Konotor for small business? My first hackathon!
3 weeks ago, I participated in my first hackathon - organized by Capital One in San Francisco. I really enjoyed the experience and would definitely do it again :)
The focus of the hackathon was to build for small businesses. One of the 4 major problem areas identified was “customer engagement”. We were told small businesses in US spend 5 times more money to acquire new customers than to retain customers, and hence customer support and engagement was very important to their business.
For those of you who don’t know - I build Konotor, a mobile-first user engagement platform, focused on re-imagining how marketing and CRM works in the mobile world. We provide an SDK for app developers and work with some of the top mobile apps in the commerce space in India today. So naturally the customer engagement problem appealed to me and my team set about creating a solution for this.
Here’s a gist of our hack for the event:
* We built a small business owner a simple mobile app to publish their deals/ announcements/ etc through simply sending a text or picture message (Over The Top - like whatsapp/iMessage). This is something they loved and appreciated for its simplicity and familiarity when we showed them the experience.
* A mobile app through which a user could follow small businesses. This may be a local coffee shop or a mom and pop store or any local service provider the user usually deals with. Now the user can
(a) chat with the business for support or queries by simply messaging them from the app - text, voice, picture messages and
(b) get notified of updates/deals offered by the business of their interest when they open the app
There is no private messaging platform today connecting small businesses with their customers. We thought of the one app for all small businesses vs. auto-creating an app for each small business and went with the first option for the hack (not far from what my friends at Haptik build, but for a different target market).
I have since shared this with a few small business owners, and they love the simplicity of the idea, and also the option of having their own app they can give out to their loyal users as a way to provide support, tips and tricks, announcements, etc. They aren’t all on twitter and feel there is too much happening there to be noticed, but can see themselves paying and using this product to stay connected with their loyal users.
Maybe there’s something there. Should we build “Konotor for Small Businesses”? ;)
