FranklyMe is a social networking service where users can communicate their stories and information through velfies. It provides a video micro blogging platform for people to ask questions to celebrities and experts and get responses from them in the form of video selfies. A creative and fun way of communicating your ideas frankly! We can say that it provides the best of all Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Quora worlds.

Where Twitter has a limitation of 140 characters FranklyMe has the 90 sec video duration limit but you get to express yourself much better through a video than a bunch of characters. Selfie addicts from Facebook can switch to velfies which conveys much more emotions than a still image does and most importantly it provides a two way video communication platform as opposed to youtube which is just a one way communication channel.

How it started?

FranklyMe was founded in April 2014 by two IITians, Nikunj Jain and Abhishek Gupta. Nikunj initially ran a mobile app development company named InoXapps which got partly sold and Nikunj left it to work on the idea of FranklyMe. InoXapps had acquired Zumbl which was co-founded by Abhishek Gupta. Nikunj states that he likes to meet interesting, weird, highly opinionated people and understand their perspective about an idea or topic. The app would provide an open platform for people from all walks of life to share their beautiful thoughts and ideas and initiate a meaningful conversation. These are the thought provoking conversations that people come across a number of times but never get to discuss them at length.

The app

FranklyMe has a user friendly and intuitive UI. Once a user logs in, he can see a stream of questions and answers and an option to look up a public personality to ask questions. It allows users to make their own velfie profiles. Users can put up questions to public figures which can be upvoted by other users so that the most popular questions are more easily seen and answered. They can easily connect with their favorite Bollywood stars, businessmen, TV stars, cricketers, politicians, fashionistas, writers, music loves or social activists. Some well-known celebrities who have joined frankly include Arvind Kejriwal, Javed Akhtar, Kiran Bedi, Chef Vikas Khanna, Singer Shafqat Amanat Ali, Composer Meet Brothers and Snapdeal Founder Kunal Bahl. It has been seen as one of the fastest growing Noida based startups. Frankly has raised $600,000 from Matrix partners to develop the product further and expand its reach.

The Bottom Line

After over a year and a half, having about 25000 users with 800 celebrities, the founders of FranklyMe have decided to shut down its operations stating that they have not yet grown big enough to be called what they aspired to be , the first video only social network of the country. While they have seen a good deal of success in the very beginning, FranklyMe hasn’t yet achieved a sustainable product market fit. Video creation continues to be a challenge that might be a bit ahead of its time. They have also said that startups should be careful with premature scaling.