What if you don’t have to wait a year long for a Santa to come? What if you get a genie who treats you as his master? What if you utter a wish and God says immediately – “TATHASTU”?
Seems like a dream, right? But four IITtians from IIT Mumbai have come up with a startup to make this dream come true! And they named it ‘Tathastu’.
‘Tathastu’ is a brain child of Chirag Chadha, Anshul Avasthi, Prashanth Villa and Nivvedan, which is a WhatsApp based local personal assistance service that helps people get various day-to-day tasks done.
The start up has also been named as one of the best start ups on Quora within a month of it’s launch. And the reason is very simple that you don’t have to download hell lot of apps in order to get different things done. Tathastu has so far fulfilled wishes like getting last minute gifts for sisters on Rakshabandhan, quenching late night cravings of Pizaa, cake or ice cream (even at 2:00 AM).
When RFI asked them about one of the most memorable wish they came accross, they gave us this one –
“So there was this guy who wanted to pretend in front of his girlfriend that he was stealing a bike to take her for a ride, but of course he didn’t really want to steal one. So we sent over one of our delivery guys and asked him to leave his bike and keys somewhere near where they were sitting. The guy pretended to steal the bike, took his girlfriend for a joy ride and left the bike where it was.
The girlfriend was convinced that he has done something extremely cheeky and we got one more happy customer J.” says Anshul
Being students, the co founders of Tathastu had been using most of the latest apps. But they soon realized that no one really likes to download so many apps, which comes into use once in a while. For instance you buy clothes once in a month but you have to download various shopping apps to buy just one dress. Or may be you need a taxi once in a while but have to download an app to book it for just that particular instance.
They followed the data for what the users like to do on their mobile phones. And found out that 70% of the time spent by people on their smartphones is spent on texting/IM based. Thus the idea came up of a one stop texting solution to all the needs of a customer.
“The basic idea was to create a solution that brought together human and machine intelligence. Tathastu is your personal assistant. We will use every trick up our sleeves to make sure that no one who approaches us goes back empty handed. And as for what we can do – the sky is the limit.”, says Chirag through his blog on Tathastu.
You can contact the Tathastu team at chirag@tathastunow.com or follow them on Facebook or Twitter. The team is operating only in Mumbai right now but soon will spread out to other cities too.
This post is a part of our awareness campaign #MyCareerMyChoice. To read more posts from this campaign, please click here.
