By Subhiksha Ganesan

Posted on July 12, 2016

This is an automated group payment solution for students by students

Contree- App and applications

Contree (http://www.letscontree.com/) is an automated, small sized mobile application for students to make group payments in a smooth flow.

It helps users in 3 different ways:

• Getting repaid for the past expenses.
• Manage present group expenses, during trips especially.
• Planning and collecting money for a future events through free bank transfer.

That Idea Moment and Core Team Members

Deepanshu, Founder

Deepanshu once faced a problem, while he had to collect 770 rupees each from nine people after a party. Seven out of nine paid only 750 rupees due to lack of change.

This is quiet a common problem among friends during get-togethers. Then Contree was born !! The founders are four friends Deepanshu, Atul, Amit and GVS Praneeth from IIT Roorkee. Their active participation in the co-curricular activities made them look out for the real world problems and find the solutions. Deepanshu and Atul are mechanical engineers.

Real World Problems and Analysis

An online market research drive called “#1MinuteAway” was conducted to make the survey short yet complete, interactive and appealing to collect honest responses. It gathered close to 470 responses. 91% people said that they end up paying more than their share in bill amount while 58% people face problem in getting paid back the extra money. Among them 94% are interested in a solution for simplifying group payments which gave them the validation that the problem is a genuine one.

Revenue among Challenging Competitors Around

They had launched the beta version on Google Play store and had seen revenues of about Rs 80,0000 without any sort of marketing expenses. Currently they have 330 users who have tested and reviewed the product based on which improvements were made and is all set for a public launch. Their revenue model comprises of charging a flat fee of 2.5% from merchants and by providing enterprise solutions as B2B model.

Following are the estimates:

• 2016: Users = 18464, Revenue = 0.003 USD Mn
• 2017: Users = 148484, Revenue = 0.134 USD Mn
• 2018: Users = 899355, Revenue = 1.430 USD Mn

Their direct competitors include many start-up companies in similar space. To tackle the competitors, effort is being put on continuous innovation by having a structured innovation team.

No more Bootstrapped

Contree was bootstrapped till last month. Currently they are backed by IIT Roorkee incubator which has provided them seed amount to develop and scale up ideas.

Safe, Speedy and Secure

Contree seamlessly handles and settles the expenses in spite of the people’s busy schedule on tripping and partying. Contree Money, app’s wallet feature, runs in accordance with international PCI-DSS compliance. Payments are secure and fast. The app lets you transfer the collected money to your bank account quickly, with IMPS/NEFT technology in the backend. Cool isn’t ?

Plans Ahead for a smooth road

With group expenses management and settlements as their core offering, a plan is set to bring merchants to their platform in future to provide a new and complete group expenditure experience in money collection, settlement to making payments in later stages, they also look to build a platform for organizations who need to regularly collect money from a large number of people. As feedback and suggestions are the core mechanism to understand the prime requirements for the product improvement, they have tried to incorporate feedback within the app and it is present in the navigation bar. Users are presented with brief questionnaire based on which the developer team analyse the pros and cons of getting that feedback/suggestion.

Based on the feedback received from the Beta testers the product was made live since June 25th. A niche segment ( College Students and Flatmates) has been identified for marketing the app which will set the base for targeted marketing approach right from the start and thereby will help in efficient future strategic planning.

Group payment app that solves the “no change” problem – Contree