Mr. Rajiv Kumar, Founder and CEO, RockeTalk

“We do not have revenue targets for 2010. We are not looking to make revenue at all this year. Our core focus is and will remain to get as many members as possible. We will make some revenue this year but that is going to be negligible… Our plans are very ambitious, though within the parameters of realism. Right now we are 2 million users in India. In the next 12 months it is expected to grow to 10 million. And we firmly believe we can get there, solely because it is not company driving growth but the current users inviting more users.”

Q. Airtel said that RockeTalk is the most downloaded application in India. What is the scenario with other cellular providers in India? Airtel recorded this phenomenal surge in downloading RockeTalk because it has a dedicated applications store. Aircel is about to launch its own applications store. Vodafone too has an applications store but they have launched it in only two-three markets so we have the exact numbers for Vodafone. But RockeTalk is an application that can be used on a phone powered by any cellular service. Idea Service has realized that we are generating a lot of revenue for them so they have co-branded the application and now it is called Idea-RockeTalk. The colour theme is same as Idea.

Q. What are the revenue streams for RockeTalk? What are its strong and weak regions in India?

There are two revenue streams. One is a page on RockeTalk where there are links to sites like Hungama and Indiatimes. If our members go through our application to their content and furthermore to their paid content, like ringtones, a video, etc, then we get a share of the revenue earned. The second is mobile advertizing and that is still a section where we are testing waters.

The strongest regions are the Maharashtra and Gujarat belt. This is followed by UP and the surrounding Hindi belt. Delhi NCR region comes in third place. The weakest region has been the North-East states. We have been trying to identify reasons for this but we think it is primarily because of the limitation of data penetration because of the Government regulations.

Q. Could you name a few marketing initiatives that RockeTalk has undertaken? A large chunk of RockeTalk’s success has been viral but we have engaged BTL marketing often in the past. We have, in the past, gone to places where people gather traditionally. There we tried assessing their behavioral patterns and determined what people do with the data in their phones. And then we channelised communities around the findings. We are initiating beta groups in various demographics that will become larger sustainable groups over time.

Q. What are the revenue targets for 2010 financial year? How has the performance been in Q1 as compared to targets? We do not have revenue targets for 2010. We are not looking to make revenue at all this year. Our core focus is and will remain to get as many members as possible. We will make some revenue this year but that is going to be negligible. And as for the performance in Q1 in terms of the number of people added to our member-base the performance has exceeded expectations considerably. The trajectory has really taken off. This quarter we are adding more than 3 lakh users every month. We have already seen 20 per cent growth month on month. Although our target is 10-12 million by year end we know we will easily cross 15 million. And these are just Indian numbers.

Q. It has been 15 months since the launch of RockeTalk in India. How has the journey been so far? When did you start operations in India? When we started we were adding not more than 50 users a day. Now we have reached a point of adding ten to twelve thousand users each day. We have now totaled more than two million users of this application in India. It was a function of the coverage of the phones as well. Earlier there was a problem of catching up with the various GPRS enabled handsets that were available in the market. But now we have caught up and RockeTalk is supported on more than 500 different handset models. We are going to the US and launching our iPhone and Android applications as well. The largest chunk of our members is still in India and the next is in Indonesia.

Q. Where there any particular challenges that you faced when setting up shop in India? Were there any advantages as well regarding the Indian mobile market? Given the number of dialects and languages in India, it was always a challenge to use text services for mobile services. This has indeed turned out to be the biggest advantage because people have switched to using Rocketalk faster than we anticipated. The voice chat was the most compelling feature for the users. Mostly text messages are in English and in the tier-I cities everyone is ok typing in English. The greatest acceptability for RockeTalk came from Eastern UP, Bihar and Gujarat. This came as a revelation to us as well. What turned out to be a challenge for a typed chat has turned out to be an advantage for us. All the users of text messaging must be literate. But users of our application may be illiterate and still use it with ease. On the other hand, we faced a lot of challenges as well as initially there were a lot of phones in the market and almost all of them needed a different version of the application. Another big speed-bump that we faced was getting people aware about the access of data. People in the metros are up to par when it comes to mobile technology but going to semi-rural and rural places and a phone is primarily used for talking and nothing else. Thirdly, the cost of mobile internet was very high. Now it has comes down on the economies of scale and also because of the competition. When we started out the internet on mobiles was only available on postpaid connections. Now it is virtually available through all plans and all providers.

Q. Mobile social networking is a sphere that is yet to reach its full potential in a market like India. How do you perceive the next five years will be for RockeTalk? Our plans are very ambitious, though within the parameters of realism. Right now we are 2 million users in India. In the next 12 months it is expected to grow to 10 million. And we firmly believe we can get there, solely because it is not company driving growth but the current users inviting more users. The growth has been exponential and we are maintaining a 20 per cent growth rate. And it always helps a member to have as many people he knows on RockeTalk list. Another exceptional feature is that RockeTalk members can send voice and photo chats to people who are not on RockeTalk as messages and the receiver can then download it. Once we have reached this immediate goal then we can look at other destinations. There will be derivative applications and we are striving for that. We have already been asked to develop a location based application specifically for India, which is purely social in nature.

Q. What are the unique features that you have introduced with RockeTalk? All the features of RockeTalk are unique. The cellular voice chat feature, sending of photos and video clips are all unique to RockeTalk. There is absolutely no other application in the world like it. Users can also send song files (copyright protected) to others on RockeTalk. The community building is yet another unique feature of this application. And users have taken to communities with a storm. And these are unlike communities one sees on Orkut or Facebook. Every time someone adds a voice or a video clip all the members of the community get to know about it. Now, there are more than seventy thousand communities in India alone.

Q. Who are your competitors and what is your positioning against them and what is your USP? We do not have competitors anywhere in the world as we are one-of-a-kind application. But at the mind-space level there is competition as there is only going to be a limited number of applications one will download on his phone and we do compete with other applications to be one that is downloaded. Any company that has an application of a social media or social gaming kind is our direct competitors.

Q. What is your advertizing budget and what are the various media that you advertise with? We do not have a budget and we have not spent a dime on advertising. We haven’t engaged print, digital, TV, radio. What we have done is developed a team whose work is to identify websites and social platforms that have large number of members who might be interested in RockeTalk and plant the seed of RockeTalk and then the product and its features does all the talking. We already have access to data of mobile internet users so we are aware of websites they visit and the kind of info they share. Operators spend a lot on our marketing. Idea and Airtel have spent a lot on our marketing because our success invariably means their success.