How many times have you been sick of unwanted, annoying photo posts from friends that clog your social media feed?
And how many times has that driven you to unfollow, or even deactivate your account, only to realize that unfollowing is no foolproof measure of filtering trash, and deactivating means you miss out on the good stuff too — sending you crawling back to the big bad mess of posts and updates?
Photos on Facebook have been known to generate 39% more likes than text posts or even videos, and account for 93% of the most engaging posts.
So, if there’s no escaping pictures, is there a way to escape the rubbish ones at least?
Bangalore-based Galleri-5 wants to be the answer to those woes. The startup, which is all set to go live by the end of March, calls itself a photo discovery platform and allows users to sieve through content as per their tastes.
IMAGE: GALLERI5
Founded by Rahul Regulapati and Movin Jain, this social media platform is planning to win over users by making sure their pictures find the right target audience. They curate photos into “galleries”, and even allow users to add pics from Facebook, Instagram, or other social media platforms.
They curate photos into “galleries”, and even allow users to add pics from Facebook, Instagram, or other social media platforms.
You can earn “Karma” points by “high fiving” pictures on others feeds. The more the karma points, the more followers you are likely to get.
Ditch the baby pics, if you want
Rahul said he and Movin surveyed 1,000 users before rolling out the app, about 80% of whom said they would want to give their friends’ vacay pictures a skip and rather see photos that interest them.
“The end goal here is to organize all the photos people upload as per different topics so people can search, find, or follow things that interest them. Essentially, it’s a very strong discovery engine,” Rahul told Tech in Asia.
Galleri5 has a working Android app, but for now, Apple users can only get in by invitation. The team is also building a website, and all of it will be ready for an open launch by the end of March, Rahul said.
Once you log in, the app asks the user to pick topics of interest. One can choose from options like “Ladakh,” “Cakes,” “Travel,” “Love Thy City,” “Faces”, and others.
Rahul said there are about 1,000 users on the app already, buying into the promise of being able to filter feeds according to areas of interest.
Also buying into the promise are seasoned entrepreneurs in India — Rahul and Movin raised seed funding from Redbus founder Phanindra Sama andTaxiForSure’s founder Raghunandan G.
“Ours is not a commerce platform,” Rahul said. “It works on unit economics. We work on a fixed cost model.”
The team wants to keep the app free for users, while charging for corporate sponsorships. Galleri5 is already running one such program with travel website Cleartrip, and is in talks with the Taj Group of hotels for another.
Galleri5’s targeted filtering also means corporate houses can be more certain that their images reach the audience they want, instead of being tagged as irrelevant online ads.
“We are also careful about which brands we onboard because you don’t want to dilute the image. By the end of the year, we are looking at 5 to 10 brands we will engage and that’ll be more than enough to break even,” he said.
This article originally published at Tech in Asia here
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