Launched in December 2017, Bangalore-based hyper local social marketplace, IamHere, solves the problem of location-based discovery and collaboration for hobby, interest and business. IamHere provides location as a platform for you to connect with those having similar interests or to connect with businesses and professionals in your locality.
It is a crowd-sourced, community-controlled social app where you can find people on the map. On the user-friendly IamHere app, you can create your profile in less than a minute with multiple avatars for your hobby, interest or business. If someone else is looking for you, you will show up on the map and you can get connected over a simple chat interface.
Once on the app, you can also share stories, you can create or join events, you can engage in social activities, you can make donations to NGOs nearby - the list is endless. All in complete privacy with different anonymity levels.
People have started finding like-minded ones near them on the IamHere app. Businesses have eased up to the idea of connecting with their local clientele by running promotions and campaigns. NGOs have started doing engagement drives with their cause audience. Event organizers are connecting with their target crowd. Whether new to the city and wanting to make friends or old in the city and wanting to know your neighborhood, IamHere is the one stop app for all your hyper local needs.
"We have about 20K users on IamHere just in Bangalore. There are 2K searches happening on the app every single day and we just clocked 300K searches on the app since launch. 30% of our users do at least 5 searches in a week, which means there is a real need we are fulfilling for them," said Naren Kumar on how IamHere has been received in the market.
"We are doing a pan-India launch during Daan Utsav, The Joy of Giving Week, where we are partnering with Goonj and Guidestar to run country-wide campaigns for the social sector, locally. Over the next few months, we are looking to strengthen our technology stack by working on recommendation algorithms using Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning. We are thinking of including vernacular localisation too," added Kumar.
Talking about how IamHere has helped his business, Nitin Kora, a natural oil business owner in Bangalore says, "IamHere has helped me in not just business promotions, but also in hiring sales executives, I must admit we have been able to increase our sales after IamHere.
Hyper local apps have been quite successful in matching demand with supply in the most optimised manner. IamHere has the right product to match its grand vision of connecting people with their neighbours, and could well be the next big technology inspiration for the growing Indian startup ecosystem.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
