A JINY to help 'Bharat' users learn mobile apps and transact online

The Bengaluru-based start-up is helping 40-year-plus users in small towns shed their fear of e-commerce, hand-holding them through the process of transacting online

It is rare to find anyone today who doesn’t have an uncle or aunt obsessing over WhatsApp forwards. In the present times, older people (40-plus age bracket) are about as WhatsApp-savvy as the younger generation.

Same is the case with YouTube. The relative ease with which a user can learn YouTube or WhatsApp is a major reason behind their growing popularity beyond tier-I cities, a segment where app companies are battling it out for the next level of growth. 

However, this is not the case with all apps. There are several like Flipkart, RedBus and Zomato- the top grossing apps among the metro users – which are seeing slow adoption in regional markets. One reason is that first-time users are skeptical when it comes to transacting online (majority of top consumer app businesses are into e-commerce, where transactions are valued over traction). The other reasons is that, some apps may just be too complicated to be understood or handled by users who are not that digitally savvy. 

So the need to train such users to use the apps, and help them go all the way out to do a transaction on their own, is an interesting business proposition. This is the goal of JINY, a new tech start-up from Bengaluru. 

JINY adds the capability of a visual-cum-voice assistant to any mobile application, to guide the user through the work-flow. Pointer, highlights and voice commands guide users through things like going to the recharge page, choosing the travel date, and making payments by keying in the card details and the OTP at the right place. The experience is almost like another person teaching you how to use the app. 

Kushagra Sinha, co-founder, JINY, says most people thought, or still think that the problem is with the language of instruction. If it’s in vernacular, people will be comfortable and use it heavily, it is assumed. “In 2015, Snapdeal was launched in 12 languages, but a year later shut down the localisation project because it did not bring them any real upside. The same thing happened with MMT (MakeMyTrip),” says Sinha. 

The real issue, according to him, is that the visual language of an app is not designed keeping in mind a non-English speaking, non-Internet savvy users in the 40-plus age group and hence is not intuitive enough for them to pick up organically. “For example, in MMT, a user may not know that she first has to put the (original) location, then the destination followed by the date of travel. The first-time user will have to be taught this work flow.”

Sinha, a design graduate from Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati, had a bird’s eye view of this problem while working as a UI/UX (user interface/user experience) researcher at Flipkart. His job was to conceptualise work-flows and app designs that would work with small town users, a class now labelled as the “Bharat”.

At Flipkart he met his co-founder, Sahil Sachdeva, a software developer who attended IIT-Hyderabad. Both called it quits towards the middle of 2017 to work on a plug-and-play product for assistive guidance in the app.

“The tech and product we have built has no precedent anywhere in the world, so we had to work really hard developing it ground up,” says Sinha. “It took us one and a half years.”

The product is squarely focussed on increasing app usage, all the way up to transaction, among the ‘Bharat’ users. Of the 566 million internet users in India, only 120 million are transacting users. This is far lower than China, where 600 million of 800 million total internet users transect online. 

Jio is one of the first customers of JINY. “They told us that despite their massive reach, 150 million installed users base (MY Jio App), people are not doing recharges, which is it the primary use-case. We are helping to make their users into transacting users,” says Sinha. 

JINY comes as a SDK (software developments kit), a list of software codes, that any app developer can incorporate in the parent app, and JINY features go live on it. Through multiple iterations, JINY has been programmed to understand the user app-screen, the task a user may be looking to accomplish, and speak out instructions accordingly and timely.

As part of research for the product, the company conducted a study with a sample audience in Lucknow. Of the set of people that the company surveyed, none was able to book a bus ticket on RedBus on their own. However, with the JINY assistant, a whopping 90 per cent were able to complete the booking. “This was a big confidence booster for product,” recounts Sinha.

Along with other pilots currently on-going, JINY is in talks with a large global social media company to see how it can help the latter improve user stickiness in small towns and vernacular markets. 

Now a seven-member team, JINY has raised $720,000 from 3one4 Capital, Ankur Capital, and angel investors including Rajesh Sawhney.