The product Cubeit was developed and designed by a team of three IIT Gandhinagar students while they were in the college. The idea behind the project emerged when they realized that during a chat session on a phone, people struggle to  collaborate , organize and access their content.

Although the team- Sarthak Jain, Nitin Gadiparthi, and Prathamesh Juvatkar, already had a job placement at a company, they decided to build a project as they still had some leisure time before their joining. With hope high, the team soon started working on the project- Cubeit.

 

The Idea Behind The Cubeit

They observed that while using a mobile device, different kinds of content such as images, links, documents, content, etc. are specific to apps. Users find it difficult to collect a Tweet, a contact or a link together at one place. It usually happens when a group of friends plans to go out on a trip. It ‘s hard to pull in contacts, flights details, stay arrangements, links to places, etc. For example, if a link is shared in a WhatsApp chat, it only appears as a link, and to access this, the user has to go on to another app, open the link, read the pages and switch back to the chat. The app resolves this issue by trying to pull and keep everything in one place so that you don’t have to switch between the apps to access items.

The team started their work by interviewing some people about how they use the chat apps- what are the features they wished existed and how they deal with sharing data, links and contacts over the chat and their suggestions to improve the capabilities.

The Challenges

The most challenging thing was to access links right inside the chat. And for this, the team thought to convert all links into cards that would intelligently extract needed information from the link presenting it in an actionable manner. So if a user is shared with a link, the card will display the contact details of the people to be contacted in case of making pre-bookings for a hotel room. These cards will eliminate the need to switch between apps to access links.

Money is always a big concern when you start on a project for people. Before this, the team made software for a friend and earned an amount of Rs. 25,000 but that was not enough to open a corporate account in a bank. You need to have at least 75, 000 to get started with it. The trio soon started looking for investors for Cubeit. Some people discouraged them with comments such as the product is not needed and it is worthless to build, some said it is necessary, but Google will make it before they do.

On the way to Success

After struggling to find an investor for the project, they finally found a person who showed interest in their idea.

Validating the concept with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the team has been in stealth since a year. With consistent efforts, it moved from private beta into public beta and looked forward to achieving traction. The product had around 2000 users with a seed funding of $3 million from partners such as Accel and Helion. With this acknowledgment, the team moved to Bengaluru and prepared to launch Cubeit into the market.