Millennials associate memories with clicking pictures. With the advent of selfies, taking pictures has become an altogether different ball game – with perfect lighting, angle, and background. With a smart digital camera, composition is fun making storing memories a painless process, it does become painful when it comes to the following step – sharing these images. WhatsApp does not allow sending more than 10 pictures at a time, Instagram and Snapchat require manual selection of pictures from the gallery. From an album of 100s of pictures, the selection process is lengthy and time-consuming…often times, leading to the pictures not being shared at all.Vebbler claims to be unique, in the sense that it does not have a one-to-many sharing approach. The idea is to allow like-minded people to form spontaneous clubs and easily share pictures with just each other in real-time. “Vebbler acts as a chronicler – with one simple tap, users will be able to digitise their experiences. Vebbler isn’t a photo-management app, it’s not based around location, or facial recognition,” Bhagat says.Explaining the same, Sahil says, “If you look at the journey of any social media network, the growth is not measured in the kind of revenue it makes, but the kind of active user network it has. The first four-to-five years are all about making your product the default option for your targeted user base. The thing about monetisation is, it is only going to be as good as the users we have on our network.”Additionally, to have an upper hand on the homegrown players it plans offers the very app in local languages, including personalised, localised stickers, and filters. The idea would work somewhere along the lines of chat messenger Hike, that offers personalised and nuanced stickers catering specifically to the Indian audience. This personalisation becomes an important strategy for the venture because apps like Snapchat and Instagram do not have a wide reach in Tier II and Tier III cities in India. The startup aims to localise the entire app in such a way that people are able to understand it.
Trying to solve this need of an instant and unhindered photo sharing tool, Sahil Bhagat launched Vebbler in 2013 as the ‘Indian social camera.’