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Instappy is a DIY mobile app development platform aimed at helping people with no coding knowledge create their own apps

What’s all the fuss about developing a mobile app? Take a computer and customise and develop your own mobile app by the time dinner is ready.

That’s the mantra Instappy adopts—DIY mobile app development in less than 60 minutes is what they claim.

Based out of New Delhi, Instappy is the brainchild of Ambika Sharma, who heads Pulp Strategy, a full service agency in the realm of tech-enabled, digital and interactive marketing.

“We are a development company, and last year we realised that we were getting a lot of queries for the mobile software and we weren’t being able to handle all the business that was coming our way,” Sharma tells e27.

Having to turn down a lot of business due to time constraints led to the birth of Instappy.

“To address our lighter client base, we started to explore app builders in the market and we realised that there wasn’t really a solution. There was nothing which was long term and they also had a lot of restrictions, we decided that it was great for us to be able to build something to fill that void,” she says.

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The platform took a year to develop and was launched in September this year. Sharma claims that 2,000 users have already signed up on Instappy.

Based on a subscription-based model, Instappy also offers customised plans for enterprises. The app subscription plans start from around US$768 per year with the more advanced versions such as that of their bestseller retail apps going up to US$2,305.

Platform for smaller businesses

Developing a mobile app is traditionally a time-consuming and expensive task, says Sharma, she estimates the time taken to develop a full blown app to be over months.

“We wanted to something that make sense for small and medium enterprise and would be able to help people to take stock of their business on mobile platform,” she says.

“Through this, people don’t have to wait that long. For smaller businesses and individuals, especially, it serves their purpose without having to shell out large amounts of money or time,” adds Sharma.

Instappy offers a 30-day free trial with a series of templates for beginners, so you can select the template, sign up, read the tutorial and start uploading images and content.

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At present, Instappy offers apps in three categories– content publishing, retail and catalogue, and enterprise.

Content publishing is is best suited for magazines, bloggers, photographers and anyone who has a lot of content to be able to showcase.

“It has [the] ability to showcase content in a nice understandable manner and there is a CMS backend, so you can update the content, change the UI, send push notifications, and be able to run promotions or advertisements for your customers,” says Sharma.

Instappy’s most popular category is the retail application and m-commerce app, which comes equipped with inventory management. The app can also help customers display products, run promotions and ensure that the app and the customer’s current e-commerce website can maintain a single inventory base. It also has a payment gateway.

“It works like any good quality m-commerce application, the differentiating factor being that it can be set up in hours and display all of your products in a categorised manner, so thats the retail platform,” says Sharma.

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The enterprise platform, which has applications meant for small and medium-sized sales teams, is completely customisable and has restricted access. It has access on demand, so people can basically run all of their sales teams and get MIS and reports on the go on mobile.

To serve the needs of local businesses, Instappy is currently available in 25 languages, including all major Indian languages along with English, Spanish, Portugese, German and French.

The company has already started to make inroads in the global market and is seeing a lot of traction in the US, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, Sharma says, adding that the platform is suitable for any company across the globe.

 

How it works

Instappy can be used by any lay person without any coding skills. A number of set mobile app templates makes the task simpler and a step-by-step guide on how to develop the app also helps in the process.

Users can choose and customise the look and features as desired to make it suitable to their audience.

“Our biggest feature would be that the apps are media rich and that they have a secure hosting, which means that they play independent of any website and cloud hosting so they are available everywhere. They are white labelled so people can actually release these applications under their own banner,” says Sharma.

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Instappy provides fully functional built-in content management system for unlimited updates over 46 rich media and social APIs. It also offers data backup, secure cloud hosting push notifications in app, real time analytics and free payment gateway and inventory management.

The platform also includes Instappy Wizard, where users can view and test their app on devices in real time as they are building it. Wizard allows users to make informed choices while they create original applications for their business.

An online help team provides suggestions and solutions in case users get stuck.

Way forward

While Instappy is being funded entirely by its parent Pulp Strategy currently, Sharma says talks are on for external funding for the platform. She did not reveal the potential investors or the amount they were looking to raise.

“We are open to attract investments, which will enable us to scale up operations faster and bring on board better advantages to the platform,” she said.

Over the one year all efforts would be targetted at strengthening the technology and to bring in more formats and features on the platform.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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