The last year has seen a spate of new Indian startups in the field of social movie recommendation websites — Flixstreet, Rinema, Muvi.com etc. The one that has clearly stood out in this brawl between startups is Dapple (www.dapple.in) — a service, drawing rave reviews despite being in Beta. Unlike the other names in the list which are primarily targeting Indian audiences, Dapple’s system is equally robust for international audiences as well. I had a chance to pose some questions to co-founder Saikat Ghose.
How did you meet your co-founders?
Tapas, Prateek and I are all alumni of BITS, Pilani and have known each other for the past 7 to 8 years. Prateek and me were also colleagues and have collaborated on many projects, building very large scale web applications for Amazon’s Advertising Platform.
We had complimentary skills and while Prateek and me had already started doing some preliminary back-end work, Tapas joined us in December 2012 to design the UI/UX for Dapple.
While the initial idea for Dapple came to us while brainstorming with colleagues for an internal hackday competition, we formally started working on Dapple only once we were out of Amazon.
Unlike the other movie platforms that have launched in India recently, Dapple has a strong international focus. Do you think it’s working?
With an exhaustive catalog of over 2,50,000 titles, Dapple has been designed to be a social variant of IMDb and cater to movie buffs everywhere. While a vast majority (almost 85 per cent) of our current user base is from India, some of our top users are from Australia, Kuwait and Singapore. One user from Russia spent over 2 hours rating/reviewing over 300 movies and was all praise for our personal recommendation engine.
The Dapple website is stunning, but it’s still in Beta, what features are you planning on adding before you launch the product commercially?
We still don’t have dedicated pages for cast/crew. We are currently building them and they should be done by the end of March. Our first mobile app for Android should also be ready by then.
Any key learning you would like to share with those who want to startup?
I think from a personal point of view, the most important lesson for first time entrepreneurs would be that starting up requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice and there are going to be a lot of bad days so it’s important to be patient, not get disheartened and give up.
Check out Dapple at www.dapple.in and let us know what you think on www.facebook.com/techchronicle
