On the sidelines of Huddle Trivandrum, Asia's largest congregation of those in the start-up ecosystem, Kiruba Shankar spoke to Truecaller co-founder Nami Zarringhalam. Watch the first part of the conversation. Here are some excerpts:
On how the app was born...
Me and Alan (Mamedi, Truecaller co-founder) has this problem where, when friends and family text or called us, we didn't who it was, and we were like "at least tell me what country this call or text is from!", because it is quite difficult to keep track of country codes and all.
What we wanted to do was build a service that was similar to the directory services we have in Sweden, where you can look anyone up by name, and find their mobile phone number, home phone number, home address and also my birthday. All of this is in the public domain in a country like Sweden. It creates trust and transperancy — to an extent — that the person you're speaking to isn't going to do something fraudulent.
On the initial launch...
We first launched the app on a platform called the XDA Developers, a forum for smartphone developers. In the first week we got 10,000 downloads, which we were very excited about this. We started to look for investments and, basically, that's where things got started.
Check out the second part of the conversation here .