HookedUp to connect people

HookedUp, a new social ‘meeting-cum-dating’ app, has joined the likes of Tinder and Truly Madly in India. Having found existent apps to be excessively dependent on probability, the developers Ankit Poddar and Vinit Poddar, students of IIMB, claim HookedUp’s differentiation in exclusive features like ‘InstaConnect’ and ‘Ask for a coffee’.

Launching the app here on Tuesday, the Poddar brothers said the value proposition for the app lies in crowded places, where the feature ‘InstaConnect’, upon activation allows users to connect other users in and around their area. “The ‘Ask for a coffee’ feature allows people to send coffee requests directly,” said Ankit Poddar.

The startup is set to raise a sum between $1 and $2 million in the next month, a huge chunk of which will be dedicated to user verification. “User verification is extremely important to us. We would rather have 10,000 verified users than 10 lakh unverified ones. We have a dedicated team that manually verifies IDs and any form of government ID is accepted,” he said. “Further, we plan to deploy at least 40 per cent of the funds we raise in marketing the app,” he added.