Vmoot gives the common man a voice on issues affecting them: Kunal Shelar, Vmoot

A Pune based startup has found the perfect time to launch their debating and polling social platform. Vmoot has been launched when the country is right in the middle of a long drawn election season. This platform aims to help the common man raise a voice on issues affecting them.

“The Questions and Opinion (Q&O) platform can be used to post questions, either in the form of a debate or as an interactive poll,” said Kunal Shelar, Founder & CEO, Vmoot.

Tell us about Vmoot. Is it a social media platform?

Vmoot is a Questions and Opinion (Q&O) platform that can be used to post questions, either in form of a debate or as an interactive poll, discuss the issues related to politics, city and local affairs, sports, entertainment, etc. with people who have similar interests and to arrive at particular opinion based on the discussion. Users can also invite friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter to participate.

It is a social media platform as it allows users to create questions and share the content on other social media platforms, however, because we do not have integrated followers options, it is still not a complete social media platform.

How is your platform different from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter?

As our focus is more on debating, Vmoot has all the features that you will want while debating. Once the question or opinion is provided it can't be deleted after 10 minutes, As we want people to give their opinion without any fear, we have the option of going anonymous in all activities. Users cannot just dislike any one's opinion, he/she has to give justification for it only then the dislike for opinion gets counted. Users can discuss opinions with other users and then give a final opinion whether in agreement or disagreement to the question. Opinion, whether users agree or disagree, can be found at one glance rather than going through each and every opinion which one has to do on Facebook and Twitter. If the topic of interest is not available in the list, the user can create one and start debating on it. Voice notes allow users to raise questions and give opinions through voice. All opinions on our platform get counted, and a final statement is made once the debate is over, hence understanding users' thought process regarding that particular question which normally doesn't happen on Facebook and Twitter.

Was it a strategic decision to launch around election time because this is the time most debates and discussions take place?

Yes, it was strategic decision to launch during election time as we wanted users to discuss the political candidates without any fear; discuss the work done by different political parties and come up with a conclusion after discussion.

Can you tell us more about your revenue model? Are you taking advertisements?

Currently, we are in the process of gaining maximum traction on our platform. Once we achieve our user base we will implement an advertisement model where we will be pitching our platform to different companies, promoting their questions across our platform and providing them maximum feedback, suggestions and complete analytics of the opinion, thus helping them to improve their products and services.

Tell us more about the polling and debating on the platform. Has it been well received? What are your future plans?

Users have appreciated this unique concept and have provided helpful suggestions and feedback regarding their experience on our platform. We are making changes to the platform accordingly.

Debates related to trending topics going on Twitter is receiving a high amount of participation. Political and sports topics, as well as issues related to the cities, has seen the active involvement of youth (18 to 30 years). Questions promoted on other social media platforms are helping us get active participation on our platform as every user wants their opinion to be counted.

Private debating is being used the most, to discuss among friends, employees, etc. Our future plan is to create an app and API so that it will be integrated with various online news portals that will allow people to share questions directly on our platform.

We also plan to get experts on our panel to evaluate the results of the debates and polls. We are currently in talks with the PMC and Traffic Division to create their pages. This will help them monitor the issues, feedback, and opinions that are provided by citizens in one glance. Youth will be the future decision makers for any country, so we are planning to promote debates in colleges and other educational institutions and reward the best debaters in order to boost debating amongst the youth.