Hush's mobile platform provides a secure discussion forum for employees

Every employee has an opinion about his/her company — for or against. But the person hardly shares such a view, especially if it is against the employer, fearing retribution. Such fear is neither good for employees and nor for the company.
 
But now an employee by logging into Hush’s app-based and web-based platforms can express his/her views fearlessly. Founded by Ashutosh Dabral and Umesh Joshi, both former employees of Yahoo, in October 2017, the Bengaluru-headquartered HR tech firm gives voice to employees, though anonymously.
 
The company has recently raised Rs 45 million in a fresh round of seed funding from Accel and Shamik Sharma, business head at Curefit. Existing investors also participated in the round. The fresh funds will be used by Hush to expand its team, grow its user base, and  bring new features to the app.
 
In May, it had raised an undisclosed amount as a seed fund.
 
Concept
 

Hush’s co-founders Ashutosh Dabral (left) and Umesh Joshi

Besides giving an employee a platform to air his/her views about the company he/she works with, Hush helps provide “authentic” information to a user who wants to join a certain firm, says co-founder Dabral. “Hush aims to help employees find solutions for their workplace-related issues and career-related questions,” he says.
 
Hush’s mobile platform, the co-founder claims, provides a secure, private and anonymous discussion forum for employees to voice their raw opinion.
 
The app provides two communities for the users. A private community for the user and their co-workers — called the company community, and a public community where people can interact with peers in the industry. But both communities are anonymous.
 
Similarly, the web platform allows users to know about the work environment and salary levels in a certain company, and also get career advice from peers in the industry.
 
Hush is building a platform from the point of view of the employees, while other players in the industry have employers’ perspective in mind, says the co-founder.
 
Opportunities

“Globally, the employee engagement is a $40-50-billion market. We want to build an authentic platform that can help employees discuss their workplace- and career-related issues,” he says.
 
Employees of start-ups such as Flipkart, Ola and Practo, and larger firms like Accenture, Adobe, IBM, TCS, and Infosys use Hush to get answers for their workplace- and career-related queries.
 
More than 50,000 employees are using the app, a number matched by those using the company’s web platform “hush.company”. The company claims employees from over 300 firms use its platforms, and at present, a user spends an average of 10 minutes per day on the app.
 
In six to eight months, Hush wants to create “a positive impact in the lives of a million employees and on board an additional 1000 companies”, says Dabral.
 
The company has observed an uptick in the usage of its platform’s newly-launched modules ‘Salary Data’ and ‘Career Advice’.
 
On the revenue model, the co-founder says: “This is a consumer play, so right now the focus is to build a valuable platform for employees and revenue opportunities will come up later... We also want to prepare premium job listings, which could be monetised, but that would take time.”
 
Charging users for expert advice could be a possible source of revenue for the firm.
 
The start-up is building a large-scale machine learning model to predict salary levels and help people evaluate what pay package they would get based on their skill levels. It also allows employees to rate their respective CEOs and CXOs.  “It is difficult to figure out what product features will resonate the most with users. We plan to do research, ideate and test features to figure out what creates the maximum value for our user base,” the co-founder added.
 

Expert Take

 

Raj Bowen, Managing Partner Ema Partners India

Such a platform, the need of the hour
 
As businesses become more transparent and democratised, there is a need to have such platforms (like Hush) for capturing the voice of the internal customer.
 
This has also been triggered by the rapidly emerging focus on better governance and adherence to ethical practices. So, there is no questioning the immediate need. 
 
Going forward, the important questions any start-up of this nature must ask are what is the unique problem we address and how sustainable is the competitive advantage, how do we scale the business with progressively decreasing costs of doing so, how to make money and remain profitable in the long term, what could disrupt the stability of our business suddenly — what entry barriers exist or can be created, and what sort of leadership talent do we need now and how do we build the pipeline.