As startup fever grips one of the most ancient cradles of humanity, as wars continue to be raged on social media over culinary delicacies, we carry on with the forward cry in the realm of tech and innovation.
Airwoot belongs to the innovative breed of products put forth by the startup Memetic Lab. They had earlier impressed industry insiders with Barometer which is an infographic for brands from India. And it works in real time. Shortly thereafter they entered the social media analytics market in India with Airwoot. In this article, we chronicle the development of Airwoot as conceived and experienced by the people who were instrumental in creating it.
Airwoot is the brainchild of Prabhat Saraswat and Saurabh Arora. The duo got acquainted with each other in Denmark in the year 2008 while pursuing their higher studies. They became good friends and shared a lot of things. As Saurabh put it to Your story “We discovered art, music and much more importantly- the power of ideas, while we were studying.”
Following their courses in Denmark’s Technical University Prabhat pursed his Doctorate in the same country while Saurabh was off to Berlin to complete his doctoral studies in Cloud Computing Architecture at Hasso-Plattner Institute. The two remained in touch mostly. As fate would have both dropped out of their doctorates to return to India by 2011. Saurabh was now employed at Fluid Digital, a digital media concern. They again somehow stumbled into each other and during November to February of the winter of 2011-2012 attended a number of hackathons.
Memetic Labs was born as the result of the interaction between the two. They came out with an Android App which has the ability to come up with the guitar tablatures of any live music which it hears. Memetic Labs also developed a social reading app. This app scans twitter feeds to inform who is reading and what he is reading.
As might be expected they started to mine buying intention data of consumers from Twitter. It was during this time that Barometer was conceived after they tracked Twitter’s most active brand at the international level. This infographic which works in real time helps to evaluate the social media practices of leading brands when it comes to customer care. It is a real-time visualization of conversations between users and brands. They helped to “spread awareness of social customer care as a practice, that brands should follow as a defined business process” as Saurabh puts it and eventually the duo came up with the social customer care Airwoot platform.
Airwoot operates out of India’s capital New Delhi. They facilitate the engagement process of businesses with their clients and serves as customer support working in real time. If you have been struggling to respond to users on social media then Airwoot eases your predicament by letting you figure out the priorities of your brand and act accordingly in real time. The service is in the pilot stage which has already attracted the attention of major brands. The creators of Airwoot are looking for a 1000% profit, a moonshot while changing the very landscape of customer support in India.
Fundraising was a challenge admits Saurabh as the two struggled with tight budgets till their baby found its way to The Morpheus, an accelerator based out of Chandigarh. Morpheus had to say this about Airwoot “We (At Morpheus) love the passion and craziness with which these guys have been working towards building a product that we believe will change the way brands interact with their customers, build a public opinion about their brand or increase revenues for themselves.” Scaling the business is the next priority of the two friends who have so far been assisted by only by a developer hired by them.
Brands find the prospect of having a real-time social media management tool to be attractive considering the potential scale of social media. Indications are that Airwoot is poised to follow the SaaS model with incentives for bulk packages. The passion of the two promises to not only bring the Moonshot to the duo but also let the predicaments of buyers and brands be solved for good.
