Don’t just start up- please take time out to sort out the right problem

Every day, we hear new startup stories, some are inspiring, some are disappointing and some just don’t make any sense, neither in terms of the usefulness of the product, nor in terms of being a worthwhile investment opportunity.

It is a great thing to start up, and we must give it a try, but what is more important to note is that most of the ideas these days seem to not be in sync with what is required on a long term basis, or what our country really needs. In the excitement and eagerness to start something new, startups have forgotten some basic rules of the game, and hence do not seem to be aiming at bigger goals.

Let’s try and analyse this-

E-commerce Websites

Do we need another one? Are any of them actually making money? If we review the financials that are on the MCA portal, available on paying a simple fee of Rs 100, we can see that these balance sheets are definitely not showing any profits, and are bleeding investor money. Now, the positive impact of these websites is the opening up of a whole new online marketplace and related ecosystems, the fact we can order almost anything online and get it delivered in a couple of hours is super convenient for some. However, most of these e-commerce companies have realised the importance of investing in the backend support and related activities, which, to my mind, makes for a much more profitable venture. Thus, we often see these e-commerce ventures scouting for companies providing innovative warehousing and logistics solutions.

The startup ecosystem can get better only if more startups focus on improving the ecosystem at each and every step- that will eventually improve the online experience. So instead of focusing on another online portal, startups should focus on related activities, related problems that are currently a hindrance to the success of the online shopping world, and work out a solution to resolve them in the best and the most efficient manner.

Food-tech

This is another hot topic in the startup and investor circle. However, I think this segment is doomed to failure since startups are trying to make this work without actually thinking about the underlying dynamics of the sector. Many startups in this sector have closed or are about to.

Why is this so? Because they are not really focusing on resolving issues in the present ecosystem required to make this work. Startups need to find solutions to first enable an ecosystem to develop; home chefs, professional chefs, delivery people, kitchen equipment, delivery vehicles, quality control, food labs and test labs- there are many variables involved in this business, and many areas for potential success. A startup in this sector can be profitable only when the startups start focusing on infrastructure first. Startups should also make the apps and the enabling technology, but it is also important for them to introduce the government to new infrastructure developments, support new ideas for employment and address a wider issue so that it can benefit the apps and technology that will support it.

Taxi Aggregation

As far as this sector goes, we can only see a fight between two rivals with foreign funding trying to capture market share and disrupt the field. The good thing with this sector is that people found a reliable, fast and cheap mode of transport, and drivers found a higher standard of living; but what's next?

Startups need to look into the adequate training of drivers. What about car servicing for such drivers? What about car loans? What about social profiling, and driver behaviour mapping? There are various related portions available to explore, and building a startup to help in the evolution of this sector can be meaningful and relevant.

R&D

The only way India will start competing with the world, especially the USA, is by focusing on R&D. Apps will always depend on Apple, Google and Microsoft; no matter how good your app is, the bigger chunk of profit will always go to these companies. Unless we start ideating on a bigger scale and support large R&D projects, it will be difficult to achieve bigger dreams.

A startup needs to focus on ingenious ways to resolve our country’s problems, starting with fixing roads faster and making them more durable, and enabling every house to generate its own power and utilise resources efficiently. New and innovative housing and building material will enable the government to achieve its ambition of providing shelter to all; ingenious ways for revolutionising agriculture and related technology uses, and community building will enable self-sufficiency; e-schools will ensure that education reaches every village.

We just do not need another temporary viral idea; we need a good reliable efficient solution to each and every problem faced by our country, because every successful solution gets recognised and rewarded. The day every startup works on resolving India's problems will be the day the Startup India project will succeed and India will get its successful entrepreneurs.

So don't just start up, please take time out to sort out the right problem.

Reference:https://yourstory.com/2016/09/solve-start-up-problem/

How Dineout managed to turn the tables on dining experience

“When we started in 2012, it was of the most difficult times to start in the table reservations space. Everyone wasn’t as savvy with the online world as they are now and nobody would look at reserving tables online, especially in India,” says Vivek Kapoor, Founder, Dineout.

However, the four founders of Dineout – Ankit Mehrotra, Sahil Jain, Nikhil Bakshi and Vivek, knew the culture of doing things online would soon catch up in India. There already was a dining-out culture, and they were confident that before long people would start booking tables online too.

But it was a Herculean task. Restaurants weren’t as tech-savvy as they are now. Also popular restaurants didn’t sense the need, as they already had many patrons. On the other hand newer restaurants felt that they wanted to explore the solution when they were financially strong.

Ankit Mehrotra, Vivek Kapoor Sahil Jain and Nikhil Bakshi

No payments to growing partnerships

So for the four founders it meant taking endless calls, waiting for hours in lobbies to get a cheque for a meagre Rs 2,000, no holidays, and questions like – ‘are you still with Dineout?’ When the team had launched in 2012, they had also raised a small seed amount, and they were able to scale because they were generating revenue from day one.

Today, the social media buzz for a restaurant starts much before it opens. Vivek says that online real estate for restaurants is equally important as the physical, offline one. So today, while everyone is talking about the foodtech bust and how they are struggling, few realise that we haven’t even hit 10 percent of the online food market.

The four-year journey for Dineout has been an interesting one. In the second year of its business it was acquired by Times Internet at a deal value of $10 million.

In September last year, Dineout also acquired InResto, which was founded by Vijayan Parthasarthy and Vamsi Yalamachili. InResto provides features like table management, reservations, customer relationship management and analytics, home delivery and takeaway management. On their entry into the B2B segment with InResto, Vivek says:

In 2014, we were able to understand that a restaurant today is unable to recognise or profile its customers. In many cases there are customers who come in several times into a restaurant, bill ‘x’ amount and order similarly. It was important that restaurants had that visibility.

The acquisition was to help Dineout work the complete value chain on how restaurants get their customers, manage them and re-engage with them.

Working from the receptions

The team today claims to have over 3,000 restaurants for table reservations, including chains like Azure, Impressario, Texmex and Speciality. Over 1,000 restaurants use the inResto Restaurant Management Suite.

Dineout has seated 1.5 lakh people so far, a number that is growing by 25 percent month-on-month. Diner count on the Dineout- inResto platform is increasing 30 percent month-on-month. Adding to this since chains have the inResto platform, wherever a restaurant is opened, the inResto base opens out.

Miten Sampat, Head of Corp Development, Times Internet Limited, says Dineout and inResto solve an important problem in the user lifecycle journey – discovery to destination for a customer looking to eat out. He adds that while considering the acquisition, the team was definitely one of the biggest factors, apart from the business.

He also adds that now with inResto, they are able to provide a complete tech stack to the restaurants, which has fuelled the recent growth.

However, when Vijayan started inResto, he began ground-up. In January 2015, he would be working at the reception at Toit in Benglauru, to understand what actually happens on the work front. “The system was built on ground, and we wanted to make it so simple that if you use WhatsApp, you can use inResto,” says Vijayan.

L-R - Vivek Kapoor and Vijayan

Creating a seamless system

Today, a customer books a table in a restaurant, and when he goes there he can order through the app and can even pay through the app.

“We are piloting with payments on the app with over 200 restaurants and 50 percent of our bookings are transacting through the app already,” says Vivek.

The market however is getting tougher. The restaurant and table booking space has seen booming activity in the past year. Zomato became another player in the segment with the acquisition of the US-based NexTable, a restaurant reservations and table-management platform. The new service is called Zomato Book. Vir Sanghvi-curated, EazyDiner, a review and table reservation platform, raised $3 million Series A recently co-led by existing investor DSG Consumer Partners and new investor Saama Capital. TripAdvisor has ventured into the space by acquiring Dutch-based IENS.

According to a Forbes report the percentage of restaurant bookings online is low in almost all markets except the US, where it is at 20 percent. The numbers are however slowly growing, and the market seems to be taking an upward trajectory.

Claiming a slice of the pie

Vivek adds that while it is a crazy competitive market, to drive the kind of market and handle the operational issues that they have dealt it, Dineout along with inResto manages the whole chain.

“We can call ourselves number one in driving business to our clients – restaurants. The volumes keep growing. My unit economics is very under control, thanks to being only technology-driven. We don’t have to manage a fleet of delivery boys and everything is controlled on the app,” says Vivek. He adds that also their revenue model is completely B2B, as the restaurant works with the Dineout team even when there is a B2C side, thus making their model stronger.

The team has also launched Dineout Plus in November. It is India's premier dining programme spread across four cities and 200 five-star hotels, which guarantees 25 percent off on total bill. The team has also recently launched their deals section where the diner can opt for curated experiences. Vivek says:

But with scale, there are different kinds of challenges. Apart being acquired by Times Internet and acquiring inResto, the journey had no stops, we had to expand to cities, increase our sales force and focus on our technology. This means ensuring your initial team understands growth and drives towards it. With inResto, it was a perfect marriage; the teams works together. And to grow it is important to work like a seamless well-oiled machine.

6 years, 4 products, and 5 continents — what is this New Yorker doing in India?

A hidden wanderer, Adam Walker has gone to the extent of using his education loan to start up. Adam’s tryst with starting the perfect venture has taken him from Europe to Africa and now to Asia.

But what caused this downtown New Yorker to finally bring his aspirations to India? The answer lies in his narrative.

Adam Walker, Founder, Hummingbill

The start

Adam’s journey as an entrepreneur began at the age of 22. He started a small wind turbine company called Kosovo Wind Garden in Pristina, Kosovo (Europe). The idea was to addresses the country’s lack of reliable electricity. Running it for a year, the idea eventually fizzled out in March 2012.

However, his love for creating a social impact took the shape of his next venture. Looking at electricity being stolen by businesses and consumers, he built an objective meter reader with other co-founders, which monitored electricity consumption along with intelligent load shedding. The idea picked some steam and seeing an active market in Chile, he enrolled the venture to the Start-Up Chile Accelerator programme in 2012.

While settling himself in Chile, things took a turn, as his investor was caught by the FBI for illegal money laundering from Russia. He was shocked of the happenings and was even ousted from the organisation. Things became bitter, but Adam wouldn’t stop taking his chances. It was too soon to call quits.

The zeal

Taking a page from his book, Adam remarks, A problem in my history is jumping to work on something without really thinking of setbacks and reflecting on the options.

Operating in the electricity monitoring space and looking at the condition of bill generation, Adam with an ex-colleague started a mobile billing subscription software, RemoteCycles in May 2013. The aim was to correct operational efficiencies preventing different customers from paying different amounts for the same service. Looking at the boom of mobile money amongst the population, he chose Nairobi, Kenya, as his next test ground.

After moving there, Adam soon realised that he fell into the classic problem of addressing the solution before the problem. Utilities in Kenya were majorly governed by public companies, and lack of competition caused these companies to have no incentives to improve operations.

This time the loss was big, and his firm was bleeding money and time. In the same year in July, Adam went back to the US and did all kinds of odd jobs to support the venture. He reminisces, It was really difficult being over-educated and underemployed. The times were really stressful.

A person who had his bachelors in Physics and Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters in Science, Technology and Public Policy from Rochester Institute of Technology was walking dogs and stacking wood at saw mills to keep his venture alive. The tough times didn’t chose to leave his side.

Although working in various countries, all of Adam’s businesses were incorporated out of the US. In December 2013, the co-founder left and Adam moved back to Kenya. Dearth of personal funds led Adam to move to a servant’s quarter in Nairobi. Building his fourth venture called HummingBill, he continued with his odd jobs, unlocking phones (imported from US) and tutoring students in Biology.

But things took a turn, when Paul English, Founder of travel metasearch Kayak, and Africa Angel Network chose to fund his venture for $45,000. Looking at the limited scope of the market, his advisors kept asking him to move out of Kenya.

But clarity struck Adam only after an exploratory trip to Mumbai in July 2014. Understanding that he gave his very best, Adam realised the need to move to a bigger market. And, in December 2014, Adam flew to Mumbai to give his dying startup another lifeline.

The introspection

Trying to understand where he went wrong, the learnings were fairly simple.

He believes that the environment and people with whom he started the company weren’t the best. Also, the culture in these geographies lacked intellectual capital in terms of experience and product understanding, not to forget the difficulty to raise capital.

But, there is a silver lining to his story, where all his experiences haven’t gone in vain. It’s been more than a year for Adam in India, and his B2B automated billing and invoice generation solution Hummingbill finally seems to have taken off.

The team at Hummingbill

A new start called Hummingbill

Adam says, Forty million small and medium sized businesses in India experience cash flow issues. In 2015, 97 percent of those B2B businesses reported consistent late payments from their clients, where their average Days Sales Outstanding was 65 days, the longest in Asia. Further, one in three invoices unpaid in India is due to the seller's fault, predominantly from their clerical errors while drafting invoices.

Looking at the enormous market and the depth of the problem, he moved to the tech capital of India — Bengaluru — to build a solution that allowed vendors to track invoices in an intelligent way, moving invoices to cloud.

Further, mentorship became easier as India had not just a history of indigenous software, but also talent migrating from the Silicon Valley.

The software solution called Hummingbill helps to remove the dependency on an accountant, allowing sales representatives to create and send invoices.

Integrated with payment gateways like Razorpay and Instamojo, the invoice comes with a payment button which vendors can use to pay the raised invoice. Integration with payment gateways also allows Hummingbill to automatically reconcile the payment.

Sitting as a Gmail plugin, the data are made available to sales representatives in a personalised manner. The solution helps businesses provide visibility into the designated sales representative responsible for invoices, while removing operational inefficiencies to the process. Reminders to businesses for payments due are also automated.

Additionally, aging reports, a tool used by collections personnel to determine which invoices are overdue for payment, are automatically generated and customised depending on the designation of the person in the organisation. This helps to bring complete automation to the process.

The software automatically syncs with Tally software, which seems to be dominating the market. The firm has raised $100,000 from a mix of angel investors from Singapore and Dubai.

While starting up, one of the major threats Adam saw was from manual accountants, which would help businesses manually create invoices monthly. The key was to disrupt them and sync the invoicing solution to Tally, which was dominating the market. He adds:

In India, there is a slight resistance towards newer technology. Further, there is a high fallback on the population for doing these tasks. However, in billing it doesn’t scale with a lot of companies still having bad books.

According to the company, over 300 businesses have downloaded Hummingbill, and uploaded over 9,000 of their clients onto the platform. Since its beta release in June, over 18,000 invoices have been tracked. The firm has garnered Rs 40,000 in revenues since June and claims to be growing at 45 percent month-on-month. Having a workforce of four members including Adam, the team is equally divided amongst engineers and sales representatives.

The company also faces competition from bigger brands like Zoho Invoice, Zoho Books, Beyond ARM and ezyCollect amongst many others in the accounts receivable management software market.

In the next nine months, the company is looking to raise a bigger round of $500,000 to triple their team size and also looking to break even.

The Adam Walker of today

The vision for this entrepreneur remains to be even bigger. While things seem to have finally picked up, Adam seems to be nothing like his past. Although a sense of regret lingers in him, he owes a better sentiment towards his life experiences and past failures.

Having learnt a lot, he questions and validates every move before taking a sound step. He did that while launching Hummingbill in India too. But his failures haven’t deterred him from taking leaps and jumps forward, because as it’s said the rolling stone gathers no moss.

From starting up in a college dorm to Rs 1cr in revenues, how this engineer duo did it all

Imagine you have been working on a particular software for a while now and it shuts down after proper use. In most cases, it is frantic rush and search for the next available option. This is where Beebom comes into play. It is a consumer technology website that helps people in understanding and using technology in a better way.

The platform gives you all the information you need – from digital tips to resources on software, apps and gadgets. The main aim of the platform is to become the world’s leading digital resources destination on the web.

“We take pride in the fact that the content provided on our website is 100 percent accurate, and of high quality; written by tech geeks from around the world. We make sure that we deliver value to our readers, and make their life easier,” says 25-year-old Devinder Maheshwari, an Electrical Engineer from Nirma University, Ahmedabad.

The platform works to provide high quality tutorials, guides and resources on various technologies used by end consumers. Devinder adds that there is a detailed testing and usage involved before writing about anything.

This, he says, happens as the team keeps themselves updated with the happenings in the technology world. “We don’t believe in the frequency of content, but we believe in quality. Therefore, we keep ourselves restricted to two to three articles a day,” he adds.

The Beebom Team

The beginnings

The idea came to Devinder during his second year of engineering when he bought a laptop in January 2011. Devinder and his roommate Kapil Jindal would explore the net. During the course of conversation, Kapil asked Devinder what a blog was, and with a basic understanding of the same, Kapil ended up creating a blog on technology and its workings.

The duo knew they wanted to make it into a complete content website. However, they did not know anything about website building or content writing and marketing. It took them 68 days to learn the different nuances and get the site live.

“Our friends really liked it. It was received really well when we launched it. But it didn't scale the way we assumed it to be,” says Devinder.

However, they had a long way to go as the website was in its very basic format. For a year or so, the duo experimented with several things and finally were able to get the traction they were looking for.

By the end of 2013, when they were in their final year, they were able to sustain decent traffic and earn a decent amount of money.

Version 2.0

The duo never thought of Beebom as a business. After graduating, Devinder went ahead to take a job in Chennai and Kapil got involved in another startup of his, which was later acquired by a firm in Ahmedabad.

Kapil was facing some troubles in his startup and Devinder wasn’t happy in his job. After a few months, the duo ended up having a conversation and decided to revive Beebom.

“We decided to get back where we started and do what we know best. So, in December, 2013 we met in Ahmedabad, and operated from there for about three to four months, and then shifted to Delhi,” says Devinder.

Crash and burn

For a year, they worked on different consultancy projects, ran advertising campaigns and worked out of the commission to make enough money to help Beebom survive. They did it for about five to six months and hoped that traffic on Beebom would increase and soon the revenue as well, but nothing went according to the plan.

It was then the duo out of desperation decided to take a different route and work more on entertainment and listicle posts. Devinder describes it as their biggest mistakes as they completely shifted out of technology content. In December of 2014 when things went south, they realised that they needed to get back to basics.

Back to the beginning

It was then the duo decided to hire Rupesh Sinha, an IT Engineer from Krishna University, Bengaluru; Akshay Gangwar, a Computer Engineer from CBP Government Engineering College; and Pratik Tyagi, a Computer Engineer from Jaypee Institute of Information and Technology.

By October 2015, we had a total team of 10 distributed and in-house employees who were working with Beebom on a regular basis.

"Now, we restrict ourselves to doing only high quality technology resources, made sure to put all our efforts in Beebom and do just as much of consultancy as it's required to survive,” says Devinder.

In May, they completely let go of the consultancy work because Beebom is now a self-sustaining entity, and with a good margin. The duo started with zero revenue. When they restarted in 2015, they had over 100,000 readers a month. And in January this year, the team claims to have touched 1.5 million readers with a revenue of Rs 1 crore.

A growing market

Currently, they claim to have over two million readers and hope to touch three million by the end of the year.

The global market for digital content is expected to reach $500 billion by 2019 and is said to be growing at a CAGR of 13.93 percent. Also today, with the growing number of software and technology boom in the country, the number of platforms for explanations, reviews and information dissemination are fast increasing.

Some of the top websites globally known for their technology content and information include Wired, which provides in-depth coverage of trends in technology, news about new gadgets and it also has a web venture called web monkey that is specifically for web developers, designers and web masters. There also is Tech2, which reviews gadgets, Gizomodo, for gadget lovers and Digitaltrends.

What does the future hold?

Beebom generates revenue via display advertising, sponsored posts and affiliate commissions where they have partnered with Amazon, Viglink and software vendors like Adobe. So whenever a product that is referred by Beebom is sold, the team earns a commission. For software products it is between 20 to 50 percent, and for gadgets it is between 4 to 15 percent.

In the near future, the team is looking forward to working on introducing a deals section for their readers, where the latter can buy products at a lower price. The team intends to generate revenue from the same. They are also aggressively working on videos and building a stronger social media presence.

Reference : https://yourstory.com/2016/08/beebom/

Truple — a startup by IIT-IIM alumni that promotes social activity instead of just networking

Magic happens when young graduates get together. Former IIT-IIM graduates Chetan Patil, C V Karthik, Rohit Harlalka, Sriram Sekhar, Madhvendra Kumar and Jeet Kumar where staying at the same society in Thane, a suburb in Mumbai, when they realised that theircorporate jobs did not complete their lives. So, Sriram — the common connect between the six of them — got them to play snooker in the evenings, which perhaps was the most significant thing for the founding of their startup. The snooker and evenings spent got the group thinking and, soon, they were brimming with ideas.

In 2013, these individuals decided to do something together, after all, because they had jotted down over hundreds of ideas over their snooker games. Some of these ideas discussed were in the consumer retail space; they wanted to start a car care franchise, an international ice cream chain and also a private label branded electronic goods distribution play. In August 2014, all that changed as the quit their corporate jobs to become entrepreneurs.

Truple founders

The journey

“Two years since we developed three products, sadly closed one, changed the strategy from B2C to B2B for another, and we’re currently working on Truple. It’s been a roller coaster ride,” says 31-year-old, Madhvendra, Co-founder of Truple.com.

They started with a product called ‘servein60’, where they became a service provider for services like plumbing, electrical, carpentry, yoga and photography. While working on servein60, they realised that the barrier to scale – in terms of huge labour cost ‑ was a manpower intensive business. They switched the model from a consumer business to a B2B model, where the platform became a marketplace model called Getblu in May 2015.

This business today generates Rs 12 lakh annual revenues. However, the team was keen to start something that could scale instantaneously. After a year of hard research Truple was born.

The birth of Truple

Last October, the co-founders realised that social engagement could be a big business in India. Truple, which was born this January, solved the problem of finding help for needs that require engagement between people. Say one likes weightlifting, he/she can connect with another person, around the corner, with a similar interest.

“We realised that social engagement has infinite market potential. It is very difficult to estimate the market size, but India has a huge potential,” says Madhvendra.

Globally, there are 1.7 billion monthly active users on different social networking platforms and it is estimated to grow to three billion by 2020. In India, there are more than 200 million social media users, with 70 percent of them being Facebook users.

“We decided to get into this space as all the current networking solutions are about I, me and myself. In today’s digital world people are independent, but not necessarily inter-dependent; hence they are connected and not engaged,” says Madhvendra.

Existing social networking solutions versus Truple

They are used by users for self-promotion; Truple is designed to be used for sharing.

They help people manage connections; Truple helps people manage engagement.

They make people independent; Truple makes people inter-dependent.

The co-founders have invested Rs 15 lakh and have a small seed round (undisclosed) from one of the angel investors who also invested in Infibeam and Pay1.

Technology is already enabling people to engage with each other. However, most networking platforms promote connections and do not close social engagement needs. Truple uses technology to enable people help each other mostly by meeting and engaging with each other.

The business model

With the median age being 27, there are at least 600 million people below this age group in the country and engaging with each other — based on activity — is going mobile.

The business works on a freemium model where there is a basic and advanced feature. The advanced feature is paid for and also has paid promotions by local businesses and individuals. The company has opened the platform for ad revenue too. The team believes that each of the sources will get activated after they have achieved a pre-defined target. The company will activate the freemium model when they have use base of 1,000,000 daily active users.

“These businesses need to scale rapidly and will need to spend large amounts of money. It depends on how quick they could get customers to sign up and use the platform,” says K Balkrishnan, Co-founder of Exfinity Ventures.

The company’s competition — in a similar vein — is startups like Meetup, Affimity, Nearfox. All these companies are in their early stage and not many have figured out a business model around social engagement business.

At present, there are 2,000 users with less than a month old public beta version with users from USA and Canada (40 percent), India (33 percent) and rest-of-world (27 percent). With limited users in the initial days of building the business they have a problem of fulfillment of user needs. “However, based on genuine user feedback, multiple ways of user engagement are in development phase, which includes passion based professional networking and enhancement in messaging,” says Madhvendra. It is too early to discuss the revenues of the company.

“This applies to any startup, know your market and test it. The next thing is, it has to scale up fast,” says V Ganapathy, CEO at Axilor Ventures.

The Truple team strongly believes that social interaction other than networking online — with friends and family — is very important. Hopefully, they become the platform for social activities. Their journey has just begun.

Reference : https://yourstory.com/2016/08/truple/

‘Viral is a negative word, we want to create content which can be shared.’ – The story of India’s biggest MCN network, Culture Machine

As you subconsciously go about scrolling through your timeline, you might not realise just how used to stopping to watch auto-playing videos you have become. Just as we were getting accustomed to viral memes and vines, videos arrived in a big way. The impact has been most significant in the case of millennials, who are looking at video as their go-to medium to educate and inform.

As per Forrester Research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words of text. From $720 million in 2013 to $1.5 billion in 2015, the video market continues to grow rapidly. Riding high on this wave is Culture Machine (CM), a content production and analysis company founded in 2013 by Sameer Pitalwalla and Venkat Prasad.

Is That You? | #ChangeTheRhyme, a campaign by one of Culture Machine’s most popular channels, BLUSH, recently garnered over 4.5 million views within weeks of its release. Other viral videos from the Culture Machine stable include Enna Da Rascalas’ South of India with 1.9 million views and the hugely popular Respect for Women ad for client Havells. The founders are concerned about making content that can be shared, as opposed to making things viral.

‘Viral’ is a negative word. It is not as much about going viral as it is about making something which is shareable. We focus on things that our audiences can share and there is a formula to arrive upon what they want, says Sameer.

Sameer, former director of video and celebrity at Disney India, and Venkat, former product manager at YouTube, met at Vidcon 2011 through a common friend and got talking about how the video ecosystem was going to evolve. They both wanted to capitalise on this evolution, and thus was born Culture Machine. While Sameer runs the media side of the business, Venkat looks at technology.

Before starting Culture Machine, Sameer had been at the helm of building many brands’ digital video businesses, and brought his media expertise to the table in this new venture. Venkat, on the other hand, came in with the tech and financial expertise he had gained working with brands such as Google and YouTube over the years.

Venkat and Sameer are like yin and yang; Venkat’s technology and operations ability and Sameer’s marketing, sales, and content understanding is a winning combination. says Gautam Patel, MD, Zodius Capital.

Marrying content and tech

Culture Machine is a multi-channel network which uses its proprietary technology, Intelligence Machine, to trawl through online videos, index them, and gather details based on viewer preferences. Armed with this data, Culture Machine guides its clients on what’s trending in the fast changing internet landscape.

Intelligence Machine is one of the largest big data platforms for online content in Asia, says Venkat.

Along with gauging and analysing what is working, Culture Machine also helps create original content. ‘Video Machine, its proprietary software, can produce music videos for all sorts of songs in different formats including displaying images with music, using typography, and simultaneously releasing them on social media and video hosting sites.

The majority of the 250-member team sits at the company headquarters in Mumbai, while the rest of it is spread in cities such as Pune (the engineering base), Chennai, and Delhi. Culture Machine also has sales teams in Los Angeles and the UK.

Singapore-based VC firm Zodius Capital was the first to realise Culture Machine’s potential and pumped in Series-A funding of $ 3.5 million within a year of the company beginning operations. The startup’s board of advisors includes Shishir Mehrotra, former vice-president of product at YouTube, Dean Gilbert, global head of content operations at YouTube, and Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO of independent mobile video platform Vuclip. 

As a part of our investment thesis, we concurred that the 15–40–year-old demographic is spending less time watching television and more time on their mobile phones watching videos on social media. We believe Culture Machine is building a web equivalent of what the Star Network built on television. We did not want to back a content company; we wanted to back a team that works on both technology content and analysis. In the digital medium you have a one-on-one interaction with your audiences and Culture Machine fits the bill perfectly, says Gautam Patel, speaking of the deal.

In January 2015, the company raised $18 million in its second round of funding from Tiger Global Management, Zodius Capital, and Times Internet, a majority of which was allocated towards strengthening its technology solutions and creating content. It also marked Tiger’s first investment in the space. At the time of the deal, Lee Fixel, Partner at Tiger Global Management, had justified the investment talking about how CM had built a world-class technology platform and the largest creator network in the country.

Multiple revenue streams

Culture Machine currently runs 240 YouTube channels out of which eight are self-owned, and its videos cumulatively clock 80 million views a month with about half-a-billion watch minutes. About 70–75 percent of this traffic comes from mobile and the company generates an annual revenue of $4.4 million.

Apart from ads on YouTube, a major source of revenue for the company is through data intelligence on video consumption trends. Culture Machine works with top brands such as Microsoft, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Havells, Tata Motors, Fox Star Studios, and SABMiller India, among many others.

CM has worked with us to create one of our best digital content-marketing pieces called The Indian Entrepreneur for our flagship brand Haywards 5000. The experience was absolutely fantastic, right from the brief to the output. What sets CM apart from the rest is their ability to first understand the client’s business, the challenges and the ecosystem within which clients operate before curating content solutions, says Shitij Jain, General Manager (Head) — Innovations & Digital Marketing | SABMiller India

Culture Machine also recently acquired popular youth Telugu channel Viva in a bid to strengthen the content creation space in South India. CM’s other regional channel acquisitions include Comedy Factory, Put Chutney and Aithe Ok, in Gujarati, Tamil, and Telugu respectively.

Along with providing data intelligence to brands, Culture Machine also identifies potential YouTube artistes who have amassed a sizeable number of followers on their dedicated channels, and has signed up over 180 artistes so far. These artistes are provided with real-time intelligence for them to know what is working with the internet audience, and adjust their content accordingly.

It’s been over a year of signing up with Culture Machine and our reach has grown significantly. The insights are helping us produce content that our target audience wants to see and we definitely want to continue our association further, says Shrey Chhabra of Old Delhi Films, a YouTube channel which creates fun videos on trending topics mainly targeting the millennial population.

However, Culture Machine’s relationship with some of its individual content contributors has not exactly been hunky dory, with a few even going on record to say they never benefited from associating with the brand. But Sameer disagrees.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. All our self-owned channels are continuing to do well and getting some of the highest number of views in their respective categories. If individual contributors are ready to form an amicable alliance, we are more than welcoming and there are several examples of how many people have actually benefited. That said, our main focus is towards building our own channels.

What’s happening in the Multiple Content Network (MCN) space?

Major players in the space include Nirvana Digital, Qyuki, Pepper Media, Ping Digital, #fame, and One Digital Entertainment, among others. Nirvana Digital has an assortment of 200 YouTube channels and over 50,000 videos and distributes its content to video platforms like Hulu, Amazon VOD, and Apple’s iTunes mobile apps and devices.

Qyuki is YouTube certified and backed by stalwarts like Shekhar Kapur, AR Rahman, and Samir Bangara. Ping Digital is one of India’s largest food networks with over 1,000 food videos. #fame, previously Famebox, raised its second round of funding of $10 million in January 2015 from existing investor and stakeholder digital media firm To The New Ventures (TTN Ventures). The firm had previously secured $3 million from TTN in a seed round.

The mass popularity of standalone channels like All India Bakchod (AIB) and The Viral Fever (TVF) also reinstates the power of video. It is interesting to note that Tiger Global also invested $10 million in TVF early this year. However, Culture Machine doesn’t really think of them as competition.

There will always be a bunch of boutiques which will specialise in a particular type of content. It is extremely difficult to build something which can achieve national scale with multiple channels the way Culture Machine has, says Sameer.

While major advertisers in the West were looking at advertising on the web in comparison to television for mega events like Super Bowl Sunday, things leaned towards the more conventional mediums of advertising in India until recently. However, things have changed in a big way and India looks poised for a video boom.

The approximately Rs 20,000-crore budget in India was not going anywhere else because television was cutting across language barriers, but with videos, social media is capable of doing just that, says Gautam, speaking of the potential in the video space. He adds,

Investors are looking for players who are building content that can scale and the only way to build it is through analytics and technology.

Reference : https://yourstory.com/2016/08/culture-machine/

The art of survival — this edutech platform teaches how to run business without funding

The introduction of technology was the need of the hour in the Indian education system. It has helped students gain education and reduced the challenges they were facing before.

Earlier, the education which was possible through limited books caused many constraints for students. And if you happen to be a student from some small place, the problem magnifies for you many times — as there’s no way to get availed those reference books for preparations.

Back in 2006, Basant Pandey was serving as a teacher in Central School at Port Blair. During his stay in Andaman, he observed that CBSE schools in the state would always lack study materials for students. The text books or sample question paper booklets would take 15-20 days to reach the state as ships would run only twice a month between main land and Island.

Basant discussed the idea with his brother Vinod Pandey, a final engineering student then, and decided to address the issue. They observed that as one of the top tourist places in India, Andaman had good internet connectivity.

They collected notes and sample papers and created a website on a free hosting server and uploaded all the papers there to help students in Andaman Islands. Within six months, they started receiving more than 500 users per day, who were not only from Andaman and but from other cities as well.

As the traffic grew, they purchased a bigger hosting solution as well as an appealing domain name. In 2007, myCBSEguide.com was launched. It is an online platform that serves free study material to CBSE students in the form of syllabus, sample question papers, board exam papers, online tests, quick revision notes, important questions, news and updates. All the materials available on the website is free for student and teachers.

In 2009, the brothers formed Elpis Technology Solutions to accommodate other platforms — onlineteachers.co.in and elpiscart.com. The former helps teachers to interact with each other, prepare for teacher exams and find teaching jobs. This platform is dedicated to the teacher community. elpiscart.com provides downloadable ebooks in PDF format and Multiple Choice Questions in quiz format at a very nominal price.

Today, the website claims to have more than six million page views per month and it goes up to 25 million per month during the exam days. myCBSEguide’s android app has more than two lakh downloads.

Bootstrap hero

“In the beginning, we started the platform to help students and there was almost zero operating cost for us as we were on a free hosting server. As soon as the traffic started growing, we implemented Google AdSense and it was more than enough to meet the initial expenses. To keep it low cost, we used open source CMS and shared/VPS hosting. At the initial stage, most of the content was being generated by our friends and colleagues serving as teachers in KV and CBSE schools,” says Basant, Founder and CEO, myCBSEguide.

Vinod and Basant (From L-R)

He adds that around 80 percent of revenue comes from Google AdSense and direct advertisements. The rest is from product sales such as ebooks and test software for CBSE students. Even today, he is managing the salary expenses of 15 full-time employees and 45 freelance content experts without raising a penny from investors.

But now, Basant believes that the market is growing rapidly and competition is becoming aggressive. New players are funded by big investors. They are leaving no stone unturned to capture the market. They have created do or die situation in the market. “For bootstrapped companies like us, it is the time to grow rapidly or crushed behind. We haven't pitched to any investor yet. But, planning to do so in next six to eight months to grow aggressively.”

What’s next?

The platform is planning to move towards subscription-based model. Basant, however, says that he understands the risk of switching from free to subscription-based model. He plans to add new products and services to complement this free stuff and monetise it by subscription — such as online tests are free, but analytics to these tests are to be subscribed.

On Elpiscart, it is working towards adding new products and different ways to increase sales. Besides, it has some new features in pipeline which will be launched within three to four months to expand its reach among students and teachers.

According to the platform, it is also planning to introduce new personalisation and gamification features to increase user engagement.

Education market

According to EY-FICCI report on the education sector in India, the current K-12 school system in India is one of the largest in the world with more than 1.4 million schools and over 250 million students enrolled.

The online education market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.50 percent by 2019. There are multiple players in the K-12 space, some of them being well funded.

Edukart and Meritnation are the two big platforms in this category.

Started in 2007, Meritnation.com claims to have 90 lakh students from CBSE, ICSE and other leading boards across India and the Gulf on its online platform. It has also raised close to Rs 96.5 crore across.

Survival of all

Experts believe that the K-12 category is big enough to accommodate many players at the same time. Various players are finding their niche to survive in the business. Some are offering freemium model, while others have adopted paid subscription. From test preparation to videos and online coaching to test papers, platforms are covering an entire sector.

Reference:https://yourstory.com/2016/08/mycbseguide/

How this 23-year-old gujju’s jugaad aims to help 50 million overseas students plan better

If the entire colonies dedicated to Indians in western countries are anything to go by, it is safe to assume that the 21st century globetrotting Indian keeps his “foreign” education close, but his money closer. For behind the façade of the grand international life are burdensome student loans, or perhaps that constant sword hanging over one’s head, the sponsoring family, which wonders about the usefulness of the expense of their life savings.

It was perhaps poetic justice then that a textbook ‘vaniya’ Gujarati– which is possibly the most infamously global community of the lot– engineered a way to help students cut short the ordeal of complex calculations, and technologically figure out the exact point in their careers, after their lofty college educations, at which they will break-even and recover the costs.

The Fantastic Mr Fox

A scientifically trained finance professional with an obsession for understanding world economics, 23-year-old Vibhav Parikh is the founder of Fox Counsel. He holds a bachelor’s degree in management studies from Mumbai Jai Hind College.

In his final year at college, students and counselors alike were crying themselves hoarse about studies overseas. “Being a Gujarati, it was essential for me to see some profit in this investment. But none of the voices that were shouting “Study Abroad” had a definite answer. A ball-park figure is of no use with an investment of this size,” says Vibhav.

Jugaad

Like a true-blue Gujarati, he broke things down and laid the foundation for his jugaadsolution.

Problem: How viable is an investment in an education abroad? Everyone knows it is imperative to study further, but not everyone has the financial capability to take that plunge to go abroad. Loans, expenses, and work permits are all factors that are seldom taken into consideration.

He learned about the ‘time value of money’ and various financial formulae at the same time. These financials were used extensively in the corporate world to evaluate the viability of projects. “I applied this to evaluate investments in education abroad. The output would simply be– when one would break-even.”

Finally, his Solution - the first ever Study Abroad Calculator in the world.

He used one of his research papers as a base, developed a few tricks on MS Excel, and made it work. “This is how things can be done for free!”

A Calculated risk

In three months, he found a partner, Pradnesh Patil, to take up the challenge of integrating finance and code. Within three more, they got the website up and running.

Fox Counsel, the online calculator, helps students estimate the cost of studying abroad and gives them their specific break-even period, so that students across India and the world are enabled to make the correct financial decisions.

The calculator uses a financial algorithm– the Fox algorithm- combined with the crucial loan payment schedules and expected salary ranges.

An individual in the USA and an individual in India would have different break-even years for the same university. This is because Fox Counsel uses the financial concept of “opportunity cost” and ensures that the output is as close to reality for the specific user.

How it’s done

The user has to input six primary details:

Where they are from

Where they are going to

Cost of Tuition Fees and Books

Expected Salary Range

Study Duration (In months)

Cost of Flight and VISA

Additionally, they have to punch in details of the loan taken, and years that must be skipped for accommodation and food expenses – in case the college’s fees is inclusive of the two, or the student is not going to bear the costs if he is, for example, staying with a relative.

The output would be the year in which the user would break-even, and a table that shows all costs, including electricity, housing, food, miscellaneous expenses and taxes, for the years till they are expected to break-even. The user can also alter the housing and food costs.

The calculator can be used by anyone. Residents in Sydney could take a loan from a bank in Sydney or the United States, and still get an output year that would accurately match their needs.

The world is his oyster

According to UNESCO Statistics, there are nearly 30 million students studying internationally every year – so, that is Fox Counsel’s market size. There are also the parents of the 30 million students, and the students that do not end up going abroad. In all, conservatively, Fox can potentially serve 50 million people a year.

This doubles up as a potential opportunity as well as a challenge. With a small team, it has been difficult to reach the entire target audience effectively; there is no one sure shot way, given how the audience is spread across countries and demographies. To overcome these barriers, they have formed networking nodes, through internet forums like Quora, across countries, which would, in turn, multiply the number of calculations.

Counselors also come in the realm of their target market. “We have a business model that encompasses students, parents, and student counselors, with a slightly unique show-case for each,” he explains.

They plan to establish tie-ups with career counselors, advertise in the educational and financial supplements of newspapers, and as of now, are already in talks with a leading educational loan provider in India for a partnership.

Kids better have my money

Fox Counsel has developed a “Venn Business Model” for their revenues, which will be garnered through user registrations, tie-ups with counselors and educational institutions, Google ad-sense and website adverts, and lastly, licensing.

Fox Counsel has also developed a unique back end system. “I can see what the users are searching for, from where to where the students are going, which is the most searched city and so on.”

So far, since they launched six months ago, they have garnered around 10,000 hits, with over a 1,000 unique calculations.

Currently, they are a free calculator. The revenue from registration and tie-ups will be generated after a year of operations. A firm even inquired whether Fox could license the calculator to them, such that they would be exclusive users of the tool. "We have kept the idea on the table for the future, but chosen not to go ahead with this stream at this early juncture," says Vibhav.

Having said that, they have made sure their fixed and variable costs aren't in the red and that they can continue operating.

Finding Quora

A growth hack has been tapping into the global community that Quora has to its credit. “There are people who blatantly use it to advertise their product, but we aren’t amongst those. We simply answer questions and that then translates to hits. I believe it is a much stronger medium than Facebook and Twitter for my product.”

He has answered 59 different questions on Quora from different Indian users, and got nearly 30,000 views since he became active last October. “If you see my answers, they are extremely specific and in-depth with regard to the questions posed. From there, I connect with students, who then use my website to help others directly.”

Currently, Fox Counsel is a completely unique product in the world market, and faces no direct competition. The Fox Counsel team do not consider themselves as a substitute to counselors, but rather, as a “synergetic complement.”

Coming up!

The next step for Fox Counsel is building liaisons with renowned counselors. To ensure word-of-mouth organic growth, they are planning to deliver presentations to final year students across colleges in Mumbai. “Recognition from the government, to give access to my calculator to students who would need a loan, is another avenue we are going after,” says Vibhav.

Fox Counsel will also be starting a free information portal on a “guide to study” for the various competitive exams, such as GMAT, CFA, GRE, CPA and the likes, using professionals in their respective fields.

The founder, Vibhav Parikh, will also be available as a Fox Counselor- for entrepreneurs that are at the idea stage of a service or product. “This would ensure that new entrepreneurs have a sound financial and business model in place before they begin, so they understand the risk before taking the plunge,” concludes Vibhav.

Reference:https://yourstory.com/2016/08/fox-counsel/