GetEchoed – Chase your goals with Social Support

How many times have you set goals, only to thrash them or brutally ignore them after a while? Well, we all have experienced it.  Studies have proved that publishing goals where people can see, such as social networks will lead to more accountability. How about a platform that integrates Social element into your goal achieving process, where people encourage, question or share their views on your goal? That’s precisely what GetEchoed is all about.

GetEchoed is a community driven platform helping you achieve tasks that you want to complete – short term or long term. GetEchoed helps you begin working on them – setting up a clear goal with a clear deadline.

User’s world in GetEchoed is a beautiful book of all the aspirational things they want to do – as they walk, work, make friends and as they live. It came from the concept of getting echoed on whatever one wants to be heard on – set out on their tasks – and the interested GetEchoed community will go the extra mile to ensure users have their attention and motivation along with the slick and sticky machine to help them crack those long-thought-of milestones.

 About GetEchoed

The idea for GetEchoed was conceived around August, 2013 – when one summer afternoon the developers had friends over at home. All of them were discussing opportunities and general life aspirations. The common thread was there were things all of them wanted to do – and do better. But none of them eventually ended pursuing that.

A major concern the group of people they were discussing was “it is very difficult to know what other people with similar goals / interest areas are upto. And all the current goal setting products are way too mechanical.” Hence even though solutions and mechanisms were existent in the real world to get us going off the ground; they were to little utility for “us as people” to get going.

The team realized that today – people need much beyond performance measurement apps. People need a product which talks to them as a friend and where they can talk to people around as friends. People need inspiration and not performance measures.

 The team

Arindam & Arpita are twin siblings. Dipanshu happens to be a school time friend; they have known each other for close to 8 years now. All three of them have helped friends on startup ideas together.

Arindam is a Deloitte Technology consultant, Slideshare & Linkedin Developer (3 years). Aprita is a psychology graduate and has rolled out multiple products and programs for client across Fortune 50 & Fortune 500 companies (4 years). Currently she is Managment Consultant at Aon Hewitt.  Dipanshu is IT Consultant for Juniper, CISCO & Avaya.

 The market research involved

The developers interacted with groups of people with similar interests – other than the routine way of interacting with individual users through surveys and quick chats.

The idea was to get validation / invalidation of the concept that how much do people care / get excited about / or are indifferent to the idea of working on their goals with the amplifying effect of a community.

Their validation was the already demonstrated user behavior on “Interest Based / Topic based groups” across social networks; followed by the validation from folks we interacted with that they would love to be inspired by people who are pursuing similar things and what are their learnings / experiences. Success is an outcome; failure is the process and people admitted to fall in love talking about it – if it was the “cool thing to talk about the journey” rather than a post facto expression

 The journey so far

There wasn’t a formal launch for GetEchoed in the conventional sense. The team has taken the organic growth route with step wise announcement across their distribution channels and social media.

They have 1000 signed up users at 40% returning active users; 2500 interactions registered. GetEchoed’s content marketing across channels – read Slideshare, Guest Blogs, FB & Twitter – have given them most of the traction. All the content that is on GetEchoed currently is user generated.

Their presentations in Slideshare have already been featured as Top Presentations on Slideshare and Trending Topics on Twitter . They have pitched GetEchoed informally at 91 Springboard bootcamp – and received brilliant feedback across participating startups and investor circle (Infoedge). The team has managed to get Infoedge members and Ex Harvard folks as their mentors early on.

 Reaching out to the masses

Content marketing and social media platforms have given GetEchoed the initial throttle very well.

Having taken the organic growth route has enabled them to maintain short, quick development cycles and be very well connected to their early adopters.

Slideshare, Twitter, Quora, Guest blogging and obviously Facebook – helped the team get through the initial mass of around 1000 users ; and help increase their reach to 1lakh potential users as on date – and they have been able to retain a fair amount (~40% users) as returning / referral users.

Going further, the team is rolling out GetEchoed with pronounced focus on a couple of communities. They shall do formal bloggers meet and a couple of press submission / reviews – the work for which is on the way – for starters. There are advanced plans of rolling out Content Marketing, Social Media and blogging in a more structured manner.

The challenges involved

Talent Challenges : Getting people to believe and collaborate / join core team in a startup. Indian developers / designers have their aspirations / ideologies. Its easier to get early sign ups ; more difficult to get a coder / designer to ‘partner’. To combat, they took interns on board; whom they trained in house. Now they are delivering reasonably good results.

Design thinking: A product of global stature and social-ish in nature needs to be talking to the users; just as a friend would. More so for GetEchoed – given it’s a fairly aspirational product. Striking balance through a lean development cycles with constant customer inputs has been challenging for the team.

Monetization Plans

The product has multiple channels to monetize – that will amplify the overall philosophy of the product and help users to stay inspired on top of their daily agenda. 2 identified channels as the developers see today:

Corporate Partnerships: Teaming with Corporates to help drive the employee engagement agenda in the organization; further the employer brand.

Brand Challenges: Companies roll out challenges that align with their overall values – connecting with users on their daily life imperatives rather than direct selling their products.

Their monetization strategies are under deliberation and they plan to roll them out only once they have moved out a certain portion of the Product Beta.

Future Plans

The team shall continue with the organic growth route coupled with the social media and content marketing route. The product as it stands today – will be furthered across different verticals [read interest areas] as they stand on GetEchoed to build strong communities.

Once they have stabilized user behavior across a couple of interest areas – is when they plan to be more aggressive in their outreach and visibility. By then, they intend to crack seed funding; which will help them tackle some of the outreach and distribution challenges.

 TTP’s take

We’ve tested the product for quite some time now, and the platform is addictive. The social nudging and encouragement are their best features. Social accountability is built in, and anytime people can ask the status of your goal. This make the goal setter put their best efforts towards reaching the goal. As we see, the competition in this market is cut throat, and developing a very loyal user base is a must. Wishing GetEchoed team all the very best!