Want to get advice from experts over a phone call? This startup might help you.

Getting expert advice in the domain you wish to build your career upon is one of the biggest problems that students or early stage Startups grapple with. Moreover, getting top-notch advice seems to be a distant proposition for those who do not have friends or someone within the family in the ‘industry’. Taking this challenge head on is an innovative Startup from Bangalore, TapChief.

Founded in February 2016 by BITS Pilani alumni, TapChief is a platform to discover and schedule calls with experts to get advice across various domains. TapChief went live on February 18, 2016, and in just 5 months they have managed to bring 3500+ professionals from over 2000 organizations onboard. The TapChief Community of Experts makes for a very diverse pool of professionals– VCs, CEOs, Developers, Designers, Consultants.

How TapChief Works?

• A user can discover experts from the pool of experts in TapChief and can request a call with the chosen expert.
• In the request, the user specifies what the discussion is going to be all about. The user also suggests timings on which the call can be scheduled.
• An expert can choose to accept, cancel or suggest different timings for any call request.
• If the expert accepts the request, both parties will receive an automatic phone call at the designated time.
• If somehow, the expert isn’t available to take a call from a user because of his engagements, there is a provision for an expert to suggest an alternate time of his own and reschedule the Call.

Who can use Tapchief?

Anyone-

• Who  needs Career and job-related advice in different domains.
• Who wants to become industry ready by interacting with professionals working in their dream company.
• Who wants to take rational business decisions by speaking to successful entrepreneurs.
• Who wants to acquire new skill sets by talking to experts with varied skill sets.

Some of the big names who are featured experts in Tapchief include Gaurav Munjal -CEO,Unacademy and Flatchat, Sattvik Mishra, Co-founder, ScoopWhoop and Ramendra S Baoni,Founder, BiSquare Systems, Ecco Electronics among others.

“Right off on launch in February, the first major obstacle for us was getting a quality pool of Experts onboard and more importantly develop a scalable model for the same. After a few offshoots, we hacked our Expert onboarding by leveraging alumni networks online. We have been on a roll since! The first month saw us grow to 1000 Experts and now we have 3500+ professionals from over 2000 organizations as a part of the TapChief community. I’d say we more than cracked this one.” said Neil Dave who is the Community Manager at TapChief

“At TapChief, we believe that “Good teams build great products”. We are fortunate enough to have a team that has endured with us through building and selling our first company, all of this while still in college at BITS Pilani. Team TapChief is a bunch of passionate BITSians looking to solve everyday problems by leveraging good tech and design.” he added.

TapChief, in its early days, was built for the Indian startup community–to help budding entrepreneurs figure out legal, financial, product and career decisions for themselves. The overwhelming response TapChief got from experts made them reconsider. In a few days, Tapchief saw authors, stand-up comedians, motivational speakers and even fitness trainers signing up to be a part of the TapChief Community. This behaviour forced Tapchief to grow out of its niche to a much broader platform for anyone to seek professional advice for critical business and career decisions.

TapChief’s primary competition are existing peer to peer networks and advice network offline. But according to Tapchief, none of them have managed to solve two key problems that come with building a community for knowledge sharing, access and quality. TapChief makes the process of discovery and connection seamless, by facilitating bite-sized consulting over a simple phone call. No app or internet is required in the actual call.

TapChief emerged as the winner at the Bangalore Edition of SeedStars World and will now be travelling to Switzerland in March 2017 to compete against entrepreneurs from 65 countries to win the 500k USD in offer.

Prior to Seed Stars World, TapChief also the won the #ChaseYourDreams Ideathon held by Mindbatteries in April 2016. TapChief emerged as the winner from 1200 startups to get the backing of PayTm Founder & CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma and 1Cr of his funding as well.

TapChief recently launched its nationwide placement training campaign, TapChief Job Coach. Under the program Students across the country can avail role-based, personalised placement coaching over a series of 4 phone calls.
Job Coach also gives Students a chance to get refered to top-notch organizations like Mckinsey &Co., Microsoft, Schlumberger, Goldman Sachs and Ogilvy & Mather.

The success of any Startup is contingent upon the value and not just the product/service it creates for its clients. In our view, enabling people to interact with the achievers across various domains is a great concept and a great value addition in a sense that it can help people in remote areas get top-notch industry advice from the comfort of their home which otherwise would have been really hard to get.

What is your take on this Startup?. Drop us your opinion at hello@timesofstartups.com.