Social Media Platform Feature: Talluk

About the Platform. 

Team. TALLUK, is a web-based platform to improve bonding and connection in the neighbourhood. It redefines the private social network industry by going a step ahead where it not only connects the people in the neighbourhood, it also connects the small businesses and service providers in a neighbourhood with the residents of the same locality.

It is one stop platform that helps the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), Market Welfare Associations (MWAs), communities and other groups to share & interact with each other thus transforming the way these associations work.

The company has been founded by budding entrepreneurs Vishal Sharma & Sudhir Goyal who are IT professionals. Vishal had found TESS Overseas, a Bangalore-based company which has created a niche in growing IT/software requirements in emerging economies in Africa & APAC. Sudhir had found a successful B2B networking web-portal www.around99.com, B2B search portal.

Whom do we cater to?

TALLUK caters to the people living in organized neighbourhoods of larger cities of India. These organized neighbourhoods are in the form of Resident Welfare Associations, Localities & Residential complexes primarily.

What do we offer to our consumers? How do you solve their problems? How do make their lives simpler?

We provide a platform which helps the consumers know their next door neighbours better, get acquainted with their neighbourhood service providers, collaborate within their localities to help each other & increase the overall safety & security levels. TALLUK also helps the consumers manage their multiple bills, society related communication and voice their opinions right at their fingertips.

What motivated us to start up?

The founders of TALLUK often found their children & family members buried in their electronic gadgets & gaming consoles engaged with somebody in the virtual world instead of collaborating & playing outside with some real friends. They both observed this growing tendency everywhere. On a keener observation founders saw this tendency playing with the psychology of their family members and the overall environment where any good or bad happening taking place very far directly affected their mood swings. The founders started doing some research and realized that what they had observed is a symptom of a major problem.

Other symptoms were “Gradually depleting social cohesion as people were more & more engrossed in the non-physical world”, “Increasing apathy of the people towards neighbourhood-related problems” and “Increase in the crime rate with the decrease in the social capital”. The estimated figures of increase in crime rates & suicidal cases were scary. Both found it difficult to ignore the problem & thus decided to try their level best to solve the problem through what they know the best “Technology”.

TALLUK was born out of a passion and a realization of the responsibility the founders felt on their shoulders.

What's in a name?

Talluk is a Hindi word derived from Urdu, meaning a relationship. In today’s dynamically fast paced world, the world has become flat and has shrunk in size that a travel of thousands of miles can be done within a few hours. On one side, while, in the virtually connected world, we chat with and poke our acquaintances who are sitting across the ocean; it has increasingly become evident that on the other side, we don’t even know the names of our neighbours sitting just next door to us.

The irony is that the most easily approachable people are least approached and with an abundance of social media platforms, we are so engrossed into those virtual spaces, resulting nothing else but emptiness.

Talluk is an honest attempt to take the people back to their basics where they could lead to a socially well-connected life full of contentment. No other word resonated better with the thought behind than TALLUK. TALLUK is soft, sophisticated, traditional, carrying a legacy in the Indian context, well known & understood and yet unique. There was no second thought after this name came forward as a suggestion.

How do we see Social Media?

A man is genetically programmed to be a social animal. We as human beings can not survive without each other’s presence. The concept of society itself originated to structure ourselves in order to protect our existence. Social media becomes even more imperative in today’s fast paced world where we are getting more and more absorbed by our loner life styles & increasingly busy professional lives.

Social media is a necessity and not a luxury, but it is a 2-edged sword as people still need to learn the optimum usage of social media. An excessive usage of the same can deteriorate the emotional quotient of the users while a balanced use can help the people lead to a better quality of life. Having said it, the best of using social media is to start it at the root level of the neighbourhood. Socializing in the neighbourhood is collaborative, realistic, physical and easy.

Currently we are....

The idea of TALLUK originated in the year 2013 but took 18 months to research and brainstorm before giving it a final shape. It was only in the mid of 2015 when Talluk was launched. Till date the idea is being spread through direct sales efforts who are directly in touch with RWAS. Talluk received tremendous response and got encouraging results from the consumers and within a brief period of around 4 months, TALLUK has more than 1600 registered active users and 60 RWAs.

Our biggest challenge was.

As start-up, the biggest challenge has been the funding. Since we believed a lot in the idea, we somehow managed to pull through the seed-funding & personal savings. The limited budget comes with a lot of challenges. The foremost is the skilled staff & manpower. Secondly, the budget is another constraint where sometimes we were required to slow down technology development as it is dependent on personal savings.

Thus, everything comes to a satisfactory point when the consumers give their voice and words to our dedicated efforts.

We want to dominate the world by..

We want to aim where TALLUK becomes the backbone of all the neighborhood communication and neighborhood transactions in the millions of households of urban India - be it urban, tier 2 & 3 cities

We’re making moolah by...

We have the following revenue generation models:

1) Subscription for small business affiliation on TALLUK
2) One stop bill payment services
3) Hyperlocal services
4) Premium mobile app subscriptions for “Safety”

Our What The **** Moment

Initially we estimated that the industry for neighbourhood transactions in the 5 major cities would be around $100 million. We reached that figure after a lot of research and understanding of the revenue model and we obviously believed to be extremely big given the fact it was only for the 5 major cities in India. We were pretty happy and positive on our estimation. But recently while preparing the investors pitch , we realized that the actual industry is somewhere around $9 Billion

in the same 5 cities of India. Now that was a hopping gap. During this time, we realized that only 1% of that market has been digitized as yet. So, as a matter of fact, we were looking to capture the market which was almost of the size of $9 Billion per year and still untamed.

Industry as we foresee

What do you think the Indian social media industry will look like in the coming years? Indian communities largely have always been pro-socializing. We often have large families, we are quite informal in our friendships unlike western world where children go to each other’s houses to play after formally setting up a play-date and we tread our relationships with care and attention.

The digitization in India has just started and as far as the socializing trend goes, it is safe to assume that it will go only northwards. The areas where social media has already captured the people’s digital devices, they would feel to look at another form of social media which takes them back to the neighbourhood. For everybody else which is almost 90% of the India’s population is a target segment for growing influence of Social media. I also think that lately with the idea of Digital India by the present govt, and very big corporate backing the idea, the growth of social media in India might be the highest in the entire world.

Lastly, Are you hiring?

Yes, we are hiring.