Interview with Yogesh Patel, CEO, Sabesebolo.com

What is the existing conferencing market in India like? How does your offering fit in?

Conferencing market is currently a tedious process and an extensive one. You have to go to one of the service providers, sign up for an account, and sign up the agreement plan they have. They are charging between Rs 3-4 a minute per user which is expensive for a lot of SMEs. These providers are not based in India. They are extensions of certain global payers.

We are offering a free audio conferencing service. People can call in a number which is either local or national long distance to them and wont cost more than Re 1 a minute. There is no incremental cost. We make money by playing a 5-second pre-roll voice advertisement.

So what has the signup and usage been like?

We are seeing serious signups happening and conference calls going on. The longest so far has been for around 3 hours. We are seeing requests coming for toll free numbers, offering calls with more than 10 people. We are seeing Indian as well as global players using our services.

The feedback you have had so far, what feature are you getting the most requests for?

What we are missing right now in terms of a key feature is a scheduler.

Sabeer Bhatia and you have so many projects live online – VoiFi, Aarzoo, etc. and now Sabsebolo. Which one of these is a hundred million dollar idea?

We strongly believe Sabsebolo has the potential to be a dominant player in the market. Not only in the audio conferencing but may be the whole voice platform. Conferencing these days incorporates sharing of presentations and documents. Yours is a plain old phone conferencing.

Absolutely. But the conferences involving presentation sharing, etc. are only around 10% of the total conferences. Majority of them are simple phone calls. That is where we are focusing.

Are you targeting consumers or the enterprises?

Our main initial target is the enterprises. Consumers can of course use the platform. In terms of conferencing business our main target will be the SMBs. Our voice broadcast message will be a consumer market service. We are also opening up platform APIs where in if other people want to build their application they can do that using our infrastructure.

Who do you source the conferencing solutions from?

We have some hardware and then there is proprietary software installed on it. I won’t be able to share where from we are sourcing the network elements.

Have you got any sponsors or advertisers so far?

No. We are talking with some of them right now. Currently we run our own ads. We are just at the start of services. Just a little over one month.

Have you signed with any ad agency like voodovox?

No we haven’t partnered with any but we are looking at them. We are right now tied up with our services and roadmaps to make sure that customer who logs in to our services actually is able to use that.

Instead of playing some ad in the call, why not send ad SMSs to the conference users after they hang up?

I like the idea from advertising perspective. This could mean more money for us. But we are already on a different roadmap. May be we will try something that in the future.

How many concurrent conferencing sessions can you hold?

Currently we can hold a lot. I won’t share the numbers and we are ready to scale it also. But we can hold hundreds of calls right now.

What applications and features you expect will go forward?

From conference perspective we are expecting the toll free number and offering individual numbers which will be non ad supported. There is also the voice broadcast feature. We are also looking at find-me-follow-me service. Suppose you don’t want to give anybody your number. We will issue you a separate number and that will ring your cellphone or the number you wish to keep private.

For voice broadcast how are you going to ensure that I an not voice spamming?

You raised a very valid point from abuse point of view. You won’t be able to use the service unless we have your cellphone number to send you an SMS and then activate it. We need to make sure that it’s a traceable thing. At the same time we will be limiting this to say 10-20 people. So you cannot spam tens and thousands of people.

Will you be integrating the services with some of the Indian social networking sites like bigadda and yaari? I have heard of some integration with online matrimony portals?

We are in talks of integrating our services. That comes within our business model.

Web 2.0 companies in the US have a healthy ad support. When do you think the Indian marketers will start spending on online advertising rather than things like Cricket?

The reason why web advertising hasn’t taken off in India is because the Internet audience at large is the younger crowd with lower disposable income. You will find around 60-70% of those being college kids. That is why your CPMs are not going higher here. Besides there are other issues like broadband usage. India based web portals focus more on e-commerce than content, etc. But things are changing now and are on the right direction.