PoPin Sets Up India R&D Centre; Targets 100,000 Users In 12 Months

Want to make your organization’s social, actionable? Popin provides the answer to CEO’s, Business Leaders, Editors and Top Level Management with an intuitively simple and attractive app that is available in both android and iPhone marketplace. The application called ‘Popin’ (portal of pain, internal) works on desktops, tablets and mobile phones.

PoPin is a SaaS based mobile and a totally secure web solution that facilitates the CrowdSourcing of ideas that the team automatically “votes” to the top. Selected initiatives can then be CrowdSolved with specific discussions to deliver timely and innovative impact to relevant corporate objectives.

Infact, the Irvine-based firm has set up its India centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore. It has hosted its cloud services of Amazon’s EC2 cloud and is targeting hot indian verticals including education, FMCG, BFSI and also political parties.  

PoPin is vertical agnostic and can benefit any vocation be it manufacturing, sales and marketing, consultancy, government, education…  Conversations can be contained, curated and controlled across the participants, be it employees, business partners or even customers in order to obtain near real time results through maximum engagement alongwith the “feeling of contribution”. It converts a disengaged corporate-employee environment to one of a fully engaged participation.

Founder and Global CEO, Hayes Drumright says ‘The current stampede to embrace social media as a valuable business tool has kicked up a big cloud of dust and created new layers of confusion for chief executives and other leaders. Most CEOs sense that social media marks an important breakthrough for business communications, but they aren’t sure how to fully utilize the technology to gain a competitive advantage. This is because leaders often have trouble distinguishing between “actionable social” information and what I like to call plain old “social noise.” There is a substantial difference between the two’

Announcing the formal launch of its development center in Bangalore which currently has a 20 member research, design and development team Sanjiv Gupta said ‘your imagination is the only inhibitor to coming up with ways that PoPin can help your organization improve engagement and uncover actionable and innovative approaches to business initiatives. While we all knew the urgency and importance of cutting through social noise that is invading your enterprise, with PoPin, you now know how and what to prioritize’.

Some of the few common uses we believe PoPin can help a CEO bridge stronger ties with his employees in a social actionable way is by building consensus for new strategies, innovation buy-in, change management and skip level management, merger-acquisition assimilation and streamline off-site meetings. It is also acts as fantastic survey and product, services road map tool.

Introducing the popin functionality Sanjiv Gupta, Director of PoPin, India, said another interesting feature of the app is you have the option of setting sessions as ANONYMOUS (so no one knows who enters what) or NAMED (everyone is explicitly identified) depending on the need to protect identities, prevent political responses or set accountability. A CEO or Head of Department will now be able to find higher levels of engagement and empathy by mixing audiences for select sessions such as combining internal engineers with customers in product roadmap discussions.

The 3 months old startup is funded by Angels. Its current target is it to expand its user base both in the global and Indian market. It expects the adoption chances for this app in the corporate world to be immense given the fact that information today is cluttered and there is no way a top level manager can find a near automatic and well defined way to dissect them and seek an actionable items that can help him improve his organizational and departmental efficiency. 

Currently PoPin draws revenue from each user billed on an annual basis. However, the revenue stream would be fine-tuned further as its global user base increases. Popin US is nearing an adoption base of 20,000 and expects to grow it by 10x within a year, with India contributing a handsome 50% of the Global foot-print.

The Genesis :

To succeed as a next-generation social CEO, business leaders need to engage more with their internal teams, partners and customers. But this requires leaders to contain, control and curate such social media conversations, rather than hosting unwanted social free-for-alls. This is the challenge most CEOs face regarding social, whether they realize it or not. 

For social to work in the C-suite, CEOs can use crowdsourcing software or new “actionable social” tools to solicit feedback from large groups. For example, department heads or sales managers can submit their own ideas and vote on the best ones to pursue for their group initiatives. This democratic format generates greater buy-in from constituents, which in turn leads to highly motivated individuals and better aligned teams. 

CEOs also need to manage which audiences participate in each initiative, doing away with the social free-for-all. For instance, some crowdsourcing projects might invite internal employees to participate, while others would query only external partners or suppliers, depending on the project focus. 

Another important aspect of this process involves structuring crowd-sourced discussions around certain specific topics, and blocking out other subjects to be avoided by the group. Leaders can also curate their social discussions by making some comments anonymous in order to solicit open criticisms, while requiring users to be clearly identified and accountable when voting on shared priorities.