I have no idea which RD Burman song has the word Vakow!, but it was powerful enough for die-hard RD fans Rahul Gupta and Amit Upadhyay to pick as the name of their startup. Vakow! was in the news today for tying up some funding (amount and stake undisclosed) from Rediff. The Mumbai-based startup, which formally launched last October, offers an SMS-based mobile networking/content sharing service, something like Twitter — quite agree with Contentsutra’s take. One cheeky feature they have however is that you can post on Twitter via Vakow and bring down the cost of SMS. I had a quick chat with Rahul (mostly) and Amit (briefly) this evening and found out more about the two founders and their startup.
So, first things first, how will/does Vakow make money? “We don’t make any money now,” comes Gupta’s candid response, very quickly. But they hope to and advertising seems to be the chief revenue channel they have in mind. The two didn’t earn a salary from their business until 2-3 months ago, which is actually when the Rediff investment happened. Otherwise, cost of operations are pretty low though an exact break-up isn’t available. For Rediff this is an strategic investment and it is easy to assume that Vakow will eventually be acquired by the Nasdaq-listed firm. But that is still some time away and for now Gupta and Upadhyay want to see how far they can go on their own.
At 28 and 27 respectively, Gupta and Upadhyay have been around quite a bit after graduating from IIT Bombay in 2003. “We wanted to be entrepreneurs from day one,” says Upadhyay. So back in 2001-2002 they started work on their first project — “a smart landline phone,” remembers Gupta a bit wryly. It didn’t go too far and after shutting down that project they joined Rakesh Mathur’s new Internet startup Webaroo (the website seems to be down). Gupta was senior product manager and Upadhyay was senior software engineer. The two quit last January and debuted their company at BarCamp Mumbai2 on October 9th.
What’s next? Some more features and perhaps more hands. The two founders are also the company’s only two employees at the moment. So far not taking those lucrative on-campus job offers at IIT seems to have paid off. “That was Plan B, but looks like we don’t need that plan anymore,” signs off Upadhyay.
