Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Community Monetization Playbook | Tamanna Dhamija @ Convosight
132 Plays3 years ago
As joyful as it sounds, motherhood can also be a painful journey. The extent of decisions taken by new mothers is bound to make them nervous and apprehensive.
In this episode of the Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Tamanna Dhamija, Co-founder, Convosight. She is an alumnus of MDI, Gurgaon and has previously worked in the Investment Banking domain. But like many entrepreneurs, she realised that there was more she could do.
Stemming from her own experiences as a new mum, she started Baby Destination in 2016, with the mission to assist the discovery journey of first-time mothers and in doing so, organically built India’s largest parenting community.
It was in 2018 when Baby Destination was selected for Facebook Community Leadership Program (FCLP), the idea behind Convosight was born. Her goal to combine content with community, lead her to realise community marketing as a business opportunity, and this became the foundation on which Convosight stands today.
Tune into this week’s episode to hear how Convosight empowers businesses to gain insights from their online communities while using technologies like data analytics and machine learning to help brands leverage communities.
What you must not miss!
- Building India’s first organically grown online parenting community.
- Building and scaling an analytics SaaS platform business.
- Leveraging online Community Marketing to advise high profile brands.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurabh. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated charter founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Journey from Banking to Entrepreneurship
00:00:27
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tamanna, co-founder at ConvoSight. Path to finding a final destination can be full of surprising twists and turns, and at times you may not even realize your final destination when you start the journey. Tamanna Dhammijak quit a well-paying job at an investment bank in the US to start a community-led platform for women in India called Baby Destination.
00:00:48
Speaker
But through a journey of twists and turns, she realized that the in-house technology they had developed to monetize and grow their community was actually a larger opportunity and they pivoted to becoming a B2B platform that on the one hand helps influencers to scale and monetize their communities and on the other hand helps brands to do the middle of the line marketing by inserting themselves in conversations inside these communities.
00:01:11
Speaker
As we enter an era in which consumers have started to distrust paid advertisements on social media channels, this offers brands the opportunity to engage with their end customers meaningfully and is a viable alternative to the more traditional digital marketing spends.
Educational and Early Career Background
00:01:27
Speaker
Here's Tamanna telling Akshay Dutt about how Convasite was developed.
00:01:31
Speaker
So, Savannah, you decided to do like an engineering degree. Tell me what was the aspiration at that time. You know, when you were growing up, did you want to like go down that path of being in the IT domain or something like that? You know, like what kind of aspirations were you growing up with? So it's a very interesting question. I did an engineering degree because my dad thought that would be the best thing for me to do.
00:01:59
Speaker
I had actually taken science in my 11th and 12th with both bio and math. My mom wanted me to become a doctor, so I sat in all the medical entrance exams. Your parents had like very ambitious plans for you. Exactly.
00:02:21
Speaker
Very, very ambitious, you know, very traditional path, right? You either become a doctor or an engineer, but my mom was, she couldn't become a doctor herself.
00:02:30
Speaker
What do your parents do? My mom's a teacher. She's a physics teacher. And my dad is an engineer and an MBA. So that's what I did. I took all the medical entrance exams. I used to hate like there was so much cramming to do. I just could never do it. So I did not clear any of them. And then the next option was to do engineering. Were you the eldest time? I was the younger
00:02:55
Speaker
younger one. Okay and what did your elder sibling do? So he is an engineer and then he did his MBA in the US but he wanted to be an engineer so I'm sure if you ask him this question he used to write ER in front of his name since he was a kid. So you gave both these entrance exams then why did you choose engineering? I don't think I had an option
00:03:23
Speaker
I didn't get through medical entrance exams. Even if I did get through, I don't know what I would be doing there. I mean, I liked the profession. I was always very scared of looking at blood and, you know, doing all that. And I heard that it has crazy study hours, which I didn't want to go and cram a lot of books. So then this was the only option. And did you enjoy those four years of engineering or was it like, you know, get through?
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think I enjoyed because I think I learned a lot from outside books, not just from the books. Did I enjoy coding? I don't think that much. I don't think I understood the concept that well. For some reason, I continue to always come first and second in class. I don't know how, but that's the problem. I didn't really get into programming or, you know, like it at that point.
00:04:23
Speaker
that much. And then when it was finally, then again, I told my dad, what do I do next? So he's like, why don't you sit for your data, intrinsic service. So then that's what I did. I think two months before the exams was in November. So he said, you're anyways, taking care of your grandma, just do that. So that's what I did. And then that's how MB happened. And again, like,
00:04:49
Speaker
You chose MDI because it would allow you to continue to be in Delhi close to family. Yes. Yes. So MDI was my dream Institute.
00:04:59
Speaker
because I wanted to be close to family, because I wanted to be close to my grandma. I figured I could come home over the weekends, so I only took the exam to get through MDI. I didn't want to go through any other college. So post MDI, where did you go from campus? So post MDI, my dream job, there's a lot of that that you'll hear in my
00:05:21
Speaker
in my story. I went to DSP Merrill Lynch, now BlackRock. You did a finance specialization. Yeah, finance and marketing specialization. And I used to think I'll be really good in marketing. So let me do, you know, there was this term MOFs, marketing of financial services.
00:05:42
Speaker
I said, that's what I want to do. So, um, it's quite crazy. Like, you know, my professors, like, I remember they wanted me to sit in Goldman Sachs interview. It was more like an equity, like a research analyst role and all that. And I just ran away like from all sides. So again, I only wanted the SP Merrill Lynch. So I then thought that let me get into finance. The closest to that would be quant control.
00:06:08
Speaker
Then I started preparing for it. I took three interviews. I think I got all three jobs. And then I selected the one in New York again, because this is where we live. The one in Manhattan is General Motors Asset Management. And what's the role there? Like, what does a quad do in an asset management company? This was the pension arm, which one of the largest corporate pension funds. And this was a new team, which was starting out
00:06:34
Speaker
which I was the first hire in that team. And my job was to build models using several tools, MATLAB, Access, VBA, build models to support all the investment classes, so equities or fixed income. So I build like a trade cost reporting model, a risk assessment model. So it was a very interesting role because getting exposure to all the different asset classes, and I had no idea how I'll do it, but I said, let me just
00:07:03
Speaker
get right in and I learned just everything right before my interview. Somehow I got to it. The rest of my career at GM was I was a portfolio manager managing internal money. I rebuilt my own trading model, had a fairly good run. This was when the market had tanked and my model was based on investing in stocks with quality and value. I was outperforming the market
00:07:31
Speaker
every year. That was GM.
Founding Baby Destination and Initial Challenges
00:07:59
Speaker
quit well paying lucrative career and become an entrepreneur. There was a bunch of things that happened. One, you know, General Motors was going through a lot of problems, a lot of money then was being outsourced, managed by external managers. Actually, my portfolio and one more was the last internal portfolio standing. That's just one right, the direction a lot of people got laid off. It was never my ambition to become like a CEO or
00:08:28
Speaker
CIO and I just wanted to learn and continue to do more in investments. But one thing that shook me first time I'm watching people getting laid off and you know the traders I used to work with and so that was one. The second was that you know while I enjoyed doing this it's not that you know I was staying up at night thinking about this like after a point it became like very very routine.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, I felt there wasn't more learning left for me. So I used to have a lot of free time there. That's when I also started our nonprofit because I just had a lot of free time. And I started thinking that, you know, I should be doing something which is very stimulating, like I need to find my purpose. And that's when I became a mother and all these things were happening at the same time. And what was your husband doing at that time? Like what was Tarun doing?
00:09:17
Speaker
Tarun was at Deutsche Bank at that time. He's always been in fixed income investments, fixed income risk. That's been his career. He was at Deutsche Bank. I think he was also going through a similar phase after working in the corporate world for 15 years. I'm sure he has his own experiences, but I was pretty determined that I'll have to do something very intellectually stimulating and
00:09:43
Speaker
where I get a chance to do something kick ass and I need to find my purpose and then that's when I became a mother and I started thinking like I was fascinated like just you know by the thought of building something for moms because I couldn't believe the experience of being a first-time mom I'm like you know there's babies born all the time left right and center but it's like really hard what a mom goes through like nobody knows like you know
00:10:09
Speaker
So I felt like it's a very complex decision making part in your life and something can be done to solve the discovery journey for a mother. Like why don't I do something you know here and that's where the idea of baby destination came to me and just one thing led to another. I started talking to moms doing research. I started talking to people in India. I'm like we have to do this.
00:10:31
Speaker
So then I decided to quit. You decided you want to do like a content play like create content for mom or like what was it that I mean how would you solve the problem of first time mom? So I wanted to solve the discovery journey of a mother just very simply put to put it in simple language right from the time you're pregnant and then when you become a mom there's lots of decisions you had to
00:10:54
Speaker
like lots of decision, right? Every day it's how to take care of the baby, what diaper to buy, right? How to pick a nanny, like so many things, right?
00:11:03
Speaker
And the inputs in that decision is what you, of course, feel is right. And there's often not a lot of time also, right? And a lot of information which is thrown at you. But often there's an opportunity to learn a lot from your peers. And I went through that myself. So when I was going back to work after my maternity leave, my son, he refused to take a bottle. I used to breastfeed him and he refused to take a bottle.
00:11:26
Speaker
I read all the blogs, what the doctor said, my mom said, everybody's giving me advice. And I'm like, damn, how do I leave him and go, right? Because there was no backup for me at work. I was the only portfolio manager. I somehow got into a WhatsApp group where there was a friend's wife who went through the same problem. And she suggested a bottle whose, the nipple was such that she'd gone through the same issue.
00:11:51
Speaker
So I bought that bottle and it worked for my son because I was going crazy buying like $100 bottles and you know, like, what is going on? Like, which child doesn't drink from a bottle? I'm like, something's not right. So lots. I mean, this is just one incident, right? Lots of such things happened, which made me realize that it's not as easy as everyone makes it sound. And there is more that could be done in terms of enabling moms to make the right decisions without so much stress of everybody telling you what to do.
00:12:22
Speaker
So what I thought could solve this problem is content community and the availability of those products and services. That was the initial idea. Okay. So it's like a social commerce.
00:12:36
Speaker
kind of a concept which you had? Yes, social commerce. But the idea was content community because there's a lot of expert information available out there. If that is coupled with your experience, and then you can make a trusted decision, which is either how to take care. It's just an informational decision, or it is a decision to buy a product or choose a service. And those products would also be available on Baby Destination, which would be the monetization part.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yes, yes.
Pivot to ConvoSight and Focus Shift
00:13:07
Speaker
Okay. And why India? Yeah, because, you know, I just felt like when I spoke to my friends, you know, in India, we did some research in India, I tried to run focus groups, I just realized that it's a bigger problem to solve in India, you know, in US that there's a lot of protocols around things, right, like,
00:13:25
Speaker
There's certain basic questions are answered like there's no question mark on should I give cows milk or should I give it's a very mature and an evolved market but in India the need gap is higher and that's why the opportunity is also higher and just
00:13:40
Speaker
You know, of course the population is much higher, so more babies are born. So that's why I thought we should do this in India. Okay. So tell me about the go-to-market journey. Like, you know, when did you quit your job and launch version one of the product? And how was it compared to what you had originally planned? So, um, I quit in 2015. I actually wanted to quit in January, 2015, but, uh, I had a, you know, personal reason due to which I had to prolong it to
00:14:10
Speaker
2015 and so then I quit and I came to India and then just first few months but again just spent in talking to mums figuring out you know how to do what to do and in the end the first version of product was just babydestination.com with a lot of content which was informational content because the idea was to learn right like let's just have a
00:14:33
Speaker
content out there and learn. It also had a couple of features which would enable the community part of it. It wasn't a forum but we used to call it stories and that's very different from Instagram stories but there was a content initially and then a community feature and then there were products that you could also purchase. Okay like products were like you were handling the end-to-end from
00:14:58
Speaker
inventory to logistics through all that or was it like through some sort of alliance? So we were handling end to end. I don't think anyone knows so much details. So we thought that initially when we're testing this out, we'll just have exclusive products, right? So a number of them were actually international brands and very exclusive useful products, which were not available in a lot of places. So we were sort of doing end to end.
00:15:22
Speaker
and that's how we launched in mid 2016. And what did the market tell you? Like three different legs. One is a community leg and then a product leg and then a content leg. What did the market tell you? What did people want? That's exactly what the market told us. Are you a content platform or are you a community or are you a commerce platform? That's exactly what the market told us. So separately on these pieces,
00:15:51
Speaker
What was missing was the journey, right? It's like, in my mind, that was an ideal journey. Somebody comes, right? They read a relevant content piece, and then they hear other moms' opinions, and then they take a decision. If it's a product decision, then that's the journey. If it's not a product decision, then, you know, they just read the content, they hear other moms' opinions, and then
00:16:10
Speaker
they're able to take that decision and they become an active part of the community. So I thought it's as simple as that and that's how it flows. But that's not what happened, right? People used to come read the content. They used to share the content. So actually, our content was shared a lot. Like, you know, we had a lot of organic traffic on our website because it was very, very useful content.
00:16:31
Speaker
But these were people who would come, who would read content shared, like used to have sometimes thousands of shares on our content organically, but that was it, right? It ended there. And then there were people who would come and just click on the product and buy the product and go, and we're like, what is going on? Like, this is. Okay. So these are like unrelated audiences.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yes, they're used to because, again, a consumer doesn't always go through that journey. A lot of people would buy the product just because it wasn't available anywhere else. And we were experimenting with all channels. So we realized in September or October that we're doing too much. We're trying to build three different things together.
00:17:12
Speaker
And just because maybe we were first time founders and we just went right and didn't really think too much and thought that this could be done. And plus we were bootstrapped. And Tarun also quit his job at the same time. Yes. So Tarun had moved to India with me. He was very convinced of the idea as well.
00:17:30
Speaker
We moved and we were trying to do all of this with the five people team. Including content writers, like content is not easy to scale. Yeah, I just, I used to, it was me and it was one intern. So I did all the sourcing myself, like, you know, tied up with 60 plus brands. I don't know how we did all of that. This is while you also had an infant to take care of. Yeah. Wow.
00:17:53
Speaker
You know, the important thing there was we realized that very soon that this is not happening, right? It's just an unrealistic expectation. It's not adding value. You know, it's been confusing mums, right? We're doing content really well. Like at one point our organic, just through our organic reach, our Facebook page reach was 15 million organically. So there was a lot of, you know, information mums were getting through the content, but just in the community, right, to come back, like they would come once and they would not come back.
00:18:20
Speaker
So all the things that we've learned now on what to do while building a community, we didn't know back then. The retention was a problem for community. They used to just come back for content, and Facebook was our biggest organic channel, Facebook page. For commerce, it's like it used to cost money to acquire a person to transact, right? And just didn't even understand how will we ever make up that cost. There was no clarity. We knew nothing, basically.
00:18:45
Speaker
So we decided that we will roll that back and just do the content and community piece, like just pick out the commerce piece and just focus on
00:18:56
Speaker
Content was working. We said we'll continue to do that. Community, we said we'll figure out where to do because fundamentally without community, the idea was not to build a content platform. Community had to be a part of it. And that's where we realized that if most of the organic reach is coming through Facebook, which means moms are spending a lot of time on Facebook, but a page cannot build a community on a page. And we started looking at Facebook groups and we used to get a lot of organic traffic from other Facebook groups.
00:19:24
Speaker
like people sharing content. Yeah, we used to share a lot in other Facebook groups also, right? Our content and we used to see how moms are engaging.
00:19:33
Speaker
But the problem was they weren't informational. So, you know, it's like Mumbai moms, Delhi moms, like they were not informational Facebook groups as such around parenting. So that's where we felt that if the idea is to give value to moms where they are, if this is where moms are, then we should build communities on Facebook and then, you know, figure out they can still come to the website to read the content because that experience cannot be deprecated on Facebook. But for the community, if they are there,
00:20:00
Speaker
Facebook groups there's nothing better than Facebook groups to provide that experience right to initiate that trust and connection between members once they are in a community and just frequent meaningful interactions between members which is very important for a community to thrive. That's how we decided to build the community piece on Facebook. And when was this? This was in July 2017.
00:20:22
Speaker
So fairly quickly you did the pivot. Yes. And you also were exploring WhatsApp as a community channel, right? Yeah. So also WhatsApp. Yes. So we used to go to a lot of offline events for moms and we used to then just create WhatsApp groups of all the moms we would meet. So we started creating local and hyper-local WhatsApp communities and we had like hundreds of WhatsApp communities at one point.
00:20:49
Speaker
Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups because those are the two channels where moms are already and it has to be a pull rather than a push. It cannot drive people onto another platform and then expect them. How would they come back if somebody's asking the questions? We were clear on that then. That's where we chose these two platforms and we also decided to build not one community but communities around specific pain points.
Developing Community Marketing Model
00:21:12
Speaker
We learned
00:21:13
Speaker
I think I would say pretty fast, right? Like we got the insight, right? That communities, yes, but it has to be around specific life stages, specific pain points. Like what? Give me an example. So like the first community we launched was Home Remedies.
00:21:28
Speaker
for babies and moms. So it was specifically around home remedies, right? And other communities, kids nutrition and recipes. So like, you know, specific or weight loss post pregnancy. So we kept launching specific communities for a life stage and a pain point. What was 2018 like, you know, how big did the
00:21:48
Speaker
community size grow in baby destination. And when did you finally go in for the external funding? Yeah, so 2018, you know, we continue to grow, and we kept launching more communities, I think by the end of
00:22:02
Speaker
2018, we had about 600,000 members in our communities. And also in the first quarter of 2018 is when Facebook noticed us because we were just growing very, very fast. They did a case study on us where they featured our story and how we've scaled community. So it was a very, very interesting and exciting year, right? We kept building more tools. We kept launching more communities. That's also the time where we started exploring monetization.
00:22:31
Speaker
And really, what caught our attention was that 40% of conversations were all around products again. So that initial hypothesis was correct. They are out to discover products, and they asked about certain brands. And what we thought is, what if we create a way for brands to engage meaningfully with these mothers? This is where they come at 2 AM at whatever time to ask. This is where they're really seeking authentic advice, which they're getting from peers.
00:22:58
Speaker
But brands can also give, you know, educate, right? Give maybe more scientific advice, bring in experts and all of that. Like a content marketing channel for brands. Yeah, we didn't know how it will play out, to be honest, because what we know is that
00:23:12
Speaker
You know, the only reason a community thrives is because of its organic nature, because it's a safe space. So it's a very sacred space. You cannot, the minute you go and bombard it with an ad or a blog, then you're sharing that, right? So we didn't know how, to be honest. We just wanted to find out how to solve this problem.
00:23:32
Speaker
So we thought we'll talk to brands and we'll figure out that do they even know Facebook groups exist? If yes, have they tried to talk to these consumers? Why if they have and why not? And that's where we realized that there's a big gap. We felt like there's so much talk on digital that happens in the world, but a lot of it is sitting at an eyeball level. They're all
00:23:53
Speaker
brands are present everywhere on the internet, which is, like you said, right, whether it's content marketing, what it's at, or it's just like, you know, just let me go and find that consumer and build a custom audience and show them ads again and again and again. And the frequency with which I show the ads is that I believe I've been able to convince them.
00:24:11
Speaker
But we realize there's no way for brands to understand what are the real pain points of the consumers because consumers are talking in real time in Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, right? But they don't have a means to get those distilled insights and they don't have a means to engage. Like it's just never happened. Just because communities never existed at that scale. That's where we said that there's an opportunity here.
00:24:34
Speaker
We started doing our early experiments around community marketing, just really enabling brands to first understand, you know, again, we say top five pain points and then engage with moms through either educating them or, you know, engaging with them to share their experiences or giving them an exclusive value. Just one of those three things. It cannot be anything else.
00:24:57
Speaker
We started doing experiments and we found a fair bit of success in community marketing. We used to always call it purpose-led marketing, middle funnel marketing, just very simply. Where are your consumers talking? Where are you listening? Where are you talking to them? The consumers are actually talking in these groups, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, Reddit, whatever.
00:25:21
Speaker
You're trying to listen to them through social listening and all that on Facebook pages, Instagram, everywhere else, but not these groups. And then you are trying to talk to them or market to them or show an ad to them, again, on all these other broadcast channels.
00:25:40
Speaker
pages and Instagram, which is great. They consume content there, but they're not talking there. It was as simple as that. We just had to figure the right way to add value to the consumer and to add value to the brand. You were giving insights to brands that this is what people are talking about, and then you were crafting communication for the brand or they would craft something and then you would publish it in the group. Tell me the nuts and bolts of this.
00:26:05
Speaker
Yes, the concept of community marketing starts from understanding the distilled insight, and it's very simple. It's not any personal information. It's not that. It's just that if I have 100,000 conversations that my potential consumers are doing, I just want to find out what are the top five things that bother them. Do they want to learn about nutrition and what kind of nutrition? And this is a paid thing?
00:26:31
Speaker
like you were charging brands for the insights? So, we were not always charging them. It's just that that's what we used to use. It was a part of like how we used to function, right? We were anyways using insights to create content. So initially, it wasn't really charging them. Initially, it was even just to find out, do you even know this, right? Because you do a lot of research through surveys and all that and, you know, consumer emotions, once you're meeting your consumers, but
00:26:57
Speaker
do you know every day what they're talking about? Insights, which then leads to marketing and marketing means once I understand the pain points, I try to answer them. I try to answer them through providing the right information, through enabling other moms to bring out experiences around that pain point or to providing an exclusive value.
00:27:23
Speaker
So that's what we enabled them. Brands would not be a part of the community.
00:27:30
Speaker
Again, a community is a very sacred place, right? So if they enter the community, that's it, right? The trust, they cannot be a part of the community. All the communication is done through the admin of the community, and it's all done with the proper disclosures. It's not like covert marketing, right? It's like, imagine if there's a community of entrepreneurs and Akshay wants to go and talk there, right? Or he just wants to tell that entrepreneurs to sign up for a podcast, right? And he speaks to the admin and
00:27:59
Speaker
he tells the admin, hey, I'm, you know, like, first, I want to know what are the five things that, you know, entrepreneurs talk about. And maybe one of those is that we want to get visibility, right? We want to get an interview or a podcast or we want to get
00:28:14
Speaker
visibility and then if you go and market there you could just do a two minute video where you're talking to them and telling them to sign up and telling them that you know what would be the benefits of doing so or you could say hey let me just give you tips on how to give a good interview right.
00:28:29
Speaker
So it's all meaningful, right? So people are not going to say, oh my god, why are you doing this paid partnership with Akshay? Because they're looking for that opportunity. And it's very commonsensical when you think of it, but somehow that's just not how marketing is perceived, right?
00:28:47
Speaker
So you started working with these brands which are making products for moms and babies and your team would create the content in different ways and insert it into the conversation. And then you would provide reports to brands like in terms of what is the ROI on what they spend. Like that's what 2018 was about creating this kind of a model.
00:29:06
Speaker
2018 was figuring out this model really, right?
Monetizing Community Leadership
00:29:10
Speaker
Like it was figuring out what would work, right? You cannot go in in certain conversations. It has to be through the admin. What would get accepted, how to show ROI, how to show an increase in conversation. It's basically word of mouth. You get into communities and you're, that's the only place you can generate word of mouth. You can have your evangelists talk about you because they're already present in communities.
00:29:32
Speaker
how to measure word of mouth, tried a lot of metrics. So it was really figuring that out. And what was 2019 about? So 2019 was about FCLP. So we got selected by Facebook for a program called Facebook Community Leadership Program, where they had selected 100 community admins from across the globe in a program where they were going to provide us with some funding. And it was a nine month long program where
00:29:59
Speaker
We would get a chance to meet other admins and go through a structured learning program on community leadership. When I saw that program, I was like, this is for us. I'm not the kind of person who fills any award applications or anything. I just don't like all that. But someone sent it to me and I was like, wow, we should fill this.
00:30:20
Speaker
The money that we got was $50,000. We thought we'll use that to build more communities and try to build more experiences in communities for moms even in tier two cities. 2019 was about that while continuing to scale up our communities, scale up the community marketing. It actually started in end of 2018. 2018 end is when the first FCLP meetup happened.
00:30:47
Speaker
But 2019 is when that program was concluded and with that, the idea of Convocyte was born. That's 2019. 2019 was like, oh my God, how do we now build Convocyte? Can we the genesis of Convocyte? Sure.
00:31:04
Speaker
So when I went to FCLP in the first meetup, which was at Menlo Park in late 2018, I was just fascinated. Like I was amazed by every single individual in that cohort. Like, you know, I've gone through, I've been fortunate to have very good experiences.
00:31:20
Speaker
in my life and meet a number of inspiring people, but these were all like, you know, kick ass community builders who were doing like really meaningful work across the globe, different categories. So I was just trying to understand, right, their motivation, they were all doing it. And one thing really struck me was none of them were really making money.
00:31:38
Speaker
And time and again, it was a very, very close-knit program. So we were together for four days, no devices, nothing, just understanding each other going through this program. And what really came out of it was that we were apparently one of the most advanced in that cohort in terms of the way we were monetizing and in terms of the technology and tools that we had built.
00:31:59
Speaker
Everyone else is a great community builder, right? Some of them would just decide to do it for nonprofit purposes, but everyone else was struggling to monetize, right? Was struggling to like, sort of, you take your life's worth and figure out how do I make a livelihood? Because they love doing this. A number of them were doing this full time, right? But there was just no way to earn money, and that thought just didn't leave me.
00:32:26
Speaker
Nobody had access to that kind of data which you had because of the tools that you had built.
00:32:32
Speaker
I don't think it's that. I just think that it's the mindset. When we started Baby Destination, we started with the objective of launching a company. The idea was to have a business model around it. But most of the community admins, unless it's a brand community, they start a community just because they are going through a pain point or they have a hobby or they're just helping a friend. They just start a community without even knowing. It's a personal passion.
00:33:01
Speaker
It's a personal passion. That's very important to note. They are very different from an Instagram influencer, a YouTube influencer who starts with the objective to monetize. These individuals mostly start with an objective just because they're going through a pain point. Because of that, the idea of monetizing is never there. Plus, it's not like, who talks about monetizing communities? There's no talk about it. You talk about monetizing Instagram influencers. No one even used to know community admins.
00:33:30
Speaker
So with all of that, once they start a community, they'll build a community. That's what before they realize they're into it full time. They're doing this. It's extremely gratifying. Every day you come and people are thanking you and you're just in this really gratified state, but you don't know how to make money. It's not about tools or data or
00:33:51
Speaker
If today brands would understand the value of these community admins, and if they were discoverable, then the way that they go to Instagram influences should be more than that.
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, this would at least be that much if not more because Instagram and with all due respect, that's still broadcast. It's all followers, right? This is an engaged group of audience that organically comes. You cannot pay money to build a Facebook group. There's no way you can do an ad. That's the reason there was just no opportunity for them to do that unless they themselves decide to upscale themselves, to go and make a pitch, to go imagine going and selling this to a brand. And the brand is like, what?
00:34:30
Speaker
Like, you know, what's a Facebook group? So it's a massive education exercise to do this, right? To brands. So this is where, you know, we thought that everything that we've done for Baby Destination, if we were to put it, we just thought that, oh my God, like, you know, we've done everything for Baby Destination, right? This is sort of the POC. If we were to take this and put it on a platform and then enable
00:34:54
Speaker
all these admins to build better communities if we could upskill them, professionalize them, and give them an ability to monetize. This would be like a whole new economy community. This is the supply and then brands have the demand. So that's how this idea came. There was no thought to do this before FCLP. What was the plan? Was it to build a place where
00:35:18
Speaker
community admins can come and plug in their communities and through API they can start seeing some data and then brands can also come and see the similar kind of a data and then
00:35:29
Speaker
transact with the community admins on the platform. Is that what you thought? Tell me what you thought of the product being like. We definitely thought that we'll create a product that removes a lot of clutter for community admins. While they're on Facebook, Facebook has given us all the opportunity to build the community, but there's a notification overload. There's so many notifications in that one feed, 100 different types of notifications.
00:35:54
Speaker
One is we wanted to give them a space where they are able to see all the data, all the metrics, the growth, engagement, and the conversational insight metrics about their communities and manage their communities from one place. Get recommendations on when to post, what to post.
00:36:09
Speaker
So it's like your assistant to manage your community. One is that. Second is we wanted to do a number of workshops, et cetera, for them to upskill them, to tell them about how to monetize, what to do, how to go even make a pitch.
00:36:27
Speaker
how to do purpose-like marketing, not covert marketing, and then how to warm up your audience to it, right? All of that, which was also like, we've done like 200 of these workshops so far. Now on the brand side, we wanted to still maintain the sanctity of the community. So it's not like an ad platform where you can just come and, right? We maintained the middle layer of taking, selling to the brand, right? Aggregating the communities,
00:36:57
Speaker
and telling the brand the power of communities, educating the brand really. It's a massive education exercise on both sides that we've gone through. And then all the sort of workflows of community, of posting, et cetera, they're all automated within CondoSight. But it's like we are facing off with the community and we're communities and we're facing off with the brand.
00:37:19
Speaker
And we started doing this with enterprise brands first, because we realized that this is new, right? It's just digital marketing 2.0. It's a new way to market. So if this has to get accepted in the world, it has to be the larger brands embracing it first, and then it will
Rapid Growth and Community Support
00:37:35
Speaker
go downstream.
00:37:35
Speaker
How long was this journey to pivot from baby destination to convo site? This was actually pretty quick. Like I said that late 2018 is, you know, when I first thought of this and by April of 2019, when I came back from my third sort of session at FCLP, we had decided we'd already started working on it, like thinking about it from March. And our first product was out in October, 2019. So we launched in beta.
00:38:03
Speaker
in October 2019 and then January 2020 is when we launched. It went all out. How did you do the acquisition of admins, the community owners? The first few admins were the ones that I knew or I spoke to. I met a number of admins in India. I found out what are their pain points. It was really hard initially because
00:38:26
Speaker
even the thought that they can monetize or somebody even telling them, even if it's another admin, how will that happen? It's just too much. They're fundamentally not business owners. That was the difference. They were not in that mindset. So first couple of months was a lot of those conversations where they're like, how will this even happen? And some of them had already tried and failed a lot because brands used to keep comparing them to Instagram or other platforms or bloggers.
00:38:53
Speaker
So initially it was just that, but then we went out and did what I think we do reasonably well, which is create a community of them.
00:39:01
Speaker
So we created a community of community admins and we call it growth and monetization for Facebook group admins. We just thought that just really need to bring them together to share learning experiences and we can share our because we could be considered experts in building and monetizing at that. That's one thing we did. The second is we set up a community success team. This is the team that's out there too. We're really serving admins, right? That's why we exist today and this team,
00:39:30
Speaker
role is to go out, talk to admins, upskill them, tell them about Converse site. It's really the largest source of acquisition. It's all organic now. 80% of it is through our community, word of mouth, referral, and through our community success team. The community success team would be creating content, creating workshops,
00:39:51
Speaker
Yeah, not content as such, but yes, workshops, it's doing demos, it's, you know, telling them on how to monetize, right? Just helping them. So the success team on boards them and helps them with their first monetization campaigns. Okay. So how many community owners are on ConvoSight today? There's close to 40,000 communities on ConvoSight and they collectively manage 350 million members. Wow. So that's, um, yeah, it's,
00:40:21
Speaker
I know even we sometimes look back and say, wow, because there's lots of communities, right? There's 1.8 billion people in communities now. So it's pretty large. This is Facebook communities only. These are Facebook right now. We've also expanded to Reddit, but yeah, this is primarily Facebook. And like I said, I mean, now it's more and more just organic discovery through our community. We also do very, very informational content on conversei.com. So our SEO has started picking up now this year. So.
00:40:51
Speaker
A lot of international admins, they just discovered us through our content and then that's when they'll install ConvoSight. But again, the idea is it cannot be 100% turnkey.
00:41:01
Speaker
they would require some hand-holding, which is why we were very clear that we need a community success team to help them get set up. It's like once, you know, it's not just a hope, right? Once they monetize, then they're all out. It's just that upskilling that they need, which just wasn't available before this. And how do you acquire brands, like personal outreach and cold calling?
00:41:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we don't do cold calling as such, but you know, it's targeted outreach. Initially, it was a lot of fit, which I used to just do personally on LinkedIn targeted outreach. We had a pretty good response rate, like nine out of 10 people would come back. Wow, that's amazing.
00:41:41
Speaker
Yeah, and every call that we've had so far, like, again, nine out of 10 of those calls have converted into paid pilots and customers. What's the secret behind that? It's like, you know, think about it if I come and tell you that actually there are these entrepreneurs in these three communities.
00:41:58
Speaker
They are talking about this, like you wouldn't even blink, right? You would be like, okay, can I get in front of them? So every message you send on LinkedIn, you would include some nugget of insight about that brand. I wouldn't. I wish it was, you know, I was doing that like in a very disciplined way. I wasn't doing that. But in conversations, at least like when you had calls, then you would. Yeah.
00:42:19
Speaker
present some insights and that would like open their eyes and say, wow. Yeah. I mean, insights, right? Just even saying, like, like I said, right, where are your consumers talking? And it's, you always think of it offline. Oh, they're talking and, you know, I can go to an event I can go to, but just telling them that these spaces exist, right? This is a reality. People have changed. Of course, COVID has taken this to a different level altogether, but consumers, right? They move from TV to digital because consumers moved online, but
00:42:47
Speaker
This is where they are spending their time now. And you have an ability to coexist with them. It is a reality. It's not just a thought. So I think that's the reason. But now, 70% of our business from brands is, again, all referrals now, referral and inbound. So what is your connoisseur monetization? Part of the spend by the brand stays with you, I'm guessing? Yes, yes. That's our monetization model.
00:43:13
Speaker
And now we're also planning to launch more self-serve models. So now ConvoSight 2.0 will be about the D2C brands having the ability to market in communities. We're expanding across more categories and it'll be self-serve or semi-self-serve models. Okay, right now it's pretty high touch. Like there would be an account manager for a brand who would
00:43:38
Speaker
work with them to create that. Then your success team would also work with the community owners to help them execute the campaign. Yes, especially the first time. I don't see that success team going away as we become bigger because as more and more admins are coming on to this, they're doing this for the first time. But yeah, that's the model today. Yeah. How did you manage the payment ecosystem? Because you would have people from all over the world. Do you need to have some sort of
00:44:06
Speaker
bank linkages across the world or how did you manage that? So we first year was only in India. Okay. Right. We've only now started expanding to US and you know, next was Southeast Asia and now it's US. So monetization is not global right now, although the tools can be used globally by anybody. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Monetization was primarily in India and now it's international and that's where the payments tools are being upgraded to.
00:44:35
Speaker
ensure different geographies. We're now working with two customers in the US, so it's now being scaled up. Okay. And tell me about the fundraise journey
Funding and Future Expansion Plans
00:44:46
Speaker
so far. So we've raised about 13.5 million so far. We raised our seed round through Sequoia Surge and IvyCap, which was last year in March.
00:44:58
Speaker
And we recently raised another round through the lead investor was called Grow and then Unilever Ventures and then Sequoia Surge and IvyCap also participated. Okay. Unilever is betting on it because it's a way for them to market their brands as well. Like they would have personally experienced the power of the platform, I guess. Yeah. So we were doing some pilots with them, but they're very different teams. Unilever Ventures is an entity based out of UK. So it's, you know,
00:45:27
Speaker
When we decided to partner with them, we did our sort of, you know, diligence and of course, because, so it's different. Like the brand teams are different and the venture arm is different. So my last question to you, what's like the roadmap now for ConvoSight? So ConvoSight 2.0 is going to be more sense of less of the high touch elements in it. So we would probably allow you to onboard brands at a faster pace. Then what next after that?
00:45:55
Speaker
Yeah. So on the side 2.0, we'll do, you know, solve this problem of education at scale. Also, it's really that there's things that we're doing, which will make communities very legit, right, right in front of you. We'll make communities extremely discoverable. You know, these are users are superstars and I think they should be out.
00:46:17
Speaker
in the world like currently there's no way like if I was to ask you there's no way to tell that hey these are the hundred communities where I'll find my consumers right it'll enable that discovery it'll give them their personalized uh spaces landing pages where you know they can exhibit their work it will give D2C brands smaller brands an opportunity like everybody should have the opportunity to do this everybody like I'm saying even you right like
00:46:43
Speaker
Everyone should have the opportunity to go in front of their consumers in communities. And that's what this will enable. The enterprise model will continue to stay high touch, but that's just enterprise brands. But for all other brands, whether it's local businesses, like imagine a local community and a coffee shop that just wants to talk to consumers.
00:47:05
Speaker
We just, I know it sounds really big, but that's really the dream. This should happen in the world because community builders work really hard. They've done all the hard work. That's the thing. They've gone through years of hard work in building this, and now is their time to monetize it meaningfully. And it provides tremendous value to the consumer and to the brand when it's done in the right manner. So that's the direction that we are going in, also expanding to other community platforms.
00:47:34
Speaker
So that was Tamanna Dhammija telling Akshay Dutt about how Convocyte was developed. If you'd like to know more about it, do log on to convocyte.com. That's www.convosighd.com.
00:47:52
Speaker
This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast is brought to you by Long Haul Ventures. Long Haul Ventures is the long haul partner for founders and startups that are building for the long haul. More about them is at www.longhaulventures.com.