Social Samosa Platform Feature - MooDoo App

About the Platform.

Moodoo is a mobile app, designed for all of us who love meeting up with friends but don’t love the hassle of organising it!

The app instantly lets you know which of your friends are free to hang out and helps you make a plan to meet in 4 taps. It’s the simplest way to make social plans and makes meeting up with friends for dinner as simple as ordering in pizza!

My Co-Founder, Vaibhav Sinha, and I set up Moodoo together and launched it earlier this year. The third CXO is Milly, my adopted hound, who acts as Chief Happiness Officer.

Moodoo is currently live on the App Store and Play Store.

Whom do we cater to?

Moodoo is most valuable for young working professionals. So many of us contend with unpredictable work schedules and don’t get to see friends as much as we’d perhaps like to. It’s very difficult to make plans in advance when you’re unsure whether you’ll leave work at 6pm or midnight… Moodoo breaks through this by focusing on spontaneous get-togethers and helping you make plans happen in the moment!

Students of course see great benefits in Moodoo too, given their love of socializing and their more open attitude towards new tech!

What do we offer to our consumers?

Hopefully I’ve captured why Moodoo is so fantastic already, but here are some example scenarios where we know that it can be particularly useful:

1. You get out of work at a reasonable hour (for once!) – who’s up for a drink?
2. It’s Sunday, you’re a little hungover – anyone feel like having a BIG brunch?
3. You find yourself in a different part of town – anyone free for coffee?
4. You’re a bit bored and have some free time – what are my friends in the mood to do?

In addition to helping you quickly rally your friends, Moodoo also offers some significant perks along the way. To name a few…

• Free coffee at Café Zoe
• Free movies each Tuesday at Deepak Cinema
• 15% off at Grandmama’s Cafés
• Unlimited cocktails and a veg starter for Rs. 999 at Fat Man’s Café & Grill,

What motivated us to start up?

We had a mini eureka moment one day after a particularly frustrating attempt to coordinate dinner with some friends.

It was one of those typical scenarios – that we all know only too well – where a simple dinner plan turns into a hundred or so messages pinging back and forth across Whatsapp. Around 30-40 minutes of time goes into furious typing and you still seem to reach no conclusion on where to meet, what time and who’s actually coming.

It was then that we figured that there simply had to be a better way!

What's in a name?

What are you in the mood to doo?

How do we see Social Media?

We love and use social media the whole time – both personally and for marketing Moodoo.

However, Moodoo in some ways is a mini revolt against our generation’s attachment to social media. Whilst social media plays a very positive role in all our lives – personally, it has helped me immensely to stay in touch with friends in London – it’s easy to become stuck in a digital bubble. Moodoo is one of the few apps that help you make real world plans happen and return to the original meaning of the word “social”…

We like to think that Moodoo is the app that helps you do stuff and create content for your social media feeds! After all, everyone prefers to be the person in the photo than the person liking it, right?

Currently we are....

We went live on the Play Store and App Store earlier this year and now have over 6000 downloads, primarily in Mumbai, and see approximately 2000 “Moodcasts” updated every month.

We also launched an update recently that allows users to discover exclusive discounts nearby based on their mood. To provide this, we have tied up with some of the coolest restaurants and entertainment spots around Mumbai including Café Zoe, Deepak Cinema, Grandmama’s Café, PDT, MRP, Cluehunt, Fat Man’s Café and White Owl Brewery.

Our biggest challenge was..

Our biggest challenge is that everyone likes to join an app like Moodoo only when all of their friends are on it. But who takes the plunge and starts using the app first? Most people like to follow trends once they have already taken off… not enough people take a leap of faith and run with something at the vision stage. We’re on the lookout for all the trendsetters out there!

We want to dominate the world by..

Ultimately, we want to become the global go-to app for meeting up with friends!

Right now, we help you quickly connect and make plans with friends. But eventually we will build up the ecosystem around that so you can directly make table bookings, buy movie tickets and books taxis via Moodoo too! It will, we hope, become your go-to app whenever you’re in the mood to do something.

Social media will naturally play a big role in helping us achieve that, particularly once we’re at scale. We’re currently using our Instagram and Facebook channels to provide suggestions to our users on fun events or cool places to meet up at around the city.

We’re making moolah by...

There are several paths to revenue generation for Moodoo.

Primarily, we believe that Moodoo can revolutionise the way that brick-and-mortar businesses advertise. Currently, it’s easy to define your target audience online but your advertisement has no real life context. Within Moodoo however, a restaurant in Lower Parel could pay for visibility to a group of target customers that are deciding where to go for dinner in Lower Parel that evening. This means that you’re paying for advertising at the most crucial moment – the decision-making moment.

We can also work on a commission basis once we have incorporated table booking, event discovery, movie ticketing etc.

Our What The **** Moment

Startups are fully of frenzied moments, but the funniest so far has got to be when we were filming a few short videos for Moodoo in London. Over two days, we were attempting to do approximately 20 short scenes across different parts of the city, including the London Aquarium, UCL Gym, bakeries, pubs, pizzerias and Hyde Park! It felt like a Bridget Jones film as we were seen dashing through the roads and public transport of London with cameras, lighting and plenty of coffee in hand!!

Industry as we foresee

I think the Indian social media industry is in a really exciting space right now. Things are evolving and maturing at a rapid pace and we are seeing some truly unique concepts emerge in the Indian digital landscape, such as POPxo and Homegrown. In addition, a number of highly creative individuals are now finding a pathway to generate visibility and monetise that creativity via Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. In that regard, social media is a very liberating force within the somewhat stale traditional media space in India, and I hope that it will continue to grow in that vein in the coming years.

Lastly, Are you hiring?

Not any full-time positions. But we’re looking to work with fabulous social media influencers who love the idea of Moodoo and would help us spread the word! So if you’re that person, please get in touch!