This fun selfie competition app got its founder slapped

Friends tend to bring out the crazy in us. But in this new app, that’s precisely the plan.

Znapin offers challenges around which users can take selfies and videos – and then you can challenge your friends, in public or private. There are things like doing a chicken dance, eating a banana, taking a selfie with your toe, or stuffing thirty french fries in your mouth. Users can also “outselfie” others’ snaps by posting an even crazier selfie. All these can be shared from the app onto Facebook and Twitter.

Zip, znap, zoom

Znapin was founded in Mumbai, India, by Yash Kotak, Nyha Shree, and Ankur Kumar. Kotak is a techie at heart and has been designing websites since 1995. Kotak and Shree have worked on many other ventures together, such as Corporate Shift, KIncredible Tech, SonykLabs, and Becomingg Magazine. Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Znapin and Grannyads – a startup that helps advertisers with affiliate marketing.

Znapin stands for zippier new-age personal interactive network. It took Kotak about 45 minutes at Bru World Café in Mumbai to come up with that. Luckily for him, the domain name was readily available. However, the app didn’t always have this name. It was initially called SelfieChallenge. It was Guy Kawasaki who suggested Kotak that the app has potential but the name SelfieChallenge would hinder its growth. This instigated the team to come up with the zingier name.

A branded selfie

Apart from offering a fun way for users to connect with friends, Znapin is proving to be a valuable tool for brands to understand their target audiences. It can be used for customer profiling and affinity marketing. By throwing sponsored selfie challenges, brands can enhance their visibility, and by incentivizing users with freebies and discounts for participating in those challenges, enhance brand loyalty. That’s how the team wants to make money from the app.

Marketers can also track their target users’ behaviour by using the app’s photo analytics feature. If a guy posts his selfie with his friend in the background filling their common friend’s car with styrofoam packing peanuts, the brands get to know that guys of that age group prefer wearing sneakers, the kind of car they own, their preferred brand of sunglasses, shoes, and watches. These are valuable pieces of information for them.

Collaborating with brands is a great way of making money for the startup. But Kotak says the primary focus right now is enhancing the app’s user base. “Monetization will obviously come via brands but we will not be promoting programmatic sponsored ads. We are looking into several interactive ways for brands to co-exist with users without annoying and flooding them with sponsored and irrelevant promotional content,” adds Kotak.

Market validation can be painful

During the design and prototype stage, Kotak and Shree headed out to the streets for market validation of their app. Although, the process was quite successful and yielded some valuable feedback and insights on the product, Kotak received some unanticipated responses – he got slapped by a woman.

“During the guerrilla testing of the app, the responses we got from people was really exciting, and in the exuberance I approached this lady for her feedback. But to my disappointment, the first challenge that popped out was “No Pants No Problem” – the consequence was pretty much expected,” he recalls.

“It was however a key insight for us – stressing the need to add localization as we expand into newer demographics,” quips Kotak.

No selfies for these challenges