Sarahah (Honesty app) is application for Android and iPhone that allow you to receive honest anonymous feedback for about yourself.

Sarahah is application for Android and iPhone that allow you to receive honest anonymous feedback for about yourself.

Sarahah is an app developed by ZainAlabdin Tawfiq.

Indians taught me programming and my first IT job was at Wipro, says Sarahah creator (ZainAlabdin Tawfiq)

You have seen Sarahah screenshots. You have heard of it. You have also probably used it. But do you know who created this app, which has become an overnight sensation. Well, that is ZainAlabdin Tawfiq, a Saudi national. He created the app because he wants people to have "honest" and frank  conversation.

We don't know right now whether Sarahah is a force for good, something that would one day be as big as WhatsApp if not bigger, or if it is just a fad. But Tawfiq, in an exclusive interview with the India Today Group, tells us that he has big plans for it. In a way, he hints, he just starting. Excerpts from our conversation with ZainAlabdin Tawfiq, the Sarahah creator.

Apps are serious business. Some of the world’s biggest companies are essentially apps. Large companies get together thousands of engineers and designers to create them;  they then spend large sums of money to publicize them. And results are often a hit and a miss — getting an app to the top of the app stores is notoriously hard.

However, one developer, working part-time from Saudi Arabia, has gone ahead and created what is currently the most popular app in the world. And he’s done it without spending a penny in marketing costs.

ZainAlabdin Tawfiq is the brains behind Sarahah, the app that’s currently taking the world by storm. Sarahah’s premise is deceptively simple — it lets people collect anonymous feedback about themselves. Users can share a link on the web, or through an app, and people who see the link can anonymously tell them what they feel about them.

People are clearly hungry for this information — Sarahah has had a dream run on the app stores thus far. The app is currently number one in the app in thirty countries, including USA, UK and France. It’s racked up 250 million visitors, and has served them over a billion pageviews.

How One Developer Working Part-Time Built Sarahah, Currently The Most Popular App In The World

At Work

Enhance your areas of strength

Strengthen Areas for Improvement

• With Your Friends

• Improve your friendship by discovering your strengths and areas for improvement

• Self-Developement

  This app is helpful in self-development because of feedbacks.

The Story

Sarahah — whose name means honestly in Arabic — wasn’t always intended to be a social network. ZainAlabdin Tawfiq, who worked as a business systems analyst at an oil company in Saudi Arabia, had first conceived of the idea as a tool to help employees provide unfiltered feedback to their employers. Workplace power dynamics can be tricky, and Tawfiq thought that letting employees give anonymous feedback to their bosses would help companies improve efficiency. “There’s an issue in the workplace people need to communicate frankly to their bosses,” Tawfiq told Mashable.

Development on the tool started in November 2016. Back then it was a simple website and didn’t have an app, and was meant to be used within companies. But then Tawfiq, who graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2014 King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, realized the tool could have a bigger purpose — it could be used by ordinary people to solicit feedback from their friends too.

 Tawfiq soon opened up a version for people, but the response was tepid. In the first few months, he’d only managed to get a few hundred shared messages. That’s when he used something he’d learnt from Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point — Gladwell talks about connectors, or people who knew everyone. Tawfiq shared his app with a friend who was a major influencer.

It was a masterstroke — Sarahah soon exploded. While he’d managed to rack up 70 odd users in a few months, one share from his influencer friend soon got him his first thousand users in the next couple of days. Tawfiq says then “it spread like a virus”, and was soon popular throughout the Arabic-speaking world, including Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt.

All this while, Sarahah was only available in Arabic, but Tawfiq wanted a bigger canvas for his idea. He then contracted an app development company, and Sarahah debuted on App Stores on 13th June. The response was stellar, bolstered in part by Arabic expats living in Canada and the US. The app soon became mainstream and immensely popular with teenagers — it was being shared across Facebook and Instagram, and after a Snapchat update which let users share links on their Snaps, on Snapchat.

And now Sarahah has became one of the most successful viral apps ever — 40 days after its launch, it was the number one app in the US, UK, Canada and France. Incredibly, all this while Sarahah was being run part-time — Taufiq still had his day job at the oil company, and is only now considering quitting to work on it full time.

The app also appears to have hit Indian shores over the last few days. Its links are all over social media, and the founder has noticed. His current pinned tweet on Twitter, posted on 9th August, says “Hello India!”.  India — and its 1.2 billion population — could spur Sarahah on to even greater heights in the coming months.

Sarahah surely is viral right now. But what is next for it?

There's good thing about Sarahah... yes, it is viral. But how can I keep the hype? Our objective is clear, its self-development through constructive feedback. I think that can help us a lot. However I know the challenges of this project in general and I have planned for lots of features. We have lot in plan.

Do you think you can take on WhatsApp?

Sarahah is different so the objective here is different. WhatsApp is a general communication platform, Sarhaha is a constructive feedback platform. So whatsapp or other messaging apps are not our competitors.

Why did you create Sarahah?

When I graduated from college and joined corporate life I noticed that there is a need for constructive feedback. Since there are barriers (to communication) like position or age, the best thing is to have anonymous feedback.

So I thought what are the solutions, may be place suggestions box on the desk.  But then I am a computer scientist and I thought there should be a way to automate this, so I created sarahah. And even before releasing sarahah I thought why limit this to corporate why not let friends and family be frank and honest with each other.

People are worried about their privacy. Some believe that this app is going to reveal the identity of senders one day.

Also Read: Alternative Websites/ Apps for Self Improvement With Some Anonymous Feedback From Friends/ Coworkers

We do have the strict privacy policy. In the privacy policy it says, that we will never reveal the identity of the sender unless we get his consent to do so. You can see also the terms and conditions on privacy policy regarding disclosure of information about revealing the identity in certain circumstances where there is a violation. But if someone is following the rules everything is good we do have this commitment not to reveal the identity unless we get his consent.

How block feature works?

We will not give the details of blocking feature. If we reveal details it will make abusers or misuse of the app easier.

Sarahah is very simple right now. Do you plan to some features to it, and what they could be?

We have good surprises and we hope that the customers will love them. Regarding new features as you see recently had a big expansion globally. Our focus now is on Sarahah scalability, after that we will bring new features.

Sarahah is also an app that doesn't seem to have any possible revenue model. How do you plan to make money?

There are many revenue models. But right now we are using advertising only for revenue.

Sarahah is now popular in India. Do you have something to say to Indian users?

I am really proud that Sarahah has reached India. The first company that I worked for, actually the only IT company that I ever worked for, was Wipro. And I am very proud and happy to see Indians coming to Sarahah.

Indians have taught me programming in university, Indians have taught me programming in the company. I had Indian colleagues and I also have Indian friends.

Sarahah users are complaining of locked accounts. How can they to unlock the locked accounts?

If a user finds his or her account locked, he or she should wait for 12 hours. It will automatically get unlocked. An account gets locked when there are too many attempts to log into it using wrong password. We are working on measure to fix this issue.


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