New Delhi : With over 200,000 downloads and 18,000 five-star reviews under its belt, Knappily is happily perched in the news and knowledge apps’ space. 22 months since inception, Knappily has devotedly remained a contrarian news application. It isn’t an aggregator.
It doesn’t merely provide a summary either. Using its 5W1H framework, the Application analyses ‘end to end’ the ‘news and issues that matter’ and it doesn’t even call itself a news app.
In this age, when anyone with a Twitter account is a blogger or reporter, so how does a news app honestly stand out from the crowd? “That isn’t the question we asked when we began”, replies Yashaswi Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Knappily, India’s highest rated app in the News and Magazines category on Google Play Store. “We just got curious about the mysterious co-existence of a myriad of news apps and a terrible lack of holistic knowledge among the youth”. “You are hit by hundreds of URLs daily.
Many of them bait you to know the ‘five things’ and ‘ten things’ that you, truth be told, must never know,” he continues. “In a way, the problem of this hyper-digital era is the same as that of the Stone Age. Man didn’t have enough knowledge at the time because he was limited by a terrible lack of information. Today, a man knows little because there is an explosion of information.” Knappily assigns the task of knowledge creation to a team of experts who ask and answer six questions – What, Why, When, Where, Who and How – for each ‘Knapp’, which is what an article on Knappily is lovingly called.
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Growing almost entirely on the influential word of mouth, Knappily doesn’t think it has a competitor. “We just pitch for that coveted 5MB space on your phone,” said Ranjith Kumar, CTO and co-founder of Knappily.
“Once you give us that, Knappily grows on you. The numbers are clear in their verdict – Knappily is a habit-forming app,” added Kumar.
He added that they are not just reading it. They are saving and sharing it too. They understand that each Knapp takes just two minutes to read but saves them at least two hours of effort of alternative research.
“We receive an average of 25 emails daily. 20 of them would thank us for our effort. But five of them would suggest what we must do next. These suggestions have helped us make incremental improvements to Knappily.” One regular user wrote she was unable to read Knappily on her daily commute. “We provided the text-to-speech option to all our users within a wee,” added Yashaswi
Promising to make subject matter experts out of dedicated readers, Knappily has won multiple start-up competitions, including IDG Venture’s Digital Consumer Innovators program and IIM Ahmedabad’s Master plan, one of India’s biggest start-up competitions. “We deleted all our PowerPoint presentations on strategy long ago,” says Yashaswi, who is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and XLRI Jamshedpur. Growing organically, Knappily is especially popular among Civil Services Aspirants. “If you are writing an exam that has a general knowledge component, Knappily is indispensable”, says Yashaswi, while also sharing the company’s plans to publish magazines and launch online test-prep modules for such users. The most recurring suggestion that Knappily receives relates to making the app available in other languages too.
Knappily provides a suitable solution to the thirst for learning and enlightenment on a range of popular and current topics. The company is currently piloting a technology project to do exactly that in multiple languages. “The results so far indicate that it will have to be a 60 percent machine and 40 percent human effort”, discloses Ranjith. “But it will be 100 percent worth the effort”, quips Yashaswi. (ANI)