O’Hi started in 2021 with Jaipur and Goa as their pilot cities, intending to further move to Gurgaon, Pune and Bangalore. The brand has recently raised INR 3 Cr. in seed funding from marquee investors such as Mr Rahul Mehta (Managing partner DST), Angellist US among others. The brand is a result of Rupal Sharma and Adeeti Singh brainchild. In just six months of running beta, O’hi has seen over 56K user’s behavior, they are diving deep into each & every expectation of authentic, instant socializing. They will soon be going for the next raise to move out of Beta, accelerate growth & double down on growth hacks, user intends that has shown strong signs of being a Global sensation. Below is a snippet from a recent interaction between team IT-Voice and Founders of o’hi app, Adeeti Singh & Rupal Sharma:
Prateek: What is the story behind the inception of O’Hi?
Adeeti Singh: Story behind “ O hi “ is really interesting . We had always been fascinated, excited about different kinds of people that walk into Cafes / Lounges every hour, every day. Those admirations , curiosity, anxiety to know someone they are seeing was some of the most common traits we could see all the time as we spend hours & hours in cafes across different parts in IndiaWe were earlier running a platform that was showing users stats of live crowds in Cafes / Lounges, We saw users using it frequently & then we went deep inside to understand that Crowd had immense value as the unattended need of instantly socializing in cafes was missed by each & everyone.Then we ran a social experiment, went randomly to a cafe asked all the customers there that “if they recall any incidence where they wanted to speak to someone in a cafe / Lounge but couldn’t due to hesitation or fear of public reaction”. Surprisingly all 76 people in that cafe had a story to tell of that “Kaash baat karli hoti “moment in cafes. That was the Eureka moment for us.
Prateek: What is the core vision of the brand? What are some of the challenges that you faced?
Adeeti Singh: Core vision of the Brand is to be the biggest, strongest real life instant socializing network across the world. To make the world a place where face to face trust can be build up among people instantly being in the same physical space – Get people out of the digital world & making them feel how beautiful it is to instantly meet / connect face to faceWe don’t think it as a challenge as such but it was about rapid testing ,understanding how diversified but interesting the different behaviors of people are on different days of week & in different cafes . We use to run 2-3 experiments every week to gather all possible user behaviors
Prateek: What are some of the dominating trends in the social networking space?
Rupal Sharma: Dominating trend in social spaces majorly revolves around the FOMO being an active part of a new social network which is something majorly used by the social platforms these days to generate that curiosity, eagerness among the users.
Prateek: What features make O’Hi stand apart from other social media platforms?
Rupal Sharma: To be honest the features that will make us successful in the long run are very lean & are results of years of on ground observation, 6 months of Data analysis with over 50+ different tests. To put in simple words the core differentiating feature that allows people to connect with someone on another table when in the same cafe / lounge without letting anybody around notice & yet being very safe to interact .
Prateek: What will be your growth strategies in the coming years?
Rupal Sharma: Growth strategy is simple. We are going slow in the beta phase to get super deep insights of all possible sets of age groups, days , cafes etc. We have been testing various growth hacks. Post Getting out of Beta in the coming Quarter we will open our app to Top 5 cities of India , NYC , San Francisco, Singapore. Than by end of 2024 we will be available for people 50+ countries across globe
