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Empowering Community Entrepreneurs | Nipun Goyal @ LikeMinds
139 Plays3 years ago
Thanks to COVID, Creators’ economy has boomed in the past two years. Worldwide, there are more than fifty million creators. But most of them do not get paid.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Nipun Goyal, Founder and CEO, LikeMinds. He is a serial entrepreneur who has worked in corporate before venturing on this journey.
An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Nipun launched his first venture while in college. In 2014, he started Curofy, a networking app that enables the communication between doctors. Post its acquisition, he started working with community entrepreneurs and founded LikeMinds in 2020, with a mission to assist creators in managing and monetizing their communities.
Tune in to this episode to hear Nipun talk about how LikeMinds is fuelling India’s Creator Economy to the next level with its simple and easy-to-use SaaS platform.
What you must not miss!
- Experience of being a second-time founder.
- Why online communities are important?
- Mission 2025 for LikeMinds
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Take a minute, I'm dead. You're not dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead.
The Great Migration to Community Entrepreneurship
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi, I'm Nippon, I'm the founder and CEO of LikeMind. I'm sure you've all heard of the great resignation. I would rather say what we see right now is a great migration. People are leaving regular corporate jobs to become more entrepreneurial and one of the most exciting ways in which people are becoming entrepreneurial is by becoming a community entrepreneur. What does this mean exactly, a community entrepreneur? Essentially,
00:00:52
Speaker
Anybody who is creating content for his followers and adding value to them, it could be a beauty influencer on TikTok or it could be someone like me who is creating content about the startup ecosystem. And as this type of entrepreneurship picks up and gains steam, we have the next generation of SaaS founders who are building
00:01:14
Speaker
products for this set of entrepreneurs. In a way, how Shopify built products for e-commerce entrepreneurs.
Nippon's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:01:21
Speaker
Today, I'm talking to Nipun Goyal, the founder of LikeMines, who's building a product for a Shopify type of product for community entrepreneurs and
00:01:30
Speaker
Nippon's own journey has been a fascinating one. He grew up in a very small town, was probably the only one in his town who got into IIT. And interestingly, he did not really choose the regular path of corporate job and instead became an entrepreneur pretty soon after graduating. And this is his second venture. His first venture was also in the space of community. So here's Nippon telling me about that whole journey of becoming a founder.
00:02:00
Speaker
This has been the story of my life, got rejected in 12, bounced again, cleared IIT, got really bad in academic, bounced back, improved my APA, placements also, the same thing happened. So during that struggle was happening, I was trying to find a job, but as a backup, I thought I should also start exploring something and a couple of my friends
00:02:27
Speaker
We started working on me and two of them, we started working on this research on what startups can we do. We shortlisted healthcare, finance, education as core sector and we wanted to work on core sector. Eventually, we narrowed down to healthcare.
00:02:44
Speaker
And in healthcare, we started off with this medical tourism company. So the essential idea was we get patients from abroad and get them treated in India. Indian medical facilities were far better than any of the developing and underdeveloped countries. So for these countries, instead of going to USA for a procedure, it's five to 10 times cheaper if they come to India, including the air cost.
00:03:14
Speaker
especially for surgery. So got you patients, eventually, you know, we, we got our jobs. So, you know, we started doing our jobs. But I mean, over, over the next couple of years, we always had that in back of our heads that you know, we are already working on never left that basically, you know, committing ourselves to that small step really helped.
Pivot to Tech-Healthcare Solutions
00:03:36
Speaker
After sort of working for one and a half odd years, we realized that we have to go full time.
00:03:42
Speaker
If this thing... On the other side, that continued to generate some revenue, the medical tourism business. It was more experimental. I think in the first few, like six to eight months, we realized that we don't want to continue that exact business because one, it was very off heavy. What do you mean by V? Like your batchmates? Me and two of my friends. Yeah, yeah. Both were batchmates from the same college.
00:04:10
Speaker
So we decided we don't want to do like a very off-savvy business, want to do something tech-oriented. So, you know, we saw that instead of, you know, making patients to travel from one country to India, the same pattern could also be seen domestically where, you know, people from smaller towns were traveling to larger cities.
00:04:35
Speaker
uh for treatment and referral was a big thing there as well so started exploring that market uh you know you know and also started thinking how can we do it tech first
00:04:46
Speaker
So essentially, like, I would say one and a half years down the job, we decided that, you know, we'll pursue it full time, didn't leave our job. But like that decision was made here to help job. So we started with an idea that, you know, can we make a network of doctors where they will exchange referrals with each other?
00:05:11
Speaker
There were kickbacks which were existing in the industry. We thought we could regulate them but you know sensitive borderline unethical. Initially we didn't see a lot of traction there as well.
00:05:24
Speaker
If I'm a GP and my patient needs eye surgery then on this platform I can find an eye surgeon and I can agree to a like a revenue share kind of a thing or something of that nature on the platform only and I can refer my patient to that eye surgeon. Exactly, so the only difference from what you said was the agreement of the revenue share because
00:05:50
Speaker
Like i said it is considered unethical to take a kickback from referral by a doctor so these arrangements were generally done you know in in few cases offline you know where people would not sort of do the transaction online but offline but like a lot of doctors also don't take kickbacks
00:06:10
Speaker
So from a kickback model we actually shifted more to a generally referring a patient finding the right doctor in the nearby town and connecting with them and eventually referring the patient because the patient deserves a better doctor.
00:06:31
Speaker
in that specialty okay so you were saying that i mean i described what that business was and then you said it was not exactly like that after that i didn't hear what you said yes i was saying the the difference between what you just described and what it was was that the kickbacks were not happening on the platform and originally it was not like a chat
00:06:56
Speaker
It was more like finding a relevant doctor near you, you know, let's say if you are sitting in, you know, small town, let's say in Hanumangad, and you want to refer a patient to Gurgaon.
00:07:08
Speaker
which are the two sort of tertiary vendors and like a lot of these decisions are also based on where the patient wants to go because they might have a family in Jaipur or Gurgaon. So the idea was can we create like a directory of doctors which can be exclusively given access to only doctors.
00:07:30
Speaker
And then doctors can use that directory to find other doctors and maybe call them up or chat with them and refer a patient.
00:07:43
Speaker
because this is not like the only thing that happens in the industry. There are a lot of doctors that also generally want to refer without a kickback as well. So this is like a LinkedIn for doctors in a way. Exactly. So that's where we started from. And I think this is the idea on which we left our jobs as well. You left a job without any
00:08:06
Speaker
promise of funding, etc., just on this idea. Yeah, you don't get promise of funding without leaving your job, especially if you are a first time founder. So, so left our job, you know, of course, you know, leaving an investment banking job was was something that was difficult for my family to accept initially. But like always, you know, they've been, you know,
00:08:32
Speaker
they've had faith on me. Even in the quota days, they had faith. They didn't intervene much in general in my decision.
Creating a Doctor Discussion Platform
00:08:42
Speaker
So that is good. But anyways, on that idea where we had
00:08:48
Speaker
Figured out that digital healthcare is something that can be solved by bringing doctors online because everyone else was very active online and doctors were not. The only place where doctors by that time were coming online was WhatsApp. Other than WhatsApp, you would not see them being active. This was 2014.
00:09:11
Speaker
So one of the very interesting things that later on we saw was doctors were being part of these WhatsApp groups and they were discussing patient cases in those WhatsApp groups.
00:09:26
Speaker
So that was a very, very interesting insight, like knowledge. Exactly. So that was a very interesting insight that we got later on, once we started committed to doing the venture. So I'll come back to that. But like in terms of the journey, what eventually happened was we left our jobs, started with few interns from the same college, couple of others as well, like four interns we had.
00:09:54
Speaker
I think one of the key hacks that we found at that time was we got like Medanta to sign up all their doctors on our platform because this would essentially become like a free referral channel for them. So we had built an app after I think leaving, it took like a couple of months. So we made sure that they downloaded the app.
00:10:16
Speaker
So I think on an average we would get like one, two, three maximum doctors a day at that time. We also hired like an army of interns at that time who would travel around and do the same thing like us. And essentially what happened by this method, we got like, I think 3,000, 4,000 doctors on board in the network. And you always curify like the app and the business.
00:10:45
Speaker
or the name came later. Was it called Curified? It was called Curified that time. I think the initial thing was 911 India. But when we left our jobs, we had shifted to Curified. The medical tourism venture was 911 India.
00:11:05
Speaker
Essentially, you know, at that time we were able to raise from few angels when we had these like three, four thousand doctors and you know, Medanta was there. So at least like this model could be seen where by some way you could bring in doctors together on a platform. But after these four thousand, how many were actually using the platform to connect? Very less, very less, very less.
00:11:31
Speaker
So essentially what we realized later on was referral is not a daily use case. A lot of doctors might use it once in a while whenever they don't know a doctor of a particular specialty. So we essentially also sort of started introducing news in the product.
00:11:56
Speaker
And within news, you know, we sort of made it specialty-wise. So, you know, giving a doctor news for their specialty became like a more regular, frequent use case for them. And this way, we got like few more thousand doctors. And essentially, that is when the WhatsApp insight came in where we saw doctors using WhatsApp groups to discuss cases with each other.
00:12:22
Speaker
And there were a lot of other things that were discussed in those WhatsApp groups as well. So, I think one of the key insights that I can draw from it. But how did you get access to those, like, doctor-only WhatsApp groups? It's awesome when you know who you are catering to. You should just hang out with them.
00:12:44
Speaker
find friends, find friend of friends, they will show things to you by themselves. So hang out in the community that you are catering to is probably the number one learning that I feel I could derive from the whole experience so far. Once we had that hit critical mass, we opened up the discussion forum in the platform and that is when we started
00:13:12
Speaker
Feeding content as well, initially you have to do that a lot. Over time what happened was we saw discussions happening naturally. There were two primary type of discussions happening. One was, you know, discussion around cases and the second was discussion around violence against doctors.
00:13:36
Speaker
So it sounds funny, but it's real. A lot of doctors are facing in small or large form violence. And it's a profession where people get emotional about the outcomes, like patient relatives and all. So we decided that we ought to focus on just the cases use case because we felt there is much more value in
00:14:01
Speaker
consumption of that content, like with the other type of content, you would never feel, you know, coming back again on the platform for consuming that content. So we stopped everything else started focusing on us on making it like a case discussion platform for doctors. So from a LinkedIn for doctors, we actually slowly pivoted to stack overflow for doctors.
00:14:26
Speaker
Okay. Help me understand what is Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is the platform used by engineers. Whenever they are stuck on any code problem, they go to this platform and there are enough people who have contributed around queries similar to them. Like a Quora in a way. Like a Quora in the modern days, you can say. I think the only big difference from Quora was we were very image heavy.
00:14:55
Speaker
Think of it like an Instagram or a Facebook kind of interface where the case can be understood just by the image. It could be a report or it could be like a real picture of the affected area. So that became the experience for which people came and experienced again and again on the platform.
00:15:17
Speaker
So one of the other key insights I would like to share here was while case discussion was the main engagement use case for us, the acquisition use case still remained until even later part of the venture. Be part of the largest directory of doctors in India. That FOMO feeling was very, very critical.
00:15:43
Speaker
So you could have like while building a community or like any product have different use cases for acquisition and retention.
00:15:51
Speaker
So it's important to think out which are these use cases. Did you start monetizing? We intended not to do it until we really go global and we started moving global before monetization.
Monetization Strategies and Inspiration
00:16:06
Speaker
So we started seeing a good initial traction in countries like Middle East. Wherever there is Indian population, they would relate a lot more with the community that we had.
00:16:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we did globalization a little bit, but I think there was a time that something I think I will not go into a lot of detail, but we had some internal discussions going on. And, you know, we were raising at that time. And because of certain constraints, like, even after having term sheets, we were not raising at that time. And the only way to survive was to monetize. How did you monetize?
00:16:49
Speaker
We were getting a lot of these pharma companies, healthcare devices coming. Another interesting insight is, I think at that time, I remember whenever we would pitch to investors, we would say healthcare is $280 billion. I think it was projected to be $280 billion in 2020 and out of which,
00:17:10
Speaker
I think some 70-80 billion dollar was spent on medical devices and pharma and doctor focused marketing. Wherever marketing is doctor focused, those part of healthcare were some 70-80 billion dollars. The conferences and the foreign trips for doctors and all of that stuff. So that market is 70-80 billion dollar and that market cannot be directly advertised to patients.
00:17:39
Speaker
That is where all these, so even if let's say 10% of that is generally that is 20, 30% expense towards marketing to doctors, there was a very nice like 10, 20, 20 odd billion dollar market marketing expense or advertising expense towards doctors, which is what we were going after at that time in India.
00:18:01
Speaker
Which is also what, I think, if you heard of this company in the US called Doxify, I think. Doximity. Doximity. Doximity. Doximity, sorry. Doximity is something similar to that. They've also built like a... Exactly.
00:18:14
Speaker
lived in 10 billion valuations when they went from there. Yeah, they did. I feel we were like, they could have. But I think it's fine. No regrets, to be honest. I think, you know, being a first time founder, getting an exit early was also helpful. How did these investments come to you? Like these opportunities? Like, I mean, how do you? I think two main reasons. I think two main two main channels. One is, you know,
00:18:40
Speaker
like own IIT slash entrepreneur network that you know we I think a lot of people from IIT today are doing entrepreneurship and like all of us are very connected if not formally but like one-on-one connections so you keep getting these introductions and like a lot of entrepreneurs you also they reach out to you cold and you know like the ones who you resonate with you like to spend time with them and
00:19:06
Speaker
They also honor, for example, one of these companies recently got into YC.
00:19:15
Speaker
they had spoken to me. They were healthcare. I sort of just had one call and they probably liked the advices that I had given to them in that call. And I told them that, you know, keep me posted. I probably didn't say yes to them for investing, but when they were closing the round, they came back. I was like, it's fine. I'll be happy to participate. And then they got into YC recently.
00:19:41
Speaker
So two primary reasons, one is the IIT slash entrepreneurial network and second is healthcare. So like I get a lot of deals on healthcare because of probably having the credibility around that. How much did you make from that exit if you are actually worthy to share? It's not, it's not something. It's not public.
00:20:02
Speaker
But it was good like, you know, bought a house. Your parents were happy that the risk was there. My parents were happy, but some of my younger families still feel, what did I do with a startup? You know, it's still risky. There is no surety even today.
00:20:24
Speaker
My paternal grandfather, we have a very extended family, so he is still confused by why did I go for it. But yeah, I mean most part of my family is happy.
00:20:38
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show. Okay, so then what like once that fail happened and you decided to move on, when
Insights on Community Building on Messaging Apps
00:21:03
Speaker
did that happen? About 2019 I guess.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, the sale happened and there was a transition period. So we stayed there until 2019. I think when I exited, I had a rough idea around what space I want to go for. But I think after exiting, started committed, you know, committed deeper into it, hired like a few sort of early people. What was the idea that you had?
00:21:33
Speaker
I think at that time I was figuring it out, but the core idea was communities are awesome, right? And we had a lot of people who were building communities on WhatsApp. So that was, again, a very, very key insight for me where instead of platforms which are much more organized like Facebook, LinkedIn, people were increasingly moving to WhatsApp to build communities.
00:22:00
Speaker
which is how with the doctoral community that whole experience. Exactly. So that was also there. But like over time, like during the transition period, I saw this whole phenomena, like every month I would be at least getting invited to one such group on WhatsApp. So got very, very curious. I found it really, really powerful because by then WhatsApp was the de facto platform to engage with people who you trust.
00:22:28
Speaker
who you relate to, who you already know and you know that being used for building like a very tight-knit network seems very very powerful.
00:22:41
Speaker
Initially, it was awesome. But over time, I realized that the engagement there also fizzles out. Or if the engagement grows, it becomes spammy for people. So if the community starts scaling beyond, let's say 30, 40 active members who are regularly chatting on it, it would become spammy for the rest of the members. And WhatsApp experience would not be the optimal experience for such people.
00:23:10
Speaker
That's what happened at the 256 number limit. So a lot of people were shifting to telegram at that time. It's almost the same time when I was figuring out what to do and this was one problem that stuck with me.
00:23:27
Speaker
I think Telegram's approach was also good, but I thought if you want something where you have to engage a significant number of people on a regular basis, a single chat experience will not work out. Something like Slack and Discord do, having threads for different
00:23:50
Speaker
So the idea was can we build something which is, you know, multi-threaded chat like Slack and Discord but with a mobile first experience. So that's where I started from and I think it took like a lot of time to figure out what exactly in this space is the problem. I think one of the core thing that I started as a value prop was discovery of communities on the platform.
00:24:18
Speaker
But I realized that I had to build the supply first to really fulfill that discovery. Initially, I was doing a hack where we were creating these communities by the system. So I created a beautiful algorithm in my mind. It was called LPIG. So L is legacy, P is profession, I is interest, and G is geography. So if you combine any of the two factors,
00:24:49
Speaker
Also, if let's say I take myself, you know, my legacy would be the institutions that I've been part of. Also, institutions could be my hometown, the colleges. Then the profession could be like professional attributes could be entrepreneurship, healthcare. Interest could be whatever interest I have, geography, for example, could be Gurgaon. So if I combine these attributes, so for example, IIT, Delhi, Alumni, who are entrepreneurs in Gurgaon.
00:25:18
Speaker
That gives me a WhatsApp group. Right. Yeah, it does. So the idea was, can we pre-create these WhatsApp group type communities on the platform and let the people have threaded conversations in them? Whenever someone signs up, then they have a whole menu of communities and they can choose who they want to join. They don't have parameters at the end. I think that is where we started from.
00:25:48
Speaker
I think by that time we had incorporated our company. So, who is really here now? You continue with the same co-founders? No, no, no, no, no. I found a new co-founder. This was a tech first co-founder. My other two co-founders were more like business first in the previous company. So, him, me and then like couple of other people who had hired
00:26:15
Speaker
So I think that went well, you know. And your version 1 launch was what? Like help me understand that go to market version 1 launch, what was it? Exactly. What was the project? The algorithmic communities that I had, so we had some 50,000 communities which we had created on the platform, algorithmically. And we started onboarding some people.
00:26:41
Speaker
Was it like a chat app? The pitch was discover relevant communities and engage with like-minded people in it. It was primarily two things. One was discovery layer of communities and the second was chat between the members.
00:27:09
Speaker
And then there were features like pools, like the chat was much more enhanced than WhatsApp. Like every community could have different threads to that bit. But I think what we... And this was a mobile first experience. This was a mobile only experience at that time. Mobile only, okay. So we started sort of feeding certain communities as well.
00:27:34
Speaker
And how did you acquire customers? Was it like Facebook ads and Google ads and all? Facebook ads. How was it? Facebook ads. Started feeding like a few communities. Eventually realized that, you know, this is not something that will like, at least in the early days will work out because without the community manager, a community is there always
00:28:04
Speaker
has to be a community manager. So either we as a platform, we start becoming a community manager, or we find people who are ready to manage those communities. And in the early days, there was nothing for them on the platform, right? Either you have people and then you incentivize people to build awesome communities on top of it.
00:28:29
Speaker
So we didn't have that. And we also were like, we were Oki Oki in terms of tools, but there was no single tool that would sort of be the champion to bring in a lot of community builders. Like, for example, on Clubhouse, people moved because, you know, there are audio first tools which were not there in the social space at that time.
00:28:50
Speaker
So I think that was one key learning we eventually realized that communities cannot exist unless the community manager is incentivized to run a community. So we sort of started figuring out what to do with that ecosystem and how do we get more tools for the community managers to sort of have them on the platform.
00:29:17
Speaker
I think did a lot of experiments around that. And the thing with this venture is it is a very, very core tech, you know, in terms of the amount of tech efforts that go, you know, building a chat, which is simple, like WhatsApp, and then also building a social network layer on top of it. So it's like combining the WhatsApp and Facebook experience both on top of it.
00:29:44
Speaker
It took a lot of time in terms of making that transition. So essentially, I think somewhere by end of last year is when we started onboarding some of the community managers. And we actually completely removed the discovery from the system because we felt that communities which are not being run by anyone will be a negative experience for our members.
00:30:13
Speaker
So it's better to only show discovery which are relevant community when we started focusing on thinking that will build the supply of the communities first and then open up discovery. So once we started focusing on community managers, again, one of the key learning after a few months was community managers who were having an intent of doing something
00:30:41
Speaker
with that community for sort of entrepreneurial gains, like for monetary gains, would generally put in a lot more effort than, you know, the people who are just doing it for the fun of it. Exactly. So
00:31:00
Speaker
We also started focusing to narrow down the experience around how do we solve for these community builders who are also entrepreneurial, who want to monetize these communities.
Platform for Creators: Ownership and Monetization
00:31:16
Speaker
And that is when we realized that the whole market is basically this whole creator economy which is
00:31:23
Speaker
which is shaping up and the whole creator economy. The thesis is that the whole set of people and probably this is something that will happen over next two to three years where a lot of creators will want to own the audience that they have on the social platforms today. When I mean own the audience, it also means that
00:31:48
Speaker
Reaching your own followers doesn't need an algorithm to be fighting against it. So for example, if you have your followers on YouTube or Instagram or any channel for that matter, even like Facebook groups, you are not sure whether your members will receive it. The algorithm decides that. So that seems like a very, very big factor in the long run, which is essentially
00:32:17
Speaker
called the decentralized internet theme, where, you know, the influencers should have the ability to have their own mini social network or internet. And then the other theme was creator, which is also what sub stack is offering. Exactly, exactly. And the other theme was this whole creator economy, which is again what sub stack is also doing, where you help these creators monetize their audience.
00:32:43
Speaker
So we saw this trend that a lot of these creators were using platforms like Slack, Discord, Telegram to manage their existing audience and do things with them like paid events, paid courses, which is not just selling a brand which they generally do on social media. So that became very, very interesting for us.
00:33:10
Speaker
And I think over time, long story short, I think three odd months back, we sort of launched with the new direction where now we are a platform for creators who are also entrepreneurs to help them build a branded community where they own the audience and then monetize that audience via
00:33:37
Speaker
various digital first services like paid events, paid memberships, you know, where you build like a paid club, with exclusive membership, and paid courses, paid consultations. So, so, so the whole architecture remains the same where, you know, they are managing the community, but the intent of managing the community is very, very clear now.
00:34:05
Speaker
Eventually monetization. Exactly. So not even eventually, like a lot of these people are already monetizing, like one of the key learning and within last three months that we've had is it's better to go after creators who are already thinking of monetization at least. So I don't want to ideally pitch to a creator here, you can also monetize. I think we already know that they can monetize.
00:34:27
Speaker
they need to see certain examples. So we want to help people who are already thinking of monetizing or are already monetizing. And we want to give like them this whole toolkit, this whole shash where they can own their audience and make the most out of the audience in terms of monetizing it. Give me an example of community entrepreneurs, like a few examples, people who are maybe using your platform, like what kind of people are they and how do they monetize?
00:34:55
Speaker
Sure. So there is this, I give you two very broad, different examples. One is this creator, who is a standup comedian called Gar Malek. So he was, you know, before he met us, he was running like five, six WhatsApp groups, one Telegram group.
00:35:19
Speaker
So the idea for his community is that it's like an online comedy club that he has built and he is charging a monthly membership for accessing these comedy events online.
00:35:35
Speaker
And he hosts regularly shows. So while you can have these shows on an individual ticket level as well, but you could also be a member where you want to see these shows anytime, anywhere you can see that. Not anytime, but like real time.
00:35:53
Speaker
So he was using a lot of tools, not only these, but for seeing analytics, he was using another tool for managing the link of Zoom, which can be leaked. He was using another tool. So someone like him, when he presented likeminds to him, it feels very appealing because he could do all that on a single platform.
00:36:16
Speaker
And so today he runs this community with three digit number of members who have subscribed to his community membership. And he keeps on bringing new comedians to make them do shows. So yeah, I mean, this is one use case. A very, very different use case is about
00:36:42
Speaker
There are a lot but let me pick one. There is this Brigadier who wants this online academy. Again, something that he was doing on events on Zoom or Meet and then running a Facebook group for the academy and multiple WhatsApp groups. Academy teaching what?
00:37:11
Speaker
teaching life skills primarily around time management and goal setting. Leadership skills, I would say, primarily. Like Tony Robbins, someone who was aspiring to be a Tony Robbins. Right. So now he also launched a membership community on the platform, also launched a few courses which he's now upselling to the community.
00:37:41
Speaker
as well as the outside members and give them the community if they buy the course. So these are like two different examples. One is like a club use case and then the second is more like a micro school or academy kind of use case. Now this is very different from let's say a typical coaching institute where you would do like tests and attendance
00:38:06
Speaker
being mandatory. This is not the bad use case. There is a lot more value in peer to peer networking as well in such communities. So that is the core difference between some of these coaching center apps versus us. For these academy or micro school use cases. And typically what do they charge like a couple of hundred rupees a month or is it like a monthly fee that they charge? In many cases it is monthly.
00:38:34
Speaker
like three digits rupee but there are communities which like have even monthly fees of 7-800 so there is this yoga instructor who runs a very successful again three digit membership community on the platform she charges I think somewhere around 800 rupee per month they also have like quarterly annual six monthly packages
00:39:03
Speaker
Generally, you get a lot of people who start with a monthly plan and they renew with these quarterly annual and annual rates. And one of the core problems that we're solving for them is managing these renewals on the app itself. If someone doesn't renew, blocking their access, nudging them to make sure that the renewal happens. Similarly, one of the key things that we're now focusing on is event turnout.
00:39:34
Speaker
How can we improve event turnouts in such communities? One, of course, in paid membership communities, but also into free membership communities where if someone registers, can we help them, like, help the creators to have a better turnout? Or, like, even in free communities, can they also monetize individual events? So, for example, in the same case of
00:40:00
Speaker
this comedian, he could also onboard members for free and let them engage in the chats in the community, but for an event they have to pay. So they decide which chat spaces are open for members. They decide which chat spaces are linked with a specific event or a course. You could also run like a cohort based course on top of this community stack.
00:40:29
Speaker
So that is where we are heading to. Our idea community has to be essential for a business who we work with. Slowly we are also venturing into moving away from just individual led communities to smaller team led communities where we see that the intent is much more to sort of build the community for long term.
00:40:54
Speaker
Like a business doing it, instead of an individual doing it. Exactly. So, you know, do you have inbuilt tools for creating courses, for creating video events? Like, do you have all of that? Or those are external tools that are plugged in, like say a Zoom webinar is created and shared over here.
Onboarding Process for Community Owners
00:41:16
Speaker
So right now it's external being plugged in in terms of video. Like there is of course a stack of
00:41:24
Speaker
cataloging an event, taking payments on top of it, taking registration for a free event, sending reminders, giving them analytics around these events, how many people registered. And then we also have ways to capture who all attended the event. So right now the video is streamed on the choice of platform by the creator. So could we zoom meet any any any platform
00:41:53
Speaker
Even for example, in this case, the link of this podcast, that can also be sort of linked with the event button. Right, like a paid podcast, one could launch a paid podcast on it where only members can listen to the podcast. Exactly. This could also be a replacement for only fans, no? In some ways. Is that something you are okay with?
00:42:22
Speaker
I think we are not really targeting that segment right now. Not very very comfortable with that use case. But never because of the legal grey area. It's not just legal. I think we've not seen enough inbound. Like we are right now only focused on India. Probably the market is also not that mature. We have not categorically said no, but we have
00:42:51
Speaker
definitely not focused on the segment as well. So, so far we haven't received any creator in that segment who wants to do this. So, like, you know, what is the journey of a community owner when they sign up? Do they get like a, like a, is there someone in your team who like handholds them through the process or like, like, you know, tell me about that. Like, for a new, like, say I decide, okay, I want to do a
00:43:18
Speaker
community around my podcast. So what would be my journey on the platform? So, uh, essentially you will, once you've shown your interest, we will like do a basic call with you to understand your goals and whether we are the right fit as a platform for you. And, uh, we'd also tell you manually wetted, like
00:43:42
Speaker
As of now, yes. But that's not very scalable. In the long run, we'll have to move to automated onboarding. But one of the things that we've recently introduced is fixed monthly pricing for using our software. So that helps in checking that only serious community builders are coming. As of now, people need to download the like-minds app.
00:44:08
Speaker
community owner doesn't get like a white labeled app and all that. Yes. But there would be some custom link that he would send to his followers, which directly land them to his community. And now we've also created a web version of this. So like in web, like a new version that we're launching or later this year is something where we are going to give them custom domains.
00:44:36
Speaker
So the whole software of the community. So for example, if you have a community today on Discord or Slack, you don't need to use that. You use the similar experience of Discord or Slack, which is similar to like mine on desktop.
00:44:55
Speaker
Our mobile experience is WhatsApp heavy. Our desktop experience is going to be Slack or Discord heavy, in terms of the look and feel. So instead of discord.com slash something, it would be up shares, podcasts, or whatever name that you have for your podcast. Dot com slash community or community.org. And that will render the whole community interaction experience for you.
00:45:25
Speaker
So white labeling on web is something that we are launching soon. White labeled app is something that we want to first evaluate whether there are enough takers for it, because of course, that will cost them a lot more than what the web experience is costing them. I mean, that is where we are, but we feel that there will definitely be few takers for it. And the thing is, like I said, this is a market to be created for next
00:45:54
Speaker
you know, three to five years, especially in India. So I think over the next few months, we'll also make a decision around whether we go global first, or whether we see enough traction in terms of white labeled and going deeper into like the Indian market. So can you I mean, you know, the the creator economy is like the
00:46:17
Speaker
next new buzzword like say 10 years ago e-commerce was that thing which all the startups were chasing today it's the creator economy or the creator entrepreneurs especially around community building that everyone is chasing so can you tell me the space like give me a lay of the land like who are the players in it what are each of their strength areas and you know where does like mine fit into that lay of the land
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, so like I told you, you know, there are different, I think two primary themes that are there. One is decentralization of internet, which is where like a lot of platforms like Discord, Slack,
00:46:58
Speaker
Telegram are doing it at scale where the audience is owned by the, in a way owned by the platform, by the creator. The other theme is monetization of creators where there is a huge number of platforms doing n number of things. So for example, there are platforms like Onlyfans which are catering to a specific use case of creators
00:47:27
Speaker
There are platforms like, you know, I think Clubhouse is also going to venture into that at some point, where, you know, you want to sort of go after podcasters to sort of monetize their podcasts as well. But that will, you know, remain like a discovery led platform as well. So primarily going to be used around discovery.
00:47:51
Speaker
Then there are a lot of these cohort-based course platforms that are coming up. There is this platform called Maven in the US. In India also, there is a platform recently launched by an academy into this cohort-based course space.
00:48:11
Speaker
So that is there, which is a lot more around horizontal use cases. Similarly, this horizontal use case monetization platform is class plus where you would see these. So I think there are different needs
00:48:31
Speaker
Correct. So there are these different needs which are being captured by these different plays. So, for example, within the create, like the cohort-based course phenomena, one space is where you bring in the audience for them.
00:48:47
Speaker
You know, like probably Clubhouse is doing for podcasters, you know, there are these platforms like, you know, in India, there is front row, there is big class, where the core value is cohort based courses, but there they will own the audience.
00:49:04
Speaker
They will bring in the audience and the educators and creators just need to take the courses. What about Facebook groups? That's like the big daddy of communities. I think that is going to evolve into how probably Myspace evolved.
00:49:23
Speaker
died down. I think the good thing about Facebook is that they keep innovating, keep coming with new products. I think there will be a space for them for sure, mostly centered around discovery of new audiences, capturing new audiences that will still remain on those platforms. So that will become like a top of the funnel where creators can find new members and then direct them to one of these decentralized platforms.
00:49:51
Speaker
Exactly. So they will continue adding value in these platforms as well because the more value they add, the more incentivized they are going to be around enabling these kind of behavior. But the core is who owns the audience. In long run, creators will want to own the audience in some way. So that is where I see these platforms. I already told you about, I feel WhatsApp,
00:50:18
Speaker
Telegram, Slack, all of them will remain similar. I think WhatsApp will evolve a lot more into e-commerce use cases for small business owners. I think that will evolve. And then I think even the very, very space that I'm going after, which is the community platform space, I think people will find use cases
00:50:45
Speaker
So even like today we are little generic while we are our core differences we are heavily focused around monetization of communities. Some of the other community platforms are just giving them spaces to host their audience. Like one one innovation of course is on their own domain which we also give. But I think even in that like giving them easy products to monetize their audience is something that
00:51:13
Speaker
we have picked as a niche in this space as well. Now, whether we will have like one use case around that monetization or multiple use cases that is still to be seen. I think we feel that two use cases which we have sort of figured out so far, one of which will go big on one is membership communities.
00:51:37
Speaker
And second is event-led monetization. It could be courses as well. We see courses as just a linkage between different events within the community. So you have a lot of data of users. I mean, surely you would have
00:51:59
Speaker
a thought that, I mean, it's an asset which you're not utilizing. You could, for example, in some way, like you said, you have some three-digit creators. So each of those creators would have maybe three-digit followers. So maybe you would have some five or six digits in terms of the user data. You're not thinking of any way to monetize that. I think we've taken that decision that we want to go for the
00:52:27
Speaker
enabling ownership of data to the creator instead of ourselves. So you're consciously taking that decision that we will not do that. Okay. How many users are there unlike mine today? Like you said, it's in five digits. And how many of them are?
00:52:51
Speaker
Most of them are paying. We have recently started this use case around even so far we were just focused on memberships. So people would come only if they pay for the membership of the community.
00:53:06
Speaker
So like I said, we so far had only focused on membership. So people would manage their top of the funnel on the social networks, the free users on the social networks, and they'll ask their members like them to come here. Exactly. Exactly.
00:53:30
Speaker
But lately we've started seeing some of the creators who also want to bring in their free members there. So early in that, but like over the next few months, I think we'll have a lot more free users as well. And the creators can create a different experience for the free versus the paying members. Like some content can be for free members, some content for paying members and stuff like that. Exactly.
00:53:57
Speaker
So, you could create different events or different chat spaces for different categories of your members. So, what's your vision for, say, 2025? What kind of numbers do you want to... So, I'm not... Like I said, we've intentionally dropped thinking about the end customers, but we see ourselves as someone who wants to serve a million creators by 2025.
00:54:26
Speaker
Okay, that's amazing. And like what kind of revenue are you expecting to do this year? Like, you get like about 5% of the membership fees that they pay, right?
00:54:39
Speaker
So we have multiple plans and again we are figuring out our revenue share, what is the optimal one. We have started with 5% for the base plan and there is a higher plan as well where we also allow them to integrate within their payment gateway. So it's again more and more moving towards not owning the data, not owning the data.
00:55:03
Speaker
So we want to maintain that DNA in the long run. And that is why we are even open for white labeling because it doesn't matter to us whether end users are downloading our app or a third app or a second app. So I think numbers, I would say we are still early. We are not chasing any specific revenue numbers.
00:55:26
Speaker
But like I said, you know, we, the number, the North Star metric is how many creators are we catering to? So we would like to reach, you know, at least in few thousands, you know, in one year. Let's see how that goes. I think we are still in the product building phase.
00:55:44
Speaker
To be honest and i don't want to change numbers until we have that mindset here product build over here or now we just get created on the platform. What changes as a second time founders.
00:56:01
Speaker
you know, from the first day. A lot of things. A lot of things. I mean, it's almost like, you know, you have seen one cycle, and especially, you know, once, once you've seen the good cycle, where, you know, you made some money in the process as well. So I think it changes a lot in terms of that, you become much more mature in terms of approaching everything, you must you become much more thoughtful while taking these decisions.
00:56:30
Speaker
And you have access to talent better, you have access to capital better. Sometimes I feel, you know, it's, it's also different in terms of the, like the rawness that is there in first time founders, I feel sometimes I've lost it. Like, you know, not thinking before doing is also important in a lot of cases.
00:56:56
Speaker
Yeah. So for example, a market like Euro five, probably we would have like, I would have never picked up if, if I was a second time founder. Uh, so I think second time founders generally pick something for longer. And, uh, I see a lot of second time founders, uh, increasingly picking up SAS plays, uh, you know, uh, because it is less riskier in general, you know, you could bootstrap for longer.
00:57:27
Speaker
or, you know, with smaller capital. So your dependency on investors also reduce over time. So, like, I think generally I've seen like SaaS plays are only picked up by more matured founders. You know, you would not see a lot of college kids picking it up. You would see either people who have worked in an industry for a while or, you know, people who have like run a venture. There are always exceptions, but
00:57:54
Speaker
Like, or even the first time founder would pivot into a SaaS business. I think SaaS needs a more polished product to come out. If you're doing something B to C, you can do a half pick product and keep pivoting until you find product market fit. But in case of SaaS, you have to come out with a more polished product first and then
00:58:23
Speaker
that it finds product market fit. Exactly. And someone who wants to make a switch to you as an angel investor, what do you advise him or her? I think this is a framework a lot of people use as angel investors. They just see two things. One is the market size and whether the team can do something meaningful in that market.
00:58:50
Speaker
So whenever you are pitching to an angel investor, try to answer these two questions very, very clearly to yourself and then only start pitching.