By In 2011-12, Truecaller was one of the biggest hyped subjects everyone was querying of. What is Truecaller? Everyone wanted to know. At that time Truecaller app was the magical answer arrived in the telecom industry which could reveal an unknown mobile caller’s identification. If you go on the actual meaning of its name, it will automatically unveil the true meaning of it. True Caller! The true identity of the caller.
Truecaller is a story of a successful startup app which made our tech-savvy life a lot much simpler. Mobile revolution was life-changing; but it also came up with new difficulties like unknown mobile numbers identity, spam calls, undesired call or privacy/security concern.
Truecaller mobile app founders.
Everyone was wanted to get rid of the complexity of unknown number identification and spam calls. Also at that time, there was no thought of global phone directory for mobile numbers.
Need is the mother of invention, so the Truecaller founded.
Founded in 2009 by Nami Zarringhala and Alan Mamedi, Originally, truecaller was started for Blackberry only. It is a global phone list for mobile communications. Improving its successful to a bigger level, it also provides security and privacy now. Truecaller makes your life simpler by recognizing spam calls, Block unwanted phone calls, block unnecessary texts, names of unsaved contact numbers, and also report fraud and other rejected calls. Nowadays it is accessible on the web as well as you can download Truecaller app on iPhone, Windows, Blackberry, Android and Symbian phone.
Alan Mamedi, founder of truecaller
The founder and CEO of Truecaller Alan Mamedi told in an interview when asked how do you describe Truecaller–
Truecaller is a global phone directory that covers Landlines, mobiles and even prepaid phone numbers and fits into your pocket.
How Was Truecaller Started?
The founding story of Truecaller begins with their old concepts of phone books and yellow pages. At the time of base phone, it was very simple for any person to search a contact in the phone book and to get connected to that particular person. All the connections and relevant information were registered in phonebooks, or you can say white or yellow pages. But then smartphones era had risen up and sooner or later the situation was changed entirely.
The base phone became outmoded and so the phone book directory idea. The luxury of finding people’s contact details had gone. The problems did not stop here only but it increased as privacy issues like spam and scam calls also extended with no bound. There was no system to find a fast and simple solution to recognize the unknown caller at that time.
Truecaller headquarters
Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Namedi were students of Royal Institutes of Technology, batch 2006, Sweden. Both of them were affectionate of mobile technology and always imagined of taking their cell phone knowledge to a greater level.
They planned a research project and developed an online global directory. This online directory initially used to search mobile numbers of all missed calls only which can be probably from the family and friends of them. To create the database for the app, they managed to collect data from the national phone directory. In the beginning, it was begun on a microscopic level. This is the story of Truecaller before the era of App store, play store etc. The Blackberry users were helped to use this global directory facility.
We wished it were easier to look at phone numbers for missed calls we received from our relatives living abroad and from our customers calling us at our previous job.
– Alan Mamedi
Truecaller’s Functionality & Features
Truecaller is a mobile app also run on the world wide web let you search people anywhere on the earth by name or number. Because it identifies your networks and you can search for a person’s connection even if you are not aware of his last name. It will let you manage your profile on its network associated with your phone number only and provide recommendations for people to join with via the Truecaller network. Undesired call blocking, spam calls, a shared connection, a broad set of contact database these are the most remarkable features and functionality of this app.
How Truecaller’s business model became so successful even till date?
Do you know, Truecaller was originated much before the era of all these app stores revolutions? Yes, you read it right. The tale of Truecaller starts a long ago before the globe knows about the mobile apps. Alan and Nami collected crowd-sourced data and unrolled its own API to a selected group of developers. Initially, it had countable numbers of connections as opposed to today which is more than a billion as of the date, and its users grew to more than 2 billion plus. How it became dramatically successful?
The success lies in Truecaller’s business and marketing model. The service tagline of Truecaller is to get rid of unknown numbers and also expand the network of contact for its users. Because it identifies your social network system, it can recognize your interest areas contacts.
This idea looked interesting for the mobile users, especially in Middle East, Asia and European countries. Once you get addicted to this app, it will offer you its premium plan. The second most valuable revenue generation comes from the big users. Truecaller sells its data to big businesses which might find it very useful for the company purpose.
For example, airline industries may need contacts to enhance its customer support. As API of Truecaller is limited, every company aligns to Truecaller to reach its database.
Apart from the database, Truecaller also produced some mind-blowing business movements:
Truecaller ask for review once a user made 5 successful searches.
Let their user invite its friends via any mode – WhatsApp, FB, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Text etc.
Use Facebook Ticker to show when someone searched for a number. It increased its Facebook following.
After 30 days of free trial, send a push notification that highlights its best points.
Display a like button to like when the user performed one successful search.
At first, these moves seem very easy, but its results turn out to be remarkably successful. Facebook and twitter likes increased by 120 percent a month and hit Google play rating to 4.5 ratings.
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