These four young men are taking on Facebook! Will they succeed?

Meet Aditya Dhull, Prince Jacob Thomas, Mohit Narwal and Chandy Thomas!

These four young men are all set to take on Facebook with their startup Treetins.com.

Treetins is a platform where 'strangers can go social' and its founders are hoping it will provide a great alternative to Facebook

But does it really have the potential to succeed? Will it make money? More importantly, will it go viral?

Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore gets talking to the new entrepreneurs.

Office address: 17th Floor of a posh office at Nariman Point, one of Mumbai’s toniest business districts.

Employees: Founder Prince Jacob Thomas, three co-founders -- Aditya Dhull, Mohit Narwal, Chandy Thomas -- and two interns. One of these six takes turns to make cupcakes so that the other five get to work at their stations.

Office space: Big enough for four to five people to squeeze in along with their laptops. Thanks to Monish Ghatalia, owner of an advertising company who was magnanimous enough to let out his office library to these four to green flag their unique venture.

Name of the web site: Treetins.com (Treetins is an anagram for interest)

Often heard from people with whom these entrepreneurs haggle for discounts on promotion material: Kya sahab, posh Nariman Point main office aur itna bargain karte ho (Sir, you have an office in the posh Nariman point area and yet you bargain for discounts).

Aim: To make Treetins.com a platform where ‘strangers can go social’ and create a social network of people based on their interest to take on Facebook.

In nutshell, Prince, Aditya, Chandy and Mohit are reinventing the Internet wheel that first helped strangers connect with each other openly through various messenger services but later closed itself by going social, giving you the choice to sift out strangers from your circle of friends.

This is how people connect on Treetins:

Any user who registers on Treetins has to first ‘Express’ (write) her/his interest. Like, somebody writing about an honest taxi driver who made her/his day. While this ‘Expression’ about the taxi driver will be in public domain the people who read it will have no way to know the person who posted it. They can only see the ‘Expression’.

Anybody interested in your ‘Expression’ can start a conversation with you by selves using A/S/C (short cuts used for age, sex and city/country) and by the time you find common interest a lot of time has passed. Most of the times such conversations lead to web cam invites again making the entire exercise very creepy.

While most of these platforms were started with the right intention, somehow people don’t have easy and safer access to strangers with common interests.

The thought behind starting Treetins was to use the Internet’s ability to reach out to maximum people and create a platform where people can connect with strangers only when they want to.

Your challenges as entrepreneurs…

Mohit: The biggest challenge right now for us is that as much as we are trying to promote ‘making strangers social’ as a concept, while people may like it, it is equally very difficult for people to start getting used to it.

To be able to sensitise people about the value of meeting strangers and interacting with them is the biggest challenge we are facing right now.

That said and done, we realised that of the two or three initiatives that we have done like ‘share your table’, people are actually quite open to an idea like this. It is for us to push them to give them a medium and to be able to start experiencing the joys of connecting with strangers.

You have left your respective careers and ventured into unknown territory. Your insecurities…

When we left our existing jobs and moved on to this our seniors were really helpful. They guided us through; even now they continue to call us and offer help. We had this fear but surprisingly and thankfully we have worked under very good people and we can get back to our respective jobs anytime.

But we left our jobs to pursue our dream very seriously.

How much time before you call it a day if it does not workout for you?

We are looking at a lifetime. The idea of Treetins is much bigger than we initially thought. We started with a web platform and it is growing much more than that.

We haven’t really thought about that yet (about quitting…). All our efforts are invested in making sure that the idea works out.

Lessons learnt…

Prince: I remember reading a Chinese proverb which said that before starting a game you should know the rules. You should know the stakes and you should know the enemies. Somewhere, when we started out, in our excitement we neglected the rules a bit and only after getting in we realised there were things we needed to have done before starting Treetins.

While we are very confident of the idea and love the concept we realised that we should have done a little more groundwork to execute this idea in a better way.

Until now we were the only employees. Now we have two interns working with us. We are slowly learning to make our employees to be as passionate about Treetins as we are.

Aditya: What I have learnt is that when you are starting there are a lot of ideas and thoughts that you come up with and after a point you keep thinking over them instead of working on those ideas. When you are working in an organisation and if you have a lot of ideas then you have this go-to person who helps you shortlist, polish and fine-tune ideas. In starting out on one’s own there is nobody to report to or delegate work to. You are the one who has to take a decision and act upon it.

Mohit: This is one lesson we all have learnt: Even if you don’t know whether it is going to work out or not for you, just go for it. Try it out, make changes on the go. Try again, fine-tune it further; keep trying till you make your idea real.

Advice to young entrerpreneurs…

Don’t be worried about taking the first step.

We procrastinate a lot about the right time to start-up. There is nothing better than jumping first and then knowing whether it was right or not. The wait for the right time never ends. Only when you try doing it once will you know if you like it or not, whether you will be successful or not.

Pros and cons of friends starting-up a business venture…

Pro is since you already know your friends are on the same wavelength you can partner and execute better with friends.

Con would be one is already afraid if you should speak up and tell your team member to pull up his socks or not.