Hashtag in recent times, has become a very powerful tool. It has the superpower to unite people, start a new trend and in general make a huge difference in our societies. However, the usage of hashtag is quite limited these days. Most times, it fails to offer a follower the information they need to understand a trending topic or a popular movement.
To put this very problem to rest, there is a new mobile app in tinsel town called Hashup. This app lets you take ownership of your hashtags by linking it to your favorite websites for others to see. You can also follow hashtag activity on your favorite topics fed live from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On Hashup, every hashtag has the potential to unlock amazing offers and experiences!
Meet The Team Behind Hashup!
CEO, Bryon Shannon along with his team of extraordinaire minds that consist of Anuj Birla, Dharmanshu Kamra and Dhruv Goel, run the show.
“I’ve always loved creativity. I view creativity in two ways – as a form of expression similar to that of a painter or a musician – or as a method of approaching problems in new or innovative ways. As a college student at the University of Wisconsin, I put this passion to work, launching an apparel company with designs that bolstered school spirit. After reaching $300K in sales, I sold the company to dive deeper into the corporate retail world where I did some really exciting marketing work. However, I’ve always enjoyed keeping my creative juices flowing outside of work as well. Like many people, I spent a lot of time chatting with friends on all of the major social networks. We used fun hashtags and saw tons of them on TV all the time. I felt that you could do so much more with hashtags if people could associate them with relevant websites”, says Bryon.
Know More About This Mobile App
Hashup is your phone’s social browser. With it, you can link a website to a relevant hashtag. When you search a hashtag, you’ll see all the websites users tagged to it. Hashup also feeds live Instagram and Twitter content for that hashtag in the same place, and lets you connect with others who love the same hashtags as you do!
What Problem is This App Looking to Solve?
Hashup answers the simple question, “why can’t the hashtags I see everywhere let me do more?” Current events and movements already unite so many people with a single hashtag. By linking it to the most useful websites, the users can learn more about what the movement is all about, and what’s happening with it here and now.
When people think about the music, shows and items they love – seeing a hashtag about it doesn’t quite do anything for them. It would be great if the hashtag let folks do more. Why can’t they just search that hashtag to buy that concert ticket, vote for their favorite contestant, download that app, get an exclusive deal and do practically anything that a normal website lets one do. Thus in a way through this app, the team is finally closing the loop that connects buzz around interesting hashtags to the content that matters most.
What Inspired It All?
“I saw hashtags all around me, from TV, to billboards, to twitter feeds exploding about some big current events. At times, I’d search those hashtags to figure out what they’re about but find nothing more than results that pointed me back to photos or tweets. I felt like it would be so much more useful to point me to a website where I could take action – actually DO something, watch something, or get something! The idea of linking a hashtag to relevant websites felt so natural. I already had an app to see all the tweets for a hashtag or photos for a hashtag – and wanted a better way to see all the websites related to a hashtag”, says Bryon.
On Challenges Faced & Competitors
Finding the right investment partners was the team’s biggest hurdle. For the team, picking the right partner was absolutely crucial for the success of their app as they will be with them on the journey from that point forward. Thus it is important that the investment partners share the vision and offer the support to create something great.
For the team, any mobile app the allow users to discover mobile content is a competitor. However, Hashup highlights the best mobile content out there thus deepening the users’ engagement and discovery of social media content that they may not have seen otherwise.
On Expansion Plans, Targeted Audience
“It’s a really exciting time to be optimizing search for the mobile web, taking a crowd-sourcing approach to curate the search results. In the last 12 months, there was a 67% global increase in the use of mobile devices to access the internet. Now, more than 1 in 4 website visits comes from a mobile device. As this massive conversion to mobile continues, our top focus is to make sure that we have a really useful tool to find web content that matters to you. Anyone in any country and of any age could benefit from this”, says the team.
The team’s mission is to use hashtags to give everyone in the world a better way to browse and interact with content they care about on the mobile web. Hashup is mainly targeted towards content creators like bloggers, artists, writers and social organizers as it offers them a platform to aggregate relevant content on single topics in one place.
On Plans of Monetizing
“Hashup enables the human curation of useful and interesting web content for any topic. Gone are the days of submitting a web query and receiving automated search results based on key word algorithms. From time to time, organizations who are doing really cool things need to be connected with people who find that content most relevant, Hashup can partner with these organizations to develop really creative and impactful web experiences for any hashtag”, says the team.
To know more about Hashup, do make it a point to visit: http://hashup.com
