Lahzenegar is a live broadcasting service for smartphones. Users can register for a free account on the app and live stream their moments with others. Currently more than 200 events have been live streamed by Lahzenegar.
Statistics show that today, the media consumption is moving towards mobile phones. Periscope is known as the most famous video streaming app in the market right now. In 2014 the company that is now called Periscope was named Bounty and had raised $1.4 million. Later the company got acquired by Twitter and released the initial version of Periscope in March 2015. Periscope is co-founded by an Iranian named Kayvon Beykpour.
Lahzenegar is an Iranian startup which has made it into the first wave of live streaming apps. The MVP version of Lahzenegar was released in October 2014 and the first public version was released recently. Until now the app has been downloaded 10,000 times and has attracted 80,000 viewers. Though Lahzenegar is free to use with some limited features, it’s already making revenue by selling audio and video streaming packages to their clients.
Currently Lahzenegar’s team consists of 3 programmers, a Product Manager, a UI/UX designer and a Marketing Manager. We spoke with Amir Hossein Faghihi, the 25 year old Co-founder and Product Manager of the startup.
Amir Hossein told us that he started his first company in 2008, just when he had just started college. Back then at their company, they designed a CMS for Iranian users so that they can manage their online content.
Until last year the company was focused only on web. “The country was going through changes in the technology field. The growth of the startup scene, the increase of the Internet speed and the widespread use of smartphones impelled us to enter new fields.” For weeks they were having brainstorming sessions until they came up with Lahzenegar.
Share Your Moments
“Lahzenegar started with a need,” says Amir Hossein. “Around October 2014 one of our clients contacted us and asked for a solution to live stream their events. The client told us the current solutions are expensive and needs high speed Internet, so it was not suitable for him”.
That’s when the idea initiated and Amir Hossein’s team brought up the problem to their brainstorming sessions. “We came to this conclusion that live streaming should happen with the easiest-to-reach tool which is a smartphone and the most-widespread kind of Internet which is mobile data.”
Challenge Accepted!
The team’s main challenge was to first see if such idea is possible on mobile platform. They started doing R&D and sat down with a couple of prominent programmers and tested some open source tools and found out such thing is possible.
“This process took a long time. For 5 months we were working on an infrastructure that was scalable and stable,” says Amir Hossein. “Though we were taking a path that not many had walked before, the outcome was satisfying,” he added.
Amir Hossein told us that since the data plans on wireless carriers is quite expensive, they’ve managed to implement some compression algorithms for both audio and video so that users don’t have to pay much for the data transfer.
When the Competitors Enter
A few months after starting Lahzenegar the team found out live streaming on cellphones is becoming a worldwide trend. “In March 2015 Meerkat started making some noises and Twitter bought Persicope. Before that there was no buzz around”. Faghihi says the wave of new apps focusing on live streaming made them hopeful of the future since they were one of the first in this sector. “We work fully agile and we care about User Experience and Customer Segment in a precise way”.
Achievements
“Since the release of the public version two months ago, our application has been downloaded 10,000 times only from our website,” said Amir Hoseein. Lahzenegar has had more than 200 live streams with over 80,000 viewers. Amir hossein told us that Lahzenegar’s first revenue was made before the public release of the app.
Lahzenegar was one of the few teams invited to attend iBridge conference in Berlin to pitch their startup. They were also one of the 10 teams which got a chance to pitch in front of investors at Seedstars Tehran pitch competition in September.
Currently Lahzenegar is in fundraising stage and is in talks with a couple of investors. Lahzenegar will soon launch its iOS app. For now the android version could be downloaded from here.
The team visions that in 2018, Lahzenegar would become so popular that people would say: “Watch my Lahzenegar @myname!”
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