In 2018, Sarthak Gupta, who was in his final year of college, saw all his friends and acquaintances leaving town to build careers in different parts of the country. Being a socialite, the IPU graduate, found it challenging to find new friends to hang out with while engrossing in activities other than the clichéd café meetups. Honestly, haven’t we all faced similar situations?
On surfing the internet, Gupta did find various platforms offering ‘experiences’ and friend meetups, separately, but couldn’t find a one-stop-platform offering both. While discussing the same with his endless number of people, he realized that others were facing similar troubles. Gupta, brought up in Delhi, saw the gap as a great opportunity and decided to initiate his startup Outbuds, a platform that lets people connect with like-minded people over real-world activities according to their shared interests.
Meet your ‘socialmate’ with Outbuds
The primary purpose of Outbuds, which literally means buddies you can hang out within the real outside world, was to create a social app that is beyond the swipe up-down and left-right concept, which helps people to socialize like they did when they had no social media. At Outbuds, they believe just as each person has a soulmate; similarly, each person has many ‘socialmates’, people to develop real friendships and connections with.
In an interview with TimesNext, Gupta stated:
“I aim to use this indispensable power of the web, of the social media and get people out of their homes to form real-world connections with like-minded people over real-world activities of their interests. We ask a very BASIC question here- you have socialized enough, but have you done it [socialized] right?”
Outbuds lets people socialize over real-world activities based on shared interests. Since it revolves around different categories of people, with different interests and a bunch of various activities, the platform faced a lot of hindrances in providing their userbase every possible activity or interest they desired. Being an early-stage venture, another challenge was to convince activity organizers to collaborate and partner with their startup by building profitable and friendly relations with partners, hosts, and organizers, encouraging them to make use of the Outbuds’ app interface. By far, the platform has collaborated with various activity hosts and organizers across Delhi NCR.
Outbud’s vision
Currently, the startup is in its process of developing its MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which will allow the platform to test user behavior and interaction with each other on the platform. The social platform, being associated with a new concept, aims to develop its platform by studying user behavior.
Sarthak Gupta, the founder of Outbuds, visions his company to become one of the leading social networks in the country with the commencement of their journey in New Delhi. The firm plans to accumulate a large user base and a broad set of hosts and partners to build a seamless network.
“We do not aim to be the next Facebook or Instagram, we are here to make the first OUTBUDS,”
says Gupta.
