Game of give and take networking platform from T-Hub trying new social media

HYDERABAD: Hyderabad based startup Denaurlen, a first-of-its-kind, India's very own new-age gamified social networking platform, is all set to launch on October 15 from world's largest startup incubator T-Hub 2.0.

The founders of the app who call themselves Tagore Senior and Tagore Junior are two passionate individuals who quite literally think out of the world. Their interest and passion for philosophy, cosmos and spirituality led them to coin the term 'Denaurlen', which comprises two Hindi words dena aur lena, (giving and taking) expressing that everything in the world is business and nothing in the world comes free.

Tagore Sr. – CEO | Founder, Denaurlen Pvt. Ltd.

Tagore Sr. dropped out of college in 4th year from Keshav Memorial Institute of Technology and stepped into the Philosophy, Psychology and Marketing fields which opened doors for him to meet different perspectives of people. At present he holds 8 years of experience in marketing where he collaborated with different service based sectors as well.

Tagore Jr. – MD | Founder, Denaurlen Pvt. Ltd.

Tagore Jr. is a graduate student of ICFAI university (BBA). He ventured into start-up in his 3rd year along with his brother Tagore Sr. and started building Denaurlen alongside his academics. Through his college he gained a deep rooted knowledge on business. He is the person who is most enthusiastic about astrophysics and draws his inspiration from it.

In an interview with NewsTAP, Tagore Sr and Jr explained the what, why and how of Denaurlen. Here are a few excerpts from the interview.

Q1. How did the idea of Denaurlen strike and how was it developed?

We are two very spiritual people and call ourselves galaxy brains. We wanted to do something so that people connect with themselves first and then with the world too. So we tapped the two most preferred industries – social media and gaming. We combined the two to make Denaurlen.We believe in the '6 degree theory' – that if you want to meet a specific person, there are exactly six people between you and the latter, which is how LinkedIn works too.

We initially wanted to make a music app but developing that would have taken a much higher investment so we decided to stick to the gamified social networking platform. We sought internships from a lot of colleges and spent a lot of money, but in the end, just one person developed the entire software! We learned a lot from our experiences and here we are ready to launch into the social networking market.

Q2. What is Denaurlen? What are the USPs?

It is a social networking app but it also includes gaming features. Here, users can collect and spend virtual 'U-coins' which not only replace the 'like' feature on other social media platforms but also help you wisely spend your time on the platform. Anything you do on the app would fetch or use the coins.

The app would help you connect with and know yourself first. Our first USP - Top 10s. This feature lets you select your top 10 favourites in 45 different categories including movies, food, books, songs, fashion, makeup, places etc. People who visit your account would also be able to see your top 10 favourites in various categories and connect with you better.

Our second USP is a global leaderboard. People with the highest number of U-coins would be at higher levels in the leaderboard. It can be anyone, if the content is good and people spend coins on that user, he would definitely come up in the leaderboard. This way, people would be encouraged to post more quality content.

We also developed a specific algorithm to monitor spammers and abusers of U-coins. They would automatically be blocked from the app for 72 hours if found spamming.

Q3. How was Denaurlen funded and what is the revenue model?

We did not raise any investments till date and everything we spent was boot-strapped. To pay for the registration of Denaurlen pvt ltd we sold our limited edition two-wheeler back in 2020. All the money spent is our money and some debt but no investors yet.

Turning probability into possibility for the advertising industry while getting revenue is our revenue model. They try very hard to push ads to their potential customers and we generally tend to skip the ads. In our app, interacting with every ad would increase U-coins count so the users would definitely watch and interact with ads, befitting ad agencies, users and us.

Q4. What is your marketing strategy?

Our marketing strategy is the bullseye model which targets the most potential users. It would be along with organic and digital marketing methods. We also plan on targeting colleges because that's where we see most of our potential users and collaborators.

Q5. Who are your competitors in the market?

There are multiple social media platforms that people are already comfortable with. However, this would be the first-of-its-kind. There is no other gamified social media platform in the entire world. We are not joining the tag of copy cats and ours in a completely new concept. We understand that it would take time for people to adapt to this new software but we are sure that once someone steps into the Denaurlen world there would be no going back.

Q6. How did you step into T-Hub?

One day our grandfather read about T-Hub in the newspaper and pushed us to pursue it. We did not expect to get in as there was a lot of competition. How could we expect, afterall we were a non-funded, wordpress startup! But to our surprise, Ayush Bagga, a Principal Manager at T-Hub, trusted our pitch and changed our lives.

Being connected to T-Hub 2.0 has increased our network, visibility, people's trust in us, market exposure and what not. Our main aim of tapping colleges is also easier being tied-up with T-Hub as colleges also trust in us now.