Startup Story #46: TwigMe – One Platform For All Your Businesses

June 26, 2017

With the abundance of apps on our phone, it is getting very difficult to manage daily tasks, meetings, and other miscellaneous activities. Enter TwigMe, a business interactivity solution and an app wherein you can manage all your businesses. It is a platform wherein you can handle multiple businesses instead of using numerous apps for different purposes. “TwigMe is essential an app that many other apps can come under. The long term vision is for the user to not download any other apps and manage their work in the local circle through TwigMe,” explains Hardik Gandhi, who co-founded this venture along with Nitin Mhaske, Pushkar Prasad, Sujoy Chakravarty and Kapil Bhadke.

Started in August 2016, TwigMe is already being used by over a 100 businesses in Pune. The app can be used by businesses in any vertical like fitness, health, schools and other organisations to create a mobile engagement solution for internal employees or external customers. “In daily life, you interact with half a dozen businesses. It could be your hospital, kids’ school, your gym and library subscription or your architect. These conversations happen in an unstructured manner mostly using WhatsApp. With TwigMe, you can access every business you’re linked to. There are micro apps within one app,” says Gandhi. The app helps you manage your appointments, events, memberships, leave applications and forms through the micro apps. But this is just one aspect of TwigMe.

The other aspect of this app is related to app developers. Gandhi elaborates, “For developers inside enterprises who want to churn out more apps for their end customers or use it internally can use TwigMe for this purpose. For ten per cent of the cost and time, we are able to implement 90 per cent of the functionalities straight away. The remaining ten per cent is customisation in terms of changes you’d want to make on the look and interface. A developer’s time to create an app cuts down. They pay us a subscription fee and with that they get many services. These apps could be in the realm of an appointment booking system, fitness app, handling memberships, loyalty programs, coaching clubs or even for a complex business activity that involves document sharing.”

Speaking about the challenges while setting up the venture, the entrepreneur says, “Over the course of time, we have dealt with several businesses and figured that the owners are excited. But, when it comes to execution, the employees are not effective enough. There could be several reasons including that most of the organisations don’t have the manpower or desire. Also, working with developers can be very time consuming and sales intensive.”

When it comes to making the product better, Gandhi says that it is crucial to listen to customers. “You must listen to your customers closely because in time you realise that they have valid reasons to say what they say. It helps in understanding the pain points. Customers, if satisfied, act as brand ambassadors of the product.”

For the future, TwigMe envisions itself to be the one stop for any business or for anyone who wants to engage with consumers. After Pune, they are all set to take the product to the US, where enterprises are more receptive and digitally prepared.