Social Media Platform Feature : Wishberg - Build, Manage and Complete Your Wishlist

About the Platform.

Wishberg is your one wishlist for life; the place to turn your wishes into goals for life.

We enable users to build and manage their wishlist for life. Users can wish for anything, spanning over 15 categories that cover almost anything a user can ask for – from Travel to Adventures, Food to Fashion, Products to Gadgets.

While many e-commerce sites have their own wish lists, they are unable to capture intangible wishes. On Wishberg, users can create customized wish lists or event-based registry and share it with friends and family and have them fulfilled.

Wishberg was founded by Pravin Jadhav & Kulin Shah. Pravin was earlier the Product Head (Ecommerce & Mobile) at Rediff.com India Limited (NASDAQ: REDF) and Head - Product & Marketing at advertising technology venture, Ohana Media; Kulin Shah was earlier the Senior Investment Manager at Reliance Venture Asset Management, venture capital arm of Reliance ADAG.

We are a 9 people strong team based in Mumbai.

Whom do we cater to?

Though Wishberg as a product appeals to everyone, we tend to appeal to users who have created a wishlist / bucket-list of all the things they want to do in life. Demographically Wishberg is most popular among users aged 18 to 40.

What do we offer to our consumers?

Wishberg offers the best place to build and manage one's wishlist. Users can track their wishes through features like - Status (wish or done), Future Timeline (when to fulfill), Experiences and Reviews (getting first hand reviews of people wishing for something) or Prepare Custom Wishlists (like event registry – Christmas or Birthday; or Holiday Lists, Books To Read, and so on).Some wishes also have the Fulfill Wish option while users can always enable ‘Receive Gifts’ on custom wishlists they create. Moreover, users can discover new wishes that others have wished for or add their own to the list.

Our approach is purely based on the imitation of the offline behavior of users. When one has to fulfill a wish he / she interacts with various people including friends and family. They discover and connect with people with similar wishes or those who can guide them to achieving it.

A publicly shared wish (& wishlist) is more likely to be completed due to social and peer pressure; also there is immense joy in sharing your achievements and accomplishments with others. We hope to change the prevalent behavior of keeping wishes hidden in personal notes. Over 450,000 wishes have been shared on Wishberg till now.

What motivated us to begin?

Honestly, we started because we wanted to build a global consumer product out of India. We considered many ideas but none of them caught our fancy as much as a wishlist did – because it's personal and there are many things you could build around it.

Tyched (Earlier version of Wishberg) began on that note – our aim was to build a place to collect all user intents – anything a user can wish for in one destination site. We launched our site in December 2011 but failed in our first attempt. Though we have not pivoted from the core concept, with more feedback from users we realized we could do a better job and that's how we started Wishberg.

What's in a name?

Everything. Wishberg – is the collection of all wishes. Its inspired from ‘iceberg’ – wishing is just the tip of our platform.

One of the reasons we changed it from Tyched was user feedback – it was difficult to pronounce and very low on recall value. We iterated more than 50 names before finalizing on Wishberg.

Currently we are....

Currently we have over 450,000 wishes on Wishberg from users across 60 countries. While India does dominate as the single largest country for the user base, over 60% of our users come from countries other than India.

While Travel is the single largest wish category; Fashion, Gadgets and Personal Goals are becoming popular wish categories too.

We started off as founders only with an outsourced development team. Today we are a team of 9 based in Mumbai and backed by some well known investors in India.

Our biggest challenge was....

One of the biggest challenges was finding advice on things like technology, product, design and growth hacking. We don’t have too many people who can provide the right advice – so we had to struggle a lot and learn some lessons the hard way. It costs time and money, but the lessons learnt also give us a new direction and approach to looking at things.

We want to dominate the world by..

We continuously work on the feedback we receive from our users. We recently launched Custom Wishlists & Registry for users to build a sub-set of actionable wishes or mini-wishlists to achieve any particular event-related wish within a particular time.

Some brands have shown an interest in using Wishberg as a platform for marketing and engagement, we will also work in that direction. There are more things and updates from Wishberg that are currently under process, we will be announcing them in a few months' time.

Our aim is to build Wishberg into the 'One Wishlist for Life' for users and move towards being the default destination for users to share their wishes & experiences in.

We’re making moolah by...

We are currently not monetizing. Our current focus is growth and engagement. However we plan to continue with some of our experiments that might lead to modernization at a later date – they include the 'fulfill wish' feature and also the involvement of a few brands who are using Wishberg to build their community and send traffic to their websites.

Your Special Moment

The most special moment for us is when users come back to Wishberg and mark some of their wishes as having been fulfilled. They add more wishes, and come back again to fulfill them – The circle continues. Its fun to see that happen.

Industry as we foresee

We would like to see brands in India thinking beyond Facebook & Twitter. There are many interesting platforms that could be leveraged for Social Media – Tumblr, Pinterest, Quora, Vine and a few others. We hope to see this adoption soon.

 Lastly, Are you hiring?

Yes. We are always looking for interesting people who can work with us.