How Compoz is aiming to turn the human need for storytelling into social media gold

Murakami wrote, “People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.” Taking pictures to tell stories and preserve our memories is not a recent human preoccupation. Cavemen more than forty thousand years ago drew their stories onto the walls of the cave just as obsessively as we chart our lives through Instagram, Twitter and Flickr. Storytelling- the fuel that has been powering human existence since the beginning of time- is continuously evolving as we get further entrenched in the digital age. But the essence is the same that it was forty thousand years ago and will remain so long after we are here no more: to give our lives meaning, to capture the infinite depths and beautiful paradoxes of our being and to create a legacy that goes far beyond mortality. Art exists because life is not enough.

Enter Compoz. In the words of the founders, “Compoz is an exciting social networking platform that lets you open the window to your world by posting a series of photos that tell stories. It connects you to storytellers from all over and lets you share or retell their stories for everyone to see. It is a simple way to create and share inspirational moments as they happen around people and their world.” In conversation with YourStory, co-founder Sandeep Ozarde delves into the compelling vision behind this storytelling app.

What sparked the idea for Compoz?

We know that amazing stories are unfolding in some corner of the world right now. Visuals have the power to convey the story to us. And we want to see, feel and know the world, through as many eyes as possible.

We believe no one can experience life in exactly the same way as another. Each of us has a unique story to tell. With a camera travelling with us almost all of the time, everyone has the power to express so much more with visuals. We created Compoz to simply bring those stories alive.

What gap does it aim to fill?

 Stories bring people together. They provoke our memory and gives us the framework for much of our understanding. In that sense, they bring people together and help us connect with each other more meaningfully. With this essence in mind, Compoz gives users the opportunity to tell their story to the world and be appreciated for it. Users can also discover the world around, be it art, lifestyle, culture or food, in newer and more dynamic ways.Brands can use the powerful medium of short visual storytelling to establish strong relationships of trust and mutual respect with their consumers.

How inspired is Compoz by the various existing social media sites like Twitter and Instagram?

Our product can be categorized as a ‘visual story-telling platform.’ It has its origins in and has evolved from blogs, photo-sharing apps and social networks. It is a blend of these distinct categories and derives its synergy by drawing on the combined features of these categories and extending them. It’s not that we are defining the concept of storytelling. But visual storytelling is more focused and it has a clear purpose of adding meaning or context to your visual content when strung together as one story piece.

We have studied the evolution of these various categories of products and drawn on these features and added value by providing a platform where users can create context and location specific visual stories and then share them with the community. The emphasis is more on photo enhancing and photo sharing activities. The focus is not on the storytelling aspect.

The unique selling proposition of the product Compoz is that it offers a structured way to create visual stories on-the-go and present it to a dedicated community of storytellers. As to our competitive advantages, UXD is the key to its usage. Original content creation offers a scope beyond curation. That apart, the scope for authentic communication and community building is what we believe will draw people to Compoz.

Apart from advertising, what other sources of revenue are you targeting?

The main revenue model would be centred on the contextual display ads. They would be represented creatively in an integrated format, such as advertorial type ad - promoting product or services in the form of story. It will allow users to interact with the advertorial content. There would be other potential revenue streams as we progress i.e. Introducing product market place, ecommerce extensions

What kind of buzz and reactions has Compoz generated? Has audience reception lived up to expectations?

We are only few weeks old. Our social marketing efforts are on, but this would take some time to build the user traction. We have received positive feedback on the app, and we are working on few enhancement features to improve the user experience further.

What challenges and obstacles did you encounter while building the app? How did you overcome them?

When we started around 15 months back, there weren’t any existing Visual Storytelling apps. Now we see that there is a new category emerging around this concept, which is good for us. Emerging competitive brands confirm the growing potential market in the given domain.

Being in the typical start-up scenario, the biggest challenge was to work effectively within the limited resources and balance it right between time and efforts putting it to achieve the desired quality. Considering the targets we had set were high on the user experience, as it would be reaching out the global market, we are pretty happy with how things turned out.

How did you secure the funding for Compoz?

It’s self-funded so far, and we would be connecting soon with investors for the investment options.

When do you plan to launch Compoz in the android market?

We are focusing on iPhone as the world market, not specific to India. We would wait till we reach the substantial user base on iPhone first, before we extend it for other platforms.

What does the future look like for Compoz?

We want to get to 100k user base mark as quickly as possible. We plan to get the seed funding in the next 4-6 months for further enhancements and growth plans. We are also working on introducing brands to share their stories, help them interact and engage with their users and introduce the android version as soon as possible.

Check out Compoz here