sharma to know the idea behind this concept of Talluk.
The Talluk
Talluk platform is user friendly and the
portal is seamlessly integrated with an email solution. The members are
provided with vendor management services such as dealing with local
kirana/ vegetable shop/ medicine shop, etc. The user can communicate
with the vendors, can refer them in the neighbourhood and can also rate
them for their services.
Talluk offers facility management such
as booking tennis court, club house, and party room, etc. It also
provides a ready tool for initiating discussion forums where residents
can discuss any topical issue concerning their society/locality.
Talluk’s other services include free
search, online chat in the neighbourhood, buy/sell, yellow pages, user
complaint registration, online RWA elections (online voting), customer
surveys, local news and neighbourhood story, etc. The highlight of
Talluk and its services are that these services are provided at no cost
to the user. Talluk has made life much easier by embracing an idea with
the innovative hand of technology.
Team Talluk
Talluk’s core team consist of the IT
professional founders Vishal Sharma and Sudhir Goyal. Sharma had found
TESS Overseas, a Bangalore-based company which has created a niche in
growing IT/software requirements in emerging economies in Africa &
APAC. On the other side, Goyal had found a B2B networking web-portal
around99 B2B search portal.
The Advisory Board consisting of
Abhishek Chauhan and Runal Dahiwade. Other team members are the sales
team who are the backbone of the company.
A small team of software development team, comprising of 3 members takes the total count of the heads to 10.
Opportunity and challenges
Sharma believes that popular Social
media seeing change in behaviour of the users as the attrition reaches
an all-time high. Adding to this, Sharma mentioned that social capital
is deteriorating rapidly and the extent of digitization of neighbourhood
has been able to penetrate only 1 per cent of the entire market.
Speaking about the opportunity in this
space, Sharma said, “We will see in the next 15 years the opportunity
will be 100 billion dollars industry with the tier 2 & 3 cities
expanding. Currently it is 9 billion dollars which comprises five major
cities.”
According to Sharma, the biggest
challenge was to develop the blue print of the technology stack.
However, the founder team has a strong technical background so after a
lot of internal brainstorming, the team managed to build a proper
product road map and understand the technology ecosystem needed where in
Talluk could thrive.
“Other challenges like presenting the
product to the end customers and digital marketing strategy were
addressed successfully with the help of the advisory board comprising of
one start-up enthusiast and one senior consulting professional who is
the practicing director at Frost & Sullivan,” added Sharma.
Business model
Talluk is an online private social
network which also facilitates RWA management and hyper-local services.
It provides a platform to the people to get connected with their
neighbourhood and enable transactions for hyper local services.
To generate revenue, Talluk deal in one
stop bill payment services, hyper local services and also subscription
for small business affiliation on Talluk. It also provides premium
mobile app subscriptions for safety.
The vision
At present Talluk is self-funded
venture, but it’s looking for investments and Sharma informed that they
are in talks for the same at an initial stages. However he also
mentioned that the venture is not looking for any kind of merger and
acquisition.
Sharma informed that Talluk received tremendous response be it from RWAs or residents or market welfare association.
Speaking about the performance, Sharma
said, “Within few months’ time we had already enrolled 44 resident
welfare associations, 7 market welfare associations with total number of
2189 users and the number is growing per month.”
Talluk has a green field area to play and have the necessary industry knowledge to come out as the winners.
“Our product is stabilized and is
accepted by the people. The vision now is to get funded and grow
exponentially. We believe that after the required funding is in place,
we can touch 1 million households within less than year,” concluded
Sharma.
