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Covert.ly: The iPhone App Eliminating Yik Yak & Competitors

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Covert.ly

I had a great conversation with the team that created and runs Covert.ly. Patron Technologies LLC. is the company which owns Covert.ly. It was founded by Sachet Gagwani, Sagar Govani, and Ashley Poyer to allow people to be able to speak completely freely (without threatening the existence or health of anyone else). Alicia Cassidy joined the company later on to help with social media.

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Covert.ly

Here are some of the questions I got a chance to ask Sagar Govani (Co-Founder & CEO) and Sachet Gagwani (Co-Founder & President):

1) What is Covert.ly?

“Covert.ly is an anonymous location based social network that uses geofencing technology and anonymity to power a feed of free speech for (mostly) millennials. Users are incentivized by voting on each others’ posts. Each upvote gets them 1 karma. Each down vote deducts 1 karma. Once they rack up 1k karma, they get a free burrito. They can also post anonymous video stories that are similar to snapchat or Instagram, but completely anonymous, and everyone sees every story.”- Sagar Govani
 

2) What is the benefit of anonymous social networking? How does your product help people daily?

“We got tired of politics ruining relationships, and personal opinions adding negativity to relationships. There are certain things you just can’t get away with saying, and certain images you can’t get away with posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. So we completely deleted the idea of user identity exposure. We were fans of Yik Yak, but they failed to stay true to their vision because of negative press. We want to protect free speech and encourage new ideas to be available.
But in order to delete censorship, user identity must never be allowed on the app unless voluntarily. People should be able to say what they want or share a picture of whatever they want, whenever they want to. That’s how you get quality content and quality memes. Alicia Cassidy joined later on to help me with public relations on social media, since I suck at that.”- Sachet Gagwani

3) What sets you apart from Yik Yak? How have you learned from their failures?

“After Yik Yak added handles, lost millions of users, and fired 60% of their workforce, we decided to bring back the anonymity concept. Yes we have a similar feed where users can up-vote and down-vote posts, just like Yik Yak. The more up-votes and quality content a user gets, the more karma they gain. This was a concept since the Yak era. But Yakarma was completely pointless. We decided to give back to our user base unlike Yik Yak. When a user gets 1000 karma, they are mailed a free burrito coupon from our company.
Spammers get banned in an automated manner. So people stopped spamming on our app, but not Yik Yaks. The content is even better, and even more diverse on our app. As of now, we are only on iOS, but tens of thousands of iPhone users are already switching over to Covert.ly and claiming it as a better alternative. We don’t want to get distracted from the vision like Yik Yak did. We plan on staying true to our purpose, even if the media accuses us of catalyzing cyber bullying online. Don’t like seeing mean words on the internet? Don’t download it! Respect your free speech and privacy rights? Then do download it. It’s as simple as that.”- Sagar Govani 

4) Are there any major features you will be adding soon that will make you even more unique and efficient than the Yik Yak app?

“We added video stories very similar to snapchat, but they are completely anonymous. Everyone is on the same story throughout America. Any average person can now reach the entire country without having to gain followers by just downloading our app and posting a single video.”- Sachet Gagwani

5) What were your biggest obstacles?

Social networking has become a very dense market. Most people think they can still start a social app and succeed just by getting a lot of users and be able to raise capital from a VC firm. The market has changed immensely according to many of my advisers. The social unicorn days are over. You need a solid business model now. So you have to target multiple verticals and establish revenue before anyone takes you seriously. And being a DC based start up doesn’t make that any easier.” – Sachet Gagwani

6) How are you solving this problem?

“We are able to incentivize users without raising any capital, because our native advertising platform pays for the rewards. And breaks even pretty well. For our second revenue source, we recently partnered with Drunk Mode. They have a lot of products and we’ve linked our geolocation technology as another source of revenue. Credits go to their CEO, Josh Anton, who introduced us to their new SDK. It was a match well made. Being geolocation based start ups targeting completely different verticals, it was a very well thought out partnership.”- Sachet Gagwani

7) How important was teamwork?

“It was probably one of the most important things in the whole lifecycle. Sachet and I are both passionate about mobile. Our main interests are growth hacking and product development.”- Sagar Govani     “We have both released high reach mobile/web products before. But when we met and sat down to talk, I realized that Sagar is a much better programmer than I am, while I’m better at growth hacking and reverse engineering systems. I think having a great developer handle the product development side, and a hacker and reach expert handle the operations side, we’re able to break things down to the smallest particles and then assimilate them into our own product. That’s what makes us a very strategic team. We used to have our own small businesses and focus on both aspects. But now that both of us focus on one full time, results end up much better.”- Sachet Gagwani

8) What have you learned?

“We have definitely learned a lot of new technical and strategic skills. However, the most important thing we’ve learned is that in order to maintain growth towards success, we cannot allow ourselves to ever stop learning.”- Sachet Gagwani
 
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Covert.ly is available free on the Apple App Store, and is currently being developed for Android. Android release can be expected as early as 2018.
Covert.ly’s Website & Download Links: http://electrumdevelopment.com/
Twitter Profiles To Follow: Covert.ly Official: https://twitter.com/CovertlyApp
Ashley Poyer: https://twitter.com/theoneashleyy Alicia Cassidy: https://twitter.com/z0mbiance

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