Quan Inc gears up to beat market leader Line
Japanese tech start-up Quan Inc, developer of decoration group messenger "Lounge", will focus more on the Thai market and aims to beat market leader Line.
The start-up plans to gross US$2 million (Bt62 million) to $3 million per month by the end of next year.
Quan Inc was set up in August last year. Its 36-year-old founder and chief executive officer Kazuhiro Mizuno said the company aims to expand the market footprint of its group messenger application “Lounge” in Thailand. It is seeking local partners to promote the application among Thai users.
“Six months after first launching ‘Lounge’, it has more than 100,000 users worldwide, of which about 50,000 users are in Thailand,” said Mizuno.
“Lounge” is now supported by both the iOS and Android platforms. By the end of June, it will be available in Thai language.
“Lounge” is a free group chat that allows users to customise size and colour of the text and background. Users can do real-time drawing on the same window with their friends in real time, save and send it to the chat screen.
Apart from the “Lounge” application, the company is also introducing its “Sticker-Maker” application that allows users to create their own message with sticker templates and then lets them share with their friends through social networks, such as Line, Twitter, Facebook, and Lounge.
Sticker-Maker was launched just three weeks ago. Currently, it has a total of 40,000 users around the world. It will support the English and Japanese languages. Sticker-Maker currently supports the iOS platform only, but by the end of July it will support Android.
“We set ‘Sticker-Maker’ as the assistant to encourage users to use ‘Lounge’ and we also aim to generate revenue directly from the ‘Sticker-Maker’ application itself,” said Mizuno.
He said there are three revenue models for “Lounge” – advertising; selling “emotion stickers”, which is $1.99 per set of character; and subscription. Now, it has more than 10,000 items across 15 categories. The revenue for
“Sticker-Maker” comes from advertising.
“Sticker-Maker’s revenue comes from only advertising. ‘Lounge’ currently earns from advertising. We will start advertising and selling ‘emotion’ in August and start the subscription model for ‘Lounge’ in November this year,” said Mizuno.
Mizuno said that by the end of 2013, the company aims to have combined revenue from Lounge and Sticker-Maker of about $2 million to $3 million per month.
Quan has seven staff, of whom five are developers. It also has four outsource designers. Mizuno has been chief executive officer at mobile and network game developer Tekunodo for two years.
