Facebook awards $40,000 for Indian youth’s app
As an entrepreneur, it is always a dream to publish an App that can make it to the top ten in Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. But that is a long way off till you have sufficient funding to finance your App and trust me, finding seed funding for your App idea is the most difficult thing in this hyper-competitive market. In such circumstances, what more can you ask when you have the big daddy of social networking to support you financially!
Monish Karam’s story is somewhat a fairy tale. Hailing from the remote state of Manipur in India, Karam has been successful in getting funding from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook for his App. Apparently, Karam’s App has found favour with the Facebook top honchos who have granted $40,000 funding to a Karam who is based in Singapore to develop a mobile application which he created in 2015.
Karam, 35, who hails from Imphal and is the founder of Jobsenz, told TOI, “Forty thousand US dollars from Facebook is meant to build, grow, and monetize the application. We are using it for marketing and Amazon AWS server infrastructure.”
Jobsenz was chosen by FbStart initiative, Facebook’s worldwide program that assists in mobile startups, for its remarkable development.
“We applied for it and the minimum criteria is to have an app which has gained some traction. According to Facebook, the app was chosen because of its impressive development so far and its potential for continued growth. We have already crossed a significant number of downloads in India,” said Karam.
The application offers a complete solution for preparing for jobs or exams with live exams, flashcards and study notes, to job search, multi-lingual resume maker. “It includes a marketplace where coaching centers or educators can sell or share their course content directly to students or job-seekers,” added Karam.
Earlier, while studying for his MBA at the National University of Singapore and IE Business School in Madrid, Karam had received an entrepreneurship award. He began a software product (recruitSenz) with that money, which he later sold it to a company in Singapore.
“While working on recruitSenz, we realized we missed to add an interface website for candidates to apply for jobs created in recruitSenz. We turned this missing feature into a new product (Jobsenz),” he added. Karam is positive of expanding his reach even more with the assistance from Facebook.
“So far, we were working in stealth mode as the focusing was on product market fit. With the download growth and validation from Facebook, we believe users can now benefit from its full features. Going ahead, we will be bringing in some funds to enhance our features for a wider reach in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh,” he said.
Hope that Karam cashes in on Facebook’s mentoring and gets his App in the top ten soon!
