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Bangalore- Abhay Kumar Gupta is the founder and CEO at Ficting. He graduated as an engineer and worked at Wipro as an Associate Consultant for a year, seeing the pain point he took a leap of faith and quit his full-time high paying job for his dream venture Ficting. Registered Ficting as a company and got incubated at SIIC IIT Kanpur and received NTT Data Innovation Fellowship.
Ficting App launched on March 25, 2020, and since they have seen 1500+ Organic Downloads (without spending even a dime on marketing) and have around 200 Monthly Active Users and Ficting App including the UI/UX and Content ( which is generated In-House as of now ) is entirely BOOTSTRAPPED.
Ficting is a reading app platform that is reviving the reading habit of people, mainly targeting the younger generation and millennials by providing an engaging and non-distractive narration, which in a way grabs their attention and hooks them on the content. Stories are told in the texting format or passive chat conversation and it proudly boasts of converting a lot of non-readers into readers. Even the name ‘Ficting’ is derived from the word ‘Fiction’ and ‘Texting’.
Ficting markets the content not as a replacement to traditional reading, but as a way to hold the attention just like any on-demand entertainment platform. The advantage being that these stories can spark people’s interest during everyday activities like waiting for a train or riding the elevator, without requiring much effort.
The vision of Ficting is to convert every non-reader into a reader and eventually every reader into a Ficter where Ficter is defined as any creative person who is an author, graphic artist or musician which in itself will unleash a potential market for new-age content creators.
In simple words, it can be seen as ‘NETFLIX for Chat Fiction’ which has a range of genres like Thriller, Romance, Spiritual, etc. It’s a great alternative to read crisp, short stories, without even killing much time and this way not only readers but also non-readers get a better reading experience.
Covid has been the most challenging times for everyone including us and forced us to rethink on the strategies moving forward. Since we were into storytelling already so we curated stories around Covid-19 using information from relevant authentic sources like ‘MYTHBUSTERS’ which clarified myths related to Corona Virus, and thus it caught the attention of local newspaper and even found it’s mention via IIT Kanpur Official Twitter Handle.
When Mr. Abhay Kumar Gupta was asked how many times it happened that you bought a book but you were unable to finish it. He said that it’s generally not because of the content but because of the narration, had the narration been engaging, you would have surely finished the entire book, as in today’s time, the attention span has reduced significantly so it becomes highly monotonous and boring to read in a normal format of reading.
He also said, according to research it is found that attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. In fact, scientists reckon everyone now has shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds.
Mr. Abhay Kumar Gupta received an invite from ‘Meet The Drapers Season 4’ after pitching Tim Draper as Ficting emerged one of the winners out of 50 startups that pitched him in person, Bagged Innovation Fellowship from NTT DATA and also mentioned on Local News Channel and Local Newspaper and even YourStory.
To know more about Ficting you can contact MR. Abhay Kumar Gupta at [email protected].
