Knappily's new route towards app knowledge dissemination

Have you ever wanted to sieve through any information while on the bus, or catch up on some interesting trendy topic of the times, just to be in the know? Obviously, there are numerous portals online brimming with information, but how to grab the right dosage of trivia?

That’s exactly what ‘Knappily’ — short for ‘Knowledge Application Daily’ — does for you. The young startup that’s positioned itself as an app-based digital magazine platform, currently publishes 12 knapps (articles) a day, and wants to double that number to 25 knapps in a couple of months.

“For an average knowledge-seeker, there is overwhelming information on the web. They don’t know where to start, and how to go about reading about topics and current affairs. Our aim is to help them get over analysis paralysis. We start with a topic, go deeper, and present it in a way that’s easy for them to consume,” Gautham Sethuraman, Knappily co-founder and head of marketing, says.

Knappily analyses and develops content-based on the 5Ws + 1H framework. “We pick issues and topics that are relevant and trending among people, and our app will help people with zero knowledge get a well-informed understanding of topics,” Sethuraman says.

“We then anticipate the questions which may arise among knowledge seekers, and then conduct secondary research from authentic information sites and credible data providers (which are all attributed under each article as references),” he says.

The 5Ws + 1H framework is a logical way in which details of a topic are broken down and disseminated, including when reporting news. “All topics are supported by anticipated questions in order of, What, Why, Where, Who and How. We provide the entire perspective of a topic for lay people to understand,” he adds.

Categories include politics, business, sports, entertainment, technology, world, law, society, environment, and features, under which topics are written. “We have an editorial setup and content team, which go through all the writing, while we’ve outsourced the technical needs for the app,” Sethuraman says.

The company — which was founded by a young team of entrepreneurs led by Yashaswi Kumar, who is its CEO — received a seed funding of Rs 25 lakh from an undisclosed angel in December 2015, and is now valued at Rs 2.5 crore. It is planning to raise Series A funding in the coming months.

“We have over 1,500 articles featured on our app. Over the course of the next 8-10 months, we want to diversify to more categories. We are also eyeing language translations for topics in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, among others, and plan to unveil a mobile site soon,” he adds.

Knappily has already seen over 24,000 downloads on Android, and 1,500 downloads on iOS. “We are organically growing at 200 downloads a day,” he concludes.