Abhinav Sree – Founder of SMSGyan, India

Here is another interesting interview by TheIndianStartup. Abhinav Sree is a co founder of SMS Gyan, a wonderful mobile/sms based service. Abhinav co founded Innoz Technologies with his 3 college friends. At Innoz, they primarily work on exciting mobile technologies. SMSGyan is the first product from Innoz Technologies.

What is your startup about?

We are a young innovative startup working on the mobile domain. Our first product SmsGyan is all about empowering mobile users providing web services via SMS. We deliver up to a max. of 500 characters results giving users full value for their money. ET POI finalists, DFJ CISCO Global BP Competition finalists, Innoz is a promising student startup and is now incubated under the iAccelerator program at IIM Ahmedabad.

What is the story behind Innoz Technologies. What led to the inception of SmsGyan?

Innoz is a story of 4 college friends getting together and doing something different rather than joining the rat race of job seekers. Being Student entrepreneurs isn’t easy but it sure wasn’t impossible. SmsGyan took birth due to the need for getting quick information from various sources to your mobile. The fact that sms has a huge market also inspired us a lot.

Which is the most popular feature of your service and which one are you most excited about?

Each new feature is pretty exciting for us. But I should say the most promising feature even by stats is PRICE. On average, a user uses this feature 14 times! This is precisely why we are looking forward to tie up with companies who can provide us with accurate results and even opportunities for our users to get a fair deal for the gadget which they request for.

We have also introduced SmsGyan in Gtalk which seems very exciting. All one has to do is add smsgyan@smsgyan.com to their Gtalk and send help for the list of keywords. So it makes a one place for all information and even promoting the websites of our partners can be done effectively.

SmsGyan was amongst the finalists of the Economic Times- Power or Ideas competition. Can you tell us about your experiences with this initiative?

For us personally it was a big learning point. Moving from just the technology to actually looking into financial points too. There were some good advices and we are working in too.

What is your revenue model? Do you charge for any of your services? Is advertising used to subsidize or completely cover your costs?

Each request costs the user Rs. 3. So the costs are covered if we mange to answer a considerable amount of queries per month.

Can you disclose a few statistics? What is your user base? How many of these are regular users?

In our beta stage we had around 25000 unique users and have successfully answered more than 3 lakh queries.

What are the future plans for SmsGyan and Innoz Technologies?

SmsGyan is already undergoing a lot of expansion plans. We are looking forward to building SmsGyan as a platform for a user to get any information whenever and wherever they want.

Innoz is also working on an exciting mobile application for file sharing and lots more. Right now its in a testing phase and looks very promising.

Full interview at TheIndianStartup »