Social Media Platform Feature: GeckoLife

About the Platform

GeckoLife is the brainchild of business partners, Ashish Trivedi and Rajeev Gupta. With almost 40 collective years of technology experience and 23 collective years of parenting, we wanted to create a new social media experience for families that is private, collaborative, meaningful and inclusive of children.

As a result, we created GeckoLife, a social platform that is suitable for groups, families and children. GeckoLife is created with a focus on private and secure online communication and allows you to organize your activities and discussions according to interest. The platform also gives parents of pre-teens the ability to oversee all connections, engagements and online content that their children have access to.

With a 20-person strong team, GeckoLife has a presence in Australia, India, Singapore and the USA.

Whom do we cater to?

GeckoLife aims to be the premiere destination online for families.

The team has been aggressively targeting schools, clubs and organizations where families are a core constituent. This is being achieved in multiple geographies with the assistance of stakeholders.

What do we offer to our consumers?

The problem we aim to solve is: single communication platform + socially responsible digital footprint.

As we are focused on activities, we make it seamless for users to capture private moments like holidays, sports games, birthdays etc. on GeckoLife, and then share them with the audience they intend to. In addition, we intend for our platform to distil the modes of communication from SMS, email amongst others, into one simple to use platform. What makes us stand out is that we move the focus away from status updates and the ‘what-I-ate-for-lunch’ culture to more meaningful conversations driven my common interests. I can manage many such groups or as we call them ‘Canvases’ on a singular dashboard that updates me on every canvas in one go.

We are also strong advocates of creating a more meaningful social experience that allows our children to also participate online, without the fear of predators.

With devices and Internet access becoming ubiquitous, GeckoLife is offered in multiple formats, including an iOS and Android app as well as a web version.

What motivated us to start up?

We wanted to build a potential game changer. Business school tells you that first mover advantage is significant, but we disagree. Was Google the first search engine? Remember MySpace before Facebook? Remember Palm before Samsung?

Our strong belief is that social will continue to evolve. Devices and technology are a way of life, and that will only strengthen.

We were also driven by wanting to build in a way that we wanted to. We have a team with tremendous drive and skills that when brought together, will create amazing things.

What's in a name?

A Gecko is agile, quick, unique and adaptive, just like our platform.

How do we see Social Media?

Remember, this industry is still only 10 years old. We have only scratched the surface of what social is, and how it will be used. The gorilla in the room has 1.3bn users. That is a lot. However, it is still only 15% global population penetration.

With device availability and ubiquitous access, we believe there is abundant room for growth in the sector. Specifically, the evolution in our view will entail greater privacy, more usefulness, micro-networks targeted towards specific interest groups of people. There will be no one-size-fits-all. GeckoLife’s focus will be family orientated with safety and privacy at its core.

Currently we are....

Our idea started at a dining table in Singapore. We moved into a small office in a dilapidated part of the Singapore restaurant scene a few weeks later. We figured working from the dining table would drive our families mad!

We are now in a nicer and better-located 1,000 square foot office in the Central Business District. We have a cool office in Delhi’s trendy Saket area, an office in Palo Alto and an office near the beach in Sydney. Our 20 person strong team is made up of 11 nationalities in four countries.

The user base we are engaging with is more diverse – with folks in the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Brazil and Ecuador!

Our biggest challenge was…

Every business is a challenge when starting out. The offering, the positioning, the staff, the infrastructure, the go-to-market strategy - list goes on.

The challenge we faced on day 1 and that exists even today today is: are we building a world-class product? This challenge will remain until we have 10 million users!

We want to dominate the world by…

Growing our presence in the 20 thriving cities and touch 40 million families by 2020 or earlier.

We want to be the premiere destination for families, and their online lives. We want depth and value, as opposed to volume and banter.

We’re making moolah by...

There are several options that we will look at as we scale up the platform. But it is important to note that at our core, we will always remain focused on what we stand for i.e. privacy and safety. So while monetization will kick in soon, it will not be at the cost of these attributes. Some of our plans for monetization include:

1. Sponsorship: Enterprises are interested in tapping the ‘family unit’. Accordingly, we intend to allow family orientated enterprises and organizations to create sponsored events on GeckoLife.
2. Groups: Charge groups and schools on a per user basis. Gecko becomes the tool for customer care (vis-a-vis, customer acquisition).

1. Family user: The more you use and store, the more you pay. Initially we intend GeckoLife to be free. Once we are at critical mass (>100,000) we intend to add in the freemium model. We will position this to be ‘sort, safely, store.’
2. Commerce: % share sales; products and services.
3. Apps: revenue share.
4. White label: We have received compliments from SME that have asked us to consider white labeling the product. This is potential blue sky, as this provides significant long-term annuity. We have resisted a focus on this area, as we remain consumer focused at this stage.

Our What The **** Moment

When we saw this report from McAfee on how kids are prone to sharing their private details online without realizing the implications of doing this; we realized that what we had created was the crying need of the hour for parents looking for privacy and security of their kids in the digital space!

Industry as we foresee

Social in our view will be consistent around the world, and not substantially different country-to-country. Social will continue to be about connecting, communicating, creating and saving.

The confluence of device ubiquity, growing internet penetration and ageing down means more and more of the 7 billion people on this planet will be on the internet to make their lives more effective and efficient.

Need an App for Family Social Networking? Download GeckoLife now!

Lastly, Are you hiring?

We are always on the lookout. We want to get to a point that we don’t look for people, but rather great people come to us!