(From right to left): Ram and Laxman Papineni, co-founders of AppVirality, with their friend Madhu who quit his high-paying job with an IT major to join AppVirality.
Growth hacker for mobile apps AppVirality, one of Tech in Asia’s Startup Arena finalists at Startup Asia Singapore 2014, has raised US$465,000 in seed funding from prominent investors, including Google India managing director Rajan Anandan and Nasscom product council chairman Ravi Gururaj.
The Hyderabad-based startup founded by brothers Laxman and Ram Papineni offers a plug-and-play white-labelled toolkit for mobile app developers to identify and implement growth techniques without having to code. The aim is to increase app downloads and user engagement through organic channels. “If you open any of our clients’ apps, you will have no clue if they are using AppVirality or not, unless you decompile the app’s SDK (software development kit),” says Laxman Papineni, CEO and co-founder.
Look ma, no code
Today AppVirality released a new growth hack called “Personalized in-app referrals”. This helps app developers configure a referral campaign, track clicks and installs, and then convert through personalization. The AppVirality SDK, integrated into the app running the campaign, enables the developer to use the toolkit’s dashboard to change text, images, or rewards, depending on the user’s behavior, location , and other characteristics. All this through a WYSIWIG dashboard and no code.
In-app referrals are a tried-and-tested growth hack used by popular apps like Uber, Airbnb, and Freecharge to get new users. For example, Uber gives new users a promo-code which can be shared with others for free rides. “If new apps by young startups want to run a referral program and have a 360-degree approach on what’s happening, it takes a lot of time and effort to build the analytics and dashboard required. AppVirality’s new growth hack can do it for them easily,” Laxman explains. If a developer wants to make any change in his app’s referral program, all he needs to do is to note it on the AppVirality dashboard, make the changes, and click the publish button. The changes will be reflected on the app user’s mobile screen immediately.
Another growth hack gives incentives to customers who install the app to share their experiences with friends on social media. Neither coding nor updates from the Play Store are needed for either of these growth hacks to be incorporated into any app which has the AppVirality SDK.
AppVirality has a slab-based pricing model. Mobile apps with monthly active users up to 10,000 can use the toolkit for free. It will charge US$149 for apps with 10,000 to 100,000 monthly active users, and the next slab up to 250,000 will be charged US$249.
Microsoft Ventures and Rajan Anandan
The Papineni brothers got a chance to pitch to the Microsoft Ventures (MSV) accelerator when they hadn’t even finalized the code for AppVirality. They joined the accelerator, completed the product, and participated in the Startup Arena in Singapore last year.
The investment round happened after Rajan Anandan contacted them out of the blue, wanting to find out more about AppVirality right after their demo day at MSV. “We met him again after three months in Hyderabad, had a 10-minute chat with him, and he said he was going to invest in us. Once Rajan Anandan commmitted, we got a lot of investor interest,” Laxman recalls.
VC firms India Internet Group and TNN Capital, InMobi vice president of technology Mohit Saxena, aQuantive co-founder Mike Galgon, and Baron Capital research analyst Ashim Mehra are other investors who participated in this funding round.
AppVirality currently is a six-member team working out of the campus of IIIT (International Institute of Information Technology) in Hyderabad. The funding will go towards hiring more developers and building up the product with new growth hacks.
From MomGrocer to AppVirality
Laxman’s elder brother Ram Papineni is the tech guy behind AppVirality. The brothers are post-graduates from Hyderabad’s Osmania University. They were active tech bloggers while at college, and drew enough visitors to get paid ads. “We used to earn some good money, and that prompted us to pursue it further. We created over 30 blogs. Advertisers came to us asking for recommendations on others like us. So we decided to build a network of bloggers called Makeideaz in 2009,” Laxman says.
The Makeideaz network grew to over 3,000 bloggers, with a turnover of of INR40 million (US$642,000). Meanwhile, the brothers also started an egrocer called MomGrocery in Hyderabad. This picked up pace in six months, but “ecommerce is tough; so we sold the company, and used that money to start AppVirality in February 2014,” Laxman says.
The brothers also sold Makeideaz to one of their friends, and decided to focus on a tech product for popularising mobile apps. “We worked in the tech services space for three years, and felt it was time to build something much more scalable. We made some good money selling MomGrocery, which we put into AppVirality,” Laxman says.
AppVirality’s market now is largely in the US, so the company is registered in Delaware.
See: App Virality: getting your app to go viral is now a necessity
This post AppVirality gets seed funding from Google India MD to help your app go viral appeared first on Tech in Asia.
AppVirality gets seed funding from Google India MD to help your app go viral
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