Exclusive email interaction with Mr. Jitin Bhatia, Founder & CEO, Explurger
Khushagra: What is Explurger all about? What are its features?
Jitin: Explurger is a social media app perfect for connecting, sharing and making friends. It is redefining the way we socialise with its unique features and approach. Sharing experiences takes centre stage on this social media app. Besides posting pictures and videos you can keep a count of the exact miles, cities, countries & continents travelled. Users from more than 50 countries are already experiencing the joy of this global social media app.
You can add miles and places to your automatic travelogue, create a cool bucket list, get rewarded for being active and much more! Some of our popular features are:
- Automatic Travelogue Creation: Check-ins are temporary, Explurge-ins are forever. Every time you create a post or Explurge-in to a place, the app’s Artificial Intelligence updates your personalized Travelogue. So, every mile, city, country, pub, club and whatnot get added to it. Since fellow Exlpurgers can see the Travelogue, it is worth all that bragging.
- Explurger Levels: Gamifying travel for the very first time, now you can increase your Explurger level. How? Every single mile you travel, city you visit, post you spread or Kudos you accumulate, the excitement goes up… and so does your Explurger level!
- Rewards: Get rewarded for being socially active. Explurger is a one-of-a-kind social app that rewards users for being active on the platform. The more you share or the more you travel, the higher your level goes and more rewards get unlocked.
- Bucket List: Love it, add it! The next time you see a picture or a post being shared from an interesting place, you can add it to your bucket list with a single tap. And while you might forget about it after doing so, the app won’t. Explurger pops up a reminder whenever you are near that travel destination.
Give a shout-out to your next destination! Share your travel plans with the world with just a few taps. Simply, select a destination, enter the future date of travel and tap ‘Spread’. A ‘Live Countdown Timer’ will engage everyone. It allows travellers and communities to collaborate with ease. Start your social media experience even before you start the trip!
Khushagra: What was your main focus when you started this app? What were your missions and visions?
Jitin: My work needed me to travel a lot. In 2017, when I returned from a business trip, my staff told me that it was my 62nd international business trip in a span of eight years. That had me thinking that if there was a way to keep a count of the number of times one travelled away from home, or told people how many miles, or how many cities or countries one travelled to… That would be a great asset. That was my ‘Eureka moment’. When my friend Sonu Sood and I met, we both shared the same thought about it — it was a fantastic idea!
Besides, I also observed that there was a sense of exclusion for most of the users on many social media platforms. Only a handful, less than 0.5% are verified, despite the number of talented content creators being much higher. These others have no recognition on social platforms. I wanted to give users the power to create their own recognition based on their engagement. With that thought, we became the first social media platform to introduce the concept of gamification. It also makes us a very exciting app.
I also felt that only a handful of influencers make money from social media. But there are so many out there who are creating fantastic content but are not gaining anything from those platforms. So, that’s how the idea of Rewards was born. The more you engage on Explurger, the more Rewards you unlock. Now, everyone is a winner on Explurger.
Our vision it to create a social media platform that gives back to the user and offers more than instant gratification. Our mission is simple. With the user being our universe, we thrive to create memories in the form of personalized travelogues, reward people for engaging more, gamifying the social scene, and empowering all to create a unique social identity for themselves.
Khushagra: What are you company’s target users, and how are you reaching out to more and more people?
Jitin: Our target user is everyone and anyone who likes connecting with people, discovering new things and is a traveller at heart. If you love to travel to new destinations, if you love browsing about new destinations, if you enjoy watching content about travel — Explurger is for you. And travel doesn’t always have to be big and fancy. When you go to a neighbourhood café, visit a society park, catch up with friends at a nearby hangout, all that is travelling too. So, if you have a smartphone, you like connecting with people, you are an explorer… We love you and you should be on Explurger.
Khushagra: What were the challenges you faced while entering the market?
Jitin: When we decided to introduce our product to the world, it was right in the middle of the pandemic. In fact, it was worse than being in the middle because it was the middle of the first lockdown, people were still figuring out what was Covid-19, how fatal it was and everyone was still trying to come to terms with it. We were advised to not launch it during the lockdown. However, we were very confident that we had a good product with us. Also, we saw it as the perfect time to take people travelling virtually. Another challenge was that when we announced Explurger, people thought we were just another social media app. However, soon we grew to have users from 40 countries! All organic. And within 20 days of our official launch, where Sonu Sood revealed himself to be the co-founder, we have added users from at least 10 more countries. And we are growing by word of mouth. Our users have sent 90 million invites recommending our app to their friends and family.
Khushagra: How is Explurger different from other social media apps?
Jitin: Explurger is unlike anything that you have seen before. Our unique features make our app more of a companion for travellers and those looking to go beyond sharing pictures. We are a keeper of people’s precious memories. Your pictures do not vanish into oblivion on Explurger. They become part of the travelogue which is created automatically for you by our cutting-edge AI. A lot of users love the fact that they can see how many miles they have travelled, how many countries, places they have visited and how many times.
We are getting a lot of kudos for our feature called the Bucket List, which is a super-fun feature. If you see someone Explurge-in at an interesting place, simply add that place to your Bucket List. Next time you are around that area, and no matter how many years later, Explurger will remind you to check out that place.
Another big winner for our users is the Rewards section. The more active you are on the app; the more Rewards open up for you eventually.
Khushagra: What does the future roadmap look like?
Jitin: The future looks very bright. Within 20 days of the launch, we have got 300,000 new users from 50 countries. They have loved the app from the word go. About 90 million invitations have been sent by our users to invite their friends and family. That’s a glowing endorsement of our product’s variability potential.
The future roadmap includes enhancing the product, adding new features such as Raffles, start an aggressive marketing campaign. In the coming years, we would like to see ourselves in the top 5 social media apps in the world.
