Former Times Internet's Head of Marketing, Sandeep Amar has launched his entrepreneurial venture, Pikboo.com, a platform to create websites for kids. The paid service will start from $65 for a year, in India it will start from INR 4500 for a year. The website created will be password protected.
India Digital Review caught up with founder and CEO of the company, Sandeep to understand the objective behind launching the platform, "The objective behind Pikboo is to provide a platform to capture and preserve memories of childhood. To preserve and immortalize the childhood memories - there as a need gap of a robust, secure and user friendly tool. Pikboo is the coolest tool to capture childhood on the web," he said.
The platform will have design templates, CMS, navigation and other unique features which will create websites with dedicated domains to help parents to track the life of the kid on the web. Parents will have the option of listing important details of each year, month and day either in form of content or photographs. The details can be shared with friends and relatives - with the help of privacy and security features. A comprehensive control panel will give complete control to parents to edit the details on website.
The venture has initial level funding from private individuals will soon look for another round informs Sandeep.
Talking about the monetisation plans of the company, Sandeep said apart from subscription model, Pikboo will introduce social commerce for kids, astrology services, kids deal card, photo printing services and even opt-in leads for BFSI products.
"We will also introduce a concept of "Hero Sites" - wherein a photo shoots will be there with the idols like Sushil Kumar, Saina Naiwal and MS Dhoni etc," he further added.
Pikboo is trageting the markets of India, US, Canada, UK and Western Europe.
"In international markets, we will push our silver package with online marketing, we already have some orders from Canada. In US, we are speaking to photo studios and photographers to launch the Gold Package(with photoshoot)," Sandeep informed.
Under the label of My Own Site Private Limited, Pikboo.com will be operation as a brand. Having a 15 year long experience in industry, Sandeep has over a decade of experience in the Internet and mobile industry. He has worked in various capacities as head of marketing, audience and analytics, and business head during his career. After quitting as Head of Marketing at Times Internet Limited he joined mobile internet company One97 Communications as the head of Mobile Advertising and Marketing. He has also led Citigroup’s Internet channel in India.
Oh, i just saw the one97 new logo, and thought one check box ticked in the New CMO, handbook, was looking forward to the next check point brand campaign...
Great work Sandeep. it takes guts to follow your heart, come out of your comfortable 9-6 job and create something new. 99% of people can never do this itself. You are a winner already as a person, as a business only time would tell.
Good luck Sandeep. Ibibo etc unsuccessfully experimented with similar products earlier. Key to success here would be getting it adopted in US while competing with US talent. But if you are thinking of selling it in India then better add some e-comm features and connect with hospitals and clinics and offer for free with limited features.
Mr. Amar what took you so long to come up with such a brilliant idea. Didnt want to use the term "dumb" but it actually is one.
Hello Sandeep
Only you could have created such a wonderful product in 3 months duration. I just created website for my kid and shared with my cousins abroad. They are so happy to be able to see such good pictures in a chronological order of my kid. My sister actually wrote back to me that she feels that she can feel to be with my daughter. But she also had one complain, in family tree product, there is no option to put aunt pictures. please add those options in family tree product, just a humble feedback/ request from USA :)