Yaari.Com – Yet another network to socialize

Yaari.Com is a social networking web start-up founded by Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia. Prerna and Parag are both Stanford Alumunus and have an excellent background to run Yaari. That’s not it, Stanford grads receive the entrepreneurship grooming which is why you see their engineers building worldclass companies like Cisco and Google. Here is an excerpt from my correspondence with Prerna the CEO in the role of Chief Yaar of Yaari.Com.

In a question to why did they found Yaari, Prerna’s take is to compete head on with Orkut on the Home Pitch,

“The idea stems from my desire for a social networking site that’s created for Indian youth, by Indian youth. Why should Orkut be the biggest social network in India, when it doesn’t address Indians’ specific needs? Yaari offers a site with mobile functionality (including free SMS!), customization, a fresh look, and founders who are always there to listen to your feedback”. Excerpts from their website, Parag used to lay awake at night imagining a world where he could spend all his time listening to music, playing games and meeting beautiful women – OK this explains a lot more 🙂

Yaari.com has been their core idea since the beginning and have stuck with it. Based on the feedback from Beta users, the site is undergoing changes and they can easily scale to host a million users. On their business model, Prerna said,

“Our business model relies primarily on advertising – both online and mobile – and premium SMS. We will offer premium services for our users, but the basic services will always remain free”

Prerna touches on some of the challenges faced by Yaari,

“One of the major challenges will be keeping our site secure. A big problem with Orkut today is fake profiles and offensive groups. We will offer verification services that will allow users to gain Yaari certification, if they choose, indicating to other Yaars that they are in fact who they claim to be. We will also devote additional resources to removing any flagged content”

On the flip side, both the founders seem to be residents of the US and may face an uphill task understanding the Indian consumer in India. Hopefully, they will bridge this gap before the VCs do 🙂

Yaari.com is self-funded by the founders and has a team of 7 developers. It is still in Beta and membership is by invitation only. Yaari.Com is giving iPods to its members depending on their popularity scores. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any invitation on eBay so guess I have to wait to get in until someone invites, hopefully before the iPod deal ends 😛

India Social Network , India Web 2.0 , Mobile India