(A social initiative by team tylt to help people find essentials nearby during COVID-19)
The news of COVID-19 was received with mixed feelings by us. Initially, we thought, we would get more time to polish our product and our launch plan. But the slowness that crept in because of this delay was not giving us the same zeal with which we were working before (yes we fall into the hustlers’ category). But then there was this moment, in which we got our high back…
So, it was a Friday evening, we were discussing our usual development plan, also checking how each of us is doing in this COVID time, away from our families, when suddenly we realized that all of us were facing a similar problem..which was to figure out how to get our essentials in this lockdown. One of us was struggling to get drinking water can as his usual vendor had stopped delivery, one of us had to go to each opened grocery store to check if milk was available and I was trying to figure out how to get groceries for my parents staying in my hometown when the delivery platforms like Big Basket had paused their operations. So, we started brainstorming on how to solve this problem which almost everyone was facing out there and that’s how LOCUS was born. We decided that we would help the community by building a hyper-local app that would show info about the essential stores nearby and this info will be crowd-sourced. Believe me, there is a different kind of euphoria when you get into building something to help people and we were in that zone by then..
Then the next stage is the one which is dreaded by all the business folks, which is building the app, because of their distant relationship with technology and we were no different :P But then glideapps (and the innovator in our team :) ) came to our rescue. The learning curve was so short for it that it took us just one night-out to build the working app (after a long time, we had seen the sunrise on that day :D ). The next stage was the crucial one where we extensively reached out to our friends and families to seek their feedback and validate the solution for the problem that we were trying to solve, and to our surprise, the kind of response overwhelmed us, as people were feeling so connected with the cause and the idea and were selflessly sharing the app to help each other. So on Sunday itself, our app was checked out 359 times by different people, just through WhatsApp. The coming days were followed by product improvements + extensive organic marketing to drive awareness of the platform.
Fast forward 2 weeks, here we are, doing our bit to fight against COVID-19 by helping people find essentials near them. It makes us even happier and proud to see how people are selflessly adding info on LOCUS to help each other. We would like to thank all these heroes who are doing their bit in this fight against COVID-19 :) As of today, we are serving people in 4 countries (India, USA, Chile and France), and in India, we are serving people across 16 cities with the crowd-sourced info of 83 stores.
So friends let’s fight these tough times together by taking all the necessary precautions, practicing social distancing and helping each other stay safe :)
