Hello Product Hunters!
I'm the CEO & founder of Lookup. We've built Lookup app to help consumers chat with local businesses or shops.
No more calling, no more waiting on hold and no more running around stores for information. You can search and start chatting with a local business swiftly and seamlessly with Lookup.
Make reservations, order deliveries, book appointments, inquire prices/products and much more - all with a message!
Lookup has recently been funded by @Biz Stone, the co-founder of @Twitter. And we believe that Biz Stone's experience in building world-class products would help us in a great way!
P.S: Lookup is live currently in India.
@miles_matthias@deepakravindran Though can't right now commit on a date, we do have plans for US, Miles. Especially now that we have a great advisor onboard (@Biz Stone) who can guide us through the launch :)
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Lookup lets you chat with local businesses and shops to make reservations, book appointments, find product availability, enquire prices and many more.
@manikarthik@deepakravindran Simply inspiring work Mani...love what you're gearing up to do and disrupt with Lookup but evenmore so your passion and drive to build great experiences that testify to a level of care and compassion to the people we are so desperately trying to woo.
@nicholassheriff@manikarthik Thanks Mani and Nicholas. Here's a short video on Lookup which explains how to get things done with a message.
Hope you enjoy it!
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@deepakravindran Curious to see how you plan out to getting businesses on board. Think that would be crucial to actually have businesses in place before users come in. Last thing you want is people coming in anticipating to find shops but them not being available.
@manikarthik Very true Mani. Just to make sure that the users experience is smooth, we do list a huge number of shops even though they are not verified with us. And in the long run, we see that most of them would be verified with us.
The onboarding of businesses happen via in-store demos, tele-sales and also we see an increase in the number of organic claims.
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@deepakravindran Sounds good but this is going to be a tough nut to crack. Will be watching this space. Best.
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How is the on boarding on the business side? Are they carrying around their phone 24/7 to be responsive to these request?
Much like teaching a small biz that a website is "easy" this still requires a time commitment from a business owner that is already stretched running their business.
@dswiese The on boarding of the businesses happen via in-store demos, tele-sales, organically claiming the businesses etc.
A good bunch of businesses are highly responsive. However, in cases when the business owners are busy or not able to respond, the Lookup support team fetches the answers and replies over chat. So, in any case, the customer gets a guaranteed response.
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@deepakravindran I like that your supporting them with a 2nd line of support. Good luck!
It sounds really "millennial" of me, but I've been putting off making a dentist appointment for months because making a phone call is too much of an inconvenience. It sounds stupid, but it's true. We need more things like this.
Curious to hear how you think this might differ from TalkTo (acquired by Path)? Interested because I actually did love TalkTo, but it seems like they weren't able to find the traction they wanted. Think you guys have a different approach @deepakravindran?
@sachinkamdar Our approach in trying to solve the problem of users connecting to businesses is quite different. And chat is just a first step towards that. Speed and quality matters a lot on the chat platform. We have a bunch of features in pipeline (AI, NLP, Payments to name a few) which will altogether simplify the way users connect with local businesses.
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Hey Deepak, Have been a fan of your work since Innoz. A small feedback- Don't you think leveraging already popular Facebook messenger user base or even Whatsapp integration and then driving users to your platform would be a great move from product perspective v/s going independent from ground up. For lookup to succeed, it will require a change in consumer behavior in India and finding a way to do it subtly with minimal effort is what you should look for. Just my $0.02 :)
@ankscricholic Thanks Ankur.
We did launch a lighter version of Lookup - "Lookup Lite" - http://blog.lookup.to/post/11926...
Lookup Lite lets customers connect to us via Whatsapp/SMS. All you have to do is save our number 9773997739 in your contacts as Lookup and start sending in your queries via SMS or WhatsApp!
Also, we do have plans to release API's to extend our services across multiple platforms.
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