This Indian founder battled social stigma to build an app

Before getting married last year, Niranjan Rao, one of the founders of contact management app 6degrees told his wife Nitya, an investment banker, to brace up for some hard times. He told her that they “wouldn’t be able to go out on holidays or long dinners because of work.” And that he had no idea when they could have kids. And yet she agreed to marry him. This is not a common occurrence in the Indian society.

Starting up in India is a worrisome decision, especially among the risk-averse working-class. Most neighborhood aunties think of entrepreneurship as glorified unemployment. Those who believe in an idea for a startup have to first come to terms with living without pay cheques. But for Indians who want to be an entrepreneur, that is not all. They also face social stigma.

“If things work out, all is well and everything will go along beautifully. And if the business is a flop, your wife will still love you and accept you as if you never gave them a testing time. Now that’s an investment if ever there was one – an investment that doesn’t ask for your monthly active users or stump you with a low valuation,” says Rao.

Rao and his co-founder Arun Samudrala have braved many a storm in their entrepreneurial journey.

Samudrala remembers an instance when he told his wife about a friend who just got promoted and bagged a shiny new chauffeur-driven car from his employer. He expected his wife to reply with some comforting words about how he too would own such a car some day, but she said: “Don’t worry – you too will give out such cars to your employees some day.”

The response came as a pleasant surprise to the founders. “That was just so amazing! If such a response doesn’t get you up and running again, nothing will,” says Rao.

Connect once, connect forever

Rao did his engineering from the Madras University and MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and ICICI Securities. Samudrala is a computer science engineer and a serial entrepreneur. He founded United Mobile Apps, which developed tech solutions with a focus on LTE and 4G tech.

Both Rao and Samudrala had been facing a common problem: losing touch with friends who change their contact details. Together, they decided to tackle it. They quit their jobs to launch 6degrees.

“Most of us have at least 1,000 contacts each. Even if on average, a user changes their phone number every five years, your phonebook is getting outdated every two days,” says Rao. “We are trying to create permanent relationships,” he says.

6degrees app looks just like a phone book. It self updates the details whenever anyone on the phonebook updates his or her profile. Symbols show all the various touchpoints with users, including Whatsapp and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. User can search through all their social networks in a single app.

The app also helps you get introductions through friends to others in their network.

“We have converted a linear listing into a network. Networking as an approach is already proven,” says Rao.