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Making Commerce Social | Pulkit Agarwal @ Trell
136 Plays4 years ago
What you seek is seeking you. This is what describes the story of our guest in this episode.
For Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO, Trell, a visual blogging app, this search started around six years ago, with a desire to visit local pandals during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, little knowing that this would turn into a business idea which is at present has surpassed international social media giants like Twitter and Pinterest with more than 45 million monthly active users.
In a candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Pulkit tells us that how visiting these local pandals helped him realize the gap of sharing local knowledge, even for people who are not into blogging and founded Trell in 2016 while he was finishing off with his engineering at IIT Bombay.
Taking a trip down memory lane, Pulkit talks about how as a fresh graduate and a first-time entrepreneur, he learnt everything from the scratch about starting his venture and attracting investors to believe and guide him on this journey. He further explains the insights which helped him to develop a simple, no-frills platform for storytellers to post their content in the language they are comfortable with.
Tune in to this episode to hear Pulkit speak about his exciting journey and how Trell is challenging international social media giants by providing Bharat with a local, Made in India visual blogging platform.
What you must not miss!!
• The experience of getting funded.
• Challenges of scaling up a social media platform to a marketplace.
• Impact of the ban on Chinese apps.
• Business growth in times of COVID.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay Hi, this is Saurabh and you are listening to the founder thesis podcast We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country and we want to learn how to build a unicorn
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi, I am Polke Tagarwal. I am co-founder and CEO of Trell.
India's Internet Market Boom in 2020
00:00:32
Speaker
2020 was truly the year that Bharat came online. With the lowest data rates in the world and a large base of young population, India is poised to become the biggest internet market in the world. And with the policy makers taking a hard stand on Chinese apps, a massive opportunity opened up for Made in India apps.
Trell: A Lifestyle Video Platform
00:00:52
Speaker
One of the most prominent of these new aged apps is Trell.
00:00:56
Speaker
a lifestyle video platform that focuses on encouraging meaningful local content targeted at Bharat. Trell is one of the fastest growing video platforms out there with a reported valuation of $400 million.
Polki's Early Interest in Technology
00:01:10
Speaker
And Pulkita Garwal, the founder of Trell, tells Akshay Dutt the fascinating journey of how he discovered and built up the community that is today the Trell app. Listen in.
00:01:20
Speaker
My love for engineering goes to very early days. When I was essentially eight years old, I used to visit my father's office, play with those MS-DOS based computers, got really into the world of technology while I did that. Started coding on it on C++, Java, and then started developing some applications to help my father in the daily shows. I think that was a moment when I discovered that I like to build things using technology, using coding.
00:01:49
Speaker
And that was a fundamental Kida that I had, which landed me to engineering. And I think that Kida just kind of kept on, and I kept on building stuff. So that precisely, I think, was more about my entrepreneurship journey than thinking I'll start doing entrepreneurship since my childhood. Yeah.
00:02:06
Speaker
OK, OK, OK. So you joined IIT Bombay for like a five-year BTEC, MTEC program. So what were those five years, like first time away from home? Was it like a tough transition, or did you have a blast? So I think those are one of the most beautiful moments that I had in my life. So IIT Bombay, or in fact, for a matter of fact, any of the really good colleges,
00:02:36
Speaker
have amazing culture of the fact that you have some of the smartest brains that are out there. And no matter which field you select over there or no matter which direction you think about, there's always somebody who is striving hard to be the best over there. Now, that creates a lot of encouragement that, yes, there is some action happening over here. And B, it also creates a lot of competition because everybody wants to be best at what they are doing.
00:03:04
Speaker
And these are some of the smartest folks you are hanging out with. So I think those are transformational years for me, wherein we had to really, let's say, it was like you are thrown into a swimming pool and you have to figure out how you can float and then swim. So those are kind of those years. But I came with immense learning.
00:03:24
Speaker
amazing French circle, a lot of enlightenment about how, you know, the technology is changing the world, how people kind of aim for their goals and they kind of, you know, go extra mile to achieve them. Right. So all of those helped, you know, me kind of in shaping up, you know, the society a lot, right. Or my thought process. Okay. And were you like a Kitabiki on campus also, or was it like a more all rounded experience or?
00:03:53
Speaker
So I was, I had decided when I went to IIT Bombay that I will kind of try out things outside my, you know, interest for studying,
College Years and Android App Development
00:04:04
Speaker
right? This is where, you know, when I entered, you know, institute, this was a time of 2011, right? So if you see, this is a time when Android operating system was kind of becoming popular, right? And, you know, smartphones were becoming everyday computer for users, right?
00:04:20
Speaker
And I think I was very early developer of Android, probably the first thousand developers of Android apps in India. But it also developed some of the couple of fun apps in my first year itself. It included like Advanced UI UX Calculator because I just didn't like the UI of those days of other apps.
00:04:42
Speaker
also developed like monopoly money tracker because you know we used to kind of play games right and we didn't used to like counting notes and we're like they shouldn't be a technological solution to this so
00:04:53
Speaker
Uh, fun stuff. Uh, got like, you know, more than 10,000 downloads used to be a big feed then, right? Because very less number of people used to have smart foods, but very humble numbers as compared to today's scale. Uh, but yeah, those, those were the initial days, I think, um, you know, from exploring anything to everything. And then after that, uh, got interested into, uh, film and media and dramatics also became the secretary of that in my Institute itself.
00:05:19
Speaker
learn two or three things about how storytelling is impacting emotions of people, right? How technology is enabling various forms of arts and storytelling. Were you like, a part of this happening or a part of this happening? No, no, no, no. So I used to do a lot of editing also in film. So I developed like two to three short films. And I also gave some of the voiceovers and played some role in the dramatics as well.
00:05:43
Speaker
So I typically tried everything to kind of understand what I like, how I like it. But I think the fun part of that was that how technology was kind of enabling all of this. So we used to just love the kind of softwares which were helping you to kind of change your voice or kind of build in some effects while you are editing a movie.
00:06:05
Speaker
And then how you do the modulation in your voice to kind of give a certain effect. So the same dialogue spoken in like three different emotions. How does it kind of create an impact? So I think those are fun times. We were just playing a lot around with the things that we had. And we had some blend of creativity around it, which made me very intrigued. And one of the things that I could appreciate while I was the secretary over there was that
00:06:32
Speaker
In my year, we received one of the maximum participations for a film competition. So earlier, typically, if you see every year, people used to get typically like, you know, hold a film competition in the institute, you would get like around 50, 60 odd entries.
00:06:47
Speaker
In our time, it was close to around 200 entries. And the reason for that was typically because now people could shoot movies through their smartphones. Because video had just arrived, creating short films using smartphones were much, much easier as compared to some of the previous batches where people require a digital camera or DSLR, et cetera. So I think those are some of the really, really amazing fun parts of it, which made me fall in love with content
00:07:16
Speaker
you know, the creativity aspect of that. Was that also the genesis of Trell, that year as the secretary of the Dramatics and Film Club? I think it's always like you can connect the dots when you look back, right? I would never know that, you know, that is something which could help me in, you know, kind of creating something like Trell. But I would say that gave us a lot of understanding about, you know, how content is being there on the Internet or
00:07:43
Speaker
all across the world and how to break that down, how to really synthesize, you know, the impact of it. So I could say that that helped in the journey. But, you know, at that point of time, I wouldn't know that I would be doing something like a
The Birth of Trell
00:07:55
Speaker
trail. So how did trail come about? I mean, I can see that you didn't really take up a job after IIT and you straight away started trail. So which means that while on campus only you started it or like, you know, how did that happen? Yeah, absolutely. So I think there were two moments wherein I decided to, you know, kind of
00:08:13
Speaker
chose the entrepreneurial path. The first moment was that while I was there in the institute, I also did an internship. And unlike a lot of people who are into creativity, I did an internship into coding. So typically, in our institute, people who are very creative, they generally stay away from coding. And people who are very coding-oriented stay away from creativity. I happened to be a kind of a guy who was very intrigued about both the blends of both the two.
00:08:41
Speaker
So when I did those internships, it was a fantastic internship. I was working with Qualcomm. It was a two and a half month internship. I also applied for the patent over there. It was a fantastic run. And I also got an offer from them that, hey, why don't you join us? But what I just learned while doing that internship is that whatever I'm developing, I'm not able to really see how it is impacting people directly.
00:09:07
Speaker
Right. Because it's, it's a, it's a, you know, B2B company, right? There are a lot of things that you develop technologically, which are very advanced. But unfortunately you might not see, you know, the light of the day until let's say a very long period of time, let's say one year, two years, three years. Right. And when that technology actually reaches the hands of people. So that, that was something which intrigued me a lot. That made me think a lot that, Hey, I do love to do this.
00:09:32
Speaker
But would I like to kind of keep developing technology which I can't see impacting people directly? And the answer came was no. I want to develop something which I could see how people engage with it, how they interact with it, and how I could help in solving problem of them. And this is where that was the first turning point when I decided that, hey, I don't think I'm a fit for a job kind of an environment. I do want to build something and see how people react on those things.
00:10:02
Speaker
That was first and second. I think we were facing a genuine problem, right? So Me being a foodie. I come from Jaipur, right? So Jaipur is very popular for food like you know, Pyaoski, Kachowari, Melpia, Aapriya, Kudhopla, Badi all of that, right? amazing cuisine, right and
00:10:19
Speaker
me being a foodie and my fellow co-founders who are into like, you know, backpacking fashion, gadgets, etc. All your co-founders are your batch mates? Like, they're all from my IT world, right? Not all. So Arun is my batch mate. So we used to call him a super security because any technical glitch would happen wherever. It will reach to Arun and he'll solve it, right? So he was that go-to guy for anybody, right? Whenever you are facing any tech challenge.
00:10:46
Speaker
And then I met Bimal, who was the second founder during our Muri Indigoda, so I also happen to be a core group member of our college culture festival Muri Indigoda, and he was leading his own culture festival at Institute. So we collaborated, we met there, and we were friends together since then.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I met Prashant during the, you know, film and media and dramatics, you know, stint, right? So he was very active in photography, in filmmaking, right? So I think, you know, this is how all of us kind of met. And all of us, you know, used to kind of jam together, institute me, like every night you would do some kind of a chattering, right? You would kind of collect into a room and kind of think, you know, out of the box, you know, just do chattering. One of the chattering that came along was, you know, which stuck us, right?
00:11:33
Speaker
hey, we have a lot of interests, but whenever we scout some relatable content around our interests on the internet, we are not able to find relevant answers. For example, let's say, as I mentioned that I'm a foodie and my other founders are into backpacking, bike riding, fashion, or gadgets. We used to search for very simple queries like, how do you cook a simple recipe from your hustle room? Or how do you dress up for various occasions, be it a date, be it a
00:12:03
Speaker
a wedding, be it a party, et cetera. Or what are some of the ways in which you could, let's say, reduce hair fall or make your hair grow faster, et cetera, et cetera. And whenever we used to kind of search for these very simple kind of queries, we used to end up with a lot of clickbaity blogs or a lot of content which was written by Americans for Americans.
00:12:28
Speaker
So at the end of the day, we did not have a lot of relatable content, which was there in Indian cultural context, to make certain decisions about our lives. So for instance, one of the funny things that happened was when we used to search what to cook from hostel room, the desserts we used to get used to involve baking cocoa powder, marshmallow, et cetera. And we're like, hey, where can we buy marshmallow? I have never heard of this stuff.
00:12:57
Speaker
And there was some very funny moments that used to happen like that. For example, if you search, what is the best street food you could eat in your city? A very generic query. They will suggest you a bagel with whipped cream. And we are like, hey, we have not heard with these two terms. Either we are very dumb, or the internet does not know what we want. So I think there were a lot of such kind of suggestions given on the internet. And we just realized that.
00:13:27
Speaker
You know, the content is not in Indian cultural context, right? And it's also not according to how we have grown up right over a period of time. And we said that if we are facing this problem of discovering relatable and meaningful content on the internet, just imagine what will be happening with the 99% of the audience, right, which is coming on the internet utilizing it, right?
00:13:48
Speaker
And that was where we decided that, hey, let's solve this. Let's solve the discovery of meaningful lifestyle content for the ecosystem. And that was honestly the germination of the journey of trail. And this was the year of 2015, 2016 when we started this.
00:14:04
Speaker
Did you, you know, you were like a bunch of college kids and, you know, did you really have that broad a vision? Let's solve the problem of finding relatable content by building a business or was it just like, you know, something to do as an experiment and you had been doing a lot of experiments and trying out stuff. So this was just something that you also tried out, like, you know,
00:14:32
Speaker
How did that whole thing actually get off the ground? Like was it a well thought out idea or was it just an experiment which could have just as well been one of many other experiments but it got traction and then you decided to focus on it and scale it up. Sure. So I think we were very passionate about solving that problem. We had not thought about how we are going to build a business or how we are going to raise one or
00:15:00
Speaker
what is there right at the end of the tunnel or anywhere.
Building a Community on Social Platforms
00:15:03
Speaker
We're just like that. Hey, this looks like a very interesting problem. It impacts, you know, let's say millions of people in India. And if we solve, did you think that you're making a video platform or no, no, no, we did not. I'll tell you how we kind of started off. So the only initial thought we had was how about we create a community?
00:15:22
Speaker
of people like us who can come on the internet and start expressing about all of these queries in our respective languages. And if we do that, that could solve the problem for somebody like us who's looking for it on the internet. Google is already there, but so is that. And that was the simplest idea with which we started the journey of building a community. So this would be like a Facebook community kind of a platform.
00:15:45
Speaker
Correct, correct. So this was the community on the existing social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, all of these are kind of becoming the popular social networks.
00:15:55
Speaker
you know, that point of time, and even today. So we said, let's use these networks, like, you know, kind of curate this kind of a content and information on the internet in unique languages, and see the, you know, kind of response of users, right on the internet. So what we used to do was we used to collate like best of photographs and videos from some of the bloggers right there in Mumbai and outside Mumbai, by pinging them on Facebook, personally, or kind of just chatting with them on Instagram, etc, etc, right. So we used to
00:16:24
Speaker
kind of ping a lot of people like that. And we used to kind of ask them to share some of the good photographs of their journey, tell us about their journey. And we used to kind of then create a nice, you know, a people's based magazine kind of a blog, right on on all of these networks, right. So
00:16:39
Speaker
Another successful experiment that ran for us was on Instagram. So this was time of Ganesh Chaturthi of 2016, when me and my founders went out and we said, let's cover all the hidden gems during this festival. We all know about the famous top three pandals, but people don't know about the other things that happened as a festival in Mumbai during those times. In fact, me being there for four years, I myself was not aware about it.
00:17:04
Speaker
So we went out with some of these blogger friends, clicked some photographs, started sharing it. And we got some amazing response from the community on Instagram. And then we said, let's keep doing this.
00:17:16
Speaker
Uh, in a matter of six months, right? By just sharing good content with high quality photographs and short videos, right? We got to more than a hundred thousand followers in a matter of six months, right? And we were still in college and these were followers for, for, for trail as an account, like, yeah. So our account was called trail Mumbai, right? So, uh, you know, there in, we got, you know, all of these, you know, followership and it went through its own changes in name, right? So I would tell tail Mumbai, then it went to.
00:17:44
Speaker
telling Mumbai and went to tell Mumbai. So it kept on refining as a name. But yes, we got all of those followers on our handle in those days. So I think that is how the journey started initially by just building a community. And then we started meeting these people, the community members, because you're very proud of building that kind of fellowship. If you imagine in 2016, there are not many handles above 100k.
00:18:12
Speaker
And we were one of them. And we were very popular in Mumbai and some of the other cities where our handle was gaining a lot of traction. So we started organizing meetups. We started organizing photo works to meet our audience and understand why they're engaging with us, what are some of the things they like about us as individuals for sharing this content, et cetera, et cetera. And that gave us a lot of insights on the basis of which a trail was formed.
00:18:41
Speaker
you know, just to share some of them, you know, first of the insights we got to know while we met these people was that if you see everybody today, right in India, or most of the people today in India, have these aspirations that they want, they call themselves by the second name that I'm a foodie, I'm a traveler, I'm a fashionista, right? I'm a gadgetry. And they take so much pride in calling themselves by these passionate names that they want to make it a profession, right? When we met all of these guys, nobody wanted to do a nine to five.
00:19:12
Speaker
Right. Everybody wanted to be a full time traveler or let's say doing some creative stuff in marketing or maybe a food blogging, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And we didn't have any of the normal nine to five that you would have be chartered accountancy, engineering, doctor, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody said that. Right. And.
00:19:30
Speaker
We said that this is a changed world. There are a lot of people who are looking to essentially establish themselves as a persona, like a fashionist, a foodie, a traveler. But there's no kind of platform. Like a social media influencer in a way. In a way. Correct. So influencer was not a very established term then. But they wanted to be somebody like that. But actually, the fact was that they wanted to share their stories about these passions.
00:19:58
Speaker
And they didn't have a right platform wherein they could do that so that people could recognize them by these, you know, adjectives or passionate names. So we figured it out that, hey, you know, a lot of people want to be recognized by these names, which are related to their passion, but they don't have a storytelling platform where they could share all of these experiences in a meaningful manner. At that point of time, if you imagine, you know, they had something like medium.com, right? Or WordPress, where they could write blogs.
00:20:23
Speaker
But they were not very well versed in English, and hence they always hesitate to write those long textual blogs. In fact, we ourselves never wrote blogs for that matter. That was like pre-TikTok, pre-Instagram reels kind of an error. Yeah, there are 2016. Instagram was new, almost like one and a half years old. Instagram had just launched, I think, videos, which were, I think,
00:20:48
Speaker
allowed to one minute or 30 seconds. So all of those things were kind of in very nascent stages. YouTube had some very few popular accounts like TVF, AIB, etc., not heard of any bloggers there. So it was not very easy also to upload on YouTube from a mobile. Yeah, that's true. And even not today. So even today when you can't really just upload something so easily on YouTube.
00:21:14
Speaker
So we figured out that these people want to do storytelling, and the existing platforms are not great enablers for them to do that. On Instagram, they shared fragmented photographs about either how they look or the beautiful scenery that they are capturing. But they never talk about their experiences over there. They never share their stories there. When it comes to YouTube, it was a cumbersome task for them to edit their videos, apply an audio, then have a desktop, and then upload it. I didn't hope they'll get reached.
00:21:44
Speaker
So that was also a very cumbersome task. And blogging, as I shared with you, people are not well versed with text. So for them, it was a difficult task. So we said that, yes, people want to express about their passion, but they don't have a platform. Can we solve this? Was the first insight. The second thing that we learned about the TG, which took some time for us to really understand. But for a matter of fact, if you see all of these people, they were amazing storytellers in the online world.
00:22:13
Speaker
If you ask them about anything, how did they cook a recipe? How did they plan their travel? How do they dress up for a wedding, etc. They comfortably speak with you for hours and hours and share all sorts of stories about it, all sorts of A versus B comparisons, etc.
Challenges for Indian Storytellers
00:22:30
Speaker
When you see them in the online world, the same person, when you see the person on an online platform, you see fragmented photographs, let's say on an Instagram without any description, right? Not giving you any essence about what this person actually knows, right? And there was a mismatch, right? A person who was a storyteller in offline world, but in the online world, they were not, right? And when we kind of try to double tap on that, try to understand why that is happening,
00:22:56
Speaker
We figured it out that A, people were not very comfortable to express in English as a language. Most of them were expressing in their own native languages and offline when we were meeting them. Second thing that their world was not so glossier like you would see on Instagram. It was not so glossy. For example, you wouldn't find them going to Paris, Sydney, London every now and then. They had a very localized life that these small joys that they used to enjoy and they used to talk about that.
00:23:24
Speaker
So they used to feel kind of underconfident while they used to kind of think about expressing about them. And lastly, they just felt that, hey, if they try to express in English as a language, then people would do a mockery about it. So they were very inhibited in a world where everybody's speaking in English, everybody's kind of doing the high five light to talk about their own stuff.
00:23:47
Speaker
Right. And this is where we figured out that this community needs a conducive platform. Right. When they could essentially express in their own languages about the local things which matter to them more as compared to the international stuff. Right. And, you know, something where they could be recognized as, you know, storytellers for their passion. Right. That, hey, you're a fascist. You know about this. You are a foodie. You know about, you know, certain stuff, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we just combine all of these insights together.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that is when we launched the first version of Trell as a platform. This was launched in mid of 2017. It was a visual blogging platform or blogging platform as we call it today. Where people could come, they could share the fragmented photographs, attaching it with voice notes, or let's say sharing videos up to three minutes and share it on the internet. So that's how Trell came into the existence and became a blogging tool for them.
00:24:45
Speaker
So, you know, typically when somebody makes a product, you always look for inspiration at other products which are already out there and to guide what your product should look like. What was that inspiration for you? Was there something like that already there in terms of a video blogging platform? Because I don't think TikTok was out that time. So like, what did you take your inspiration from to build the product UI, UX and all of that?
00:25:15
Speaker
Sure. So I think there were a lot of inspirations that we tried to take from a lot of platforms that were out there, but none of them were kind of catering to this need. So we had to always come up with a fundamental thought ourselves. One of the products which was close to it was, if you remember, Google's photo story. So what Google used to do, and those times they used to collect their photographs and make a photo story out of it, wherein you could just swipe things and kind of see the entire experience coming out.
00:25:45
Speaker
So that was one of the initial inspiration for us to understand how blogging could be in future. Then definitely some of the UI UX elements, you would always get inspired from the folks like Foursquare, which was also into location-based, let's say, check-ins and blogging and gamification. Then Instagram was there, which was multimedia. And I think these were some of the only platforms that we could refer to, which were closer to what we were trying to do.
00:26:12
Speaker
And how did it look like the early version? Was it like a feed, the way you have an Instagram feed? Yeah, wherein you would see, let's say, a photograph or a jet plane. It will have a title. When you tap onto that, there is a photo story which opens up or a video story which opens up.
00:26:31
Speaker
which auto plays in front of you. This is where a protagonist or let's say the content creator would come in front of it, right? Either start speaking about their experiences on, you know, the moving pictures, or they would kind of show their own videos and narrate their entire experience. So that, that was fundamentally how we were thinking of a visual form of blogging, right? So what if you kind of just remove all the text that is involved in blogging and make a very, very fundamental visual way of expression, right?
00:26:59
Speaker
So that's how it came into the existence. Yeah. Like 2017 you launched this, you had passed out in 16 and your other co-founders also. So there were multiple things that we did to get this launched.
00:27:27
Speaker
I think to talk about us, you know, two of our founders had already graduated one year before, right? And so Bimal and Krasan had already graduated and they had their own jobs that they're pursuing in Bangalore and Hyderabad respectively, right? So they had some savings, right? Which kind of helped us in passing the first eight to nine months, right? So I think immediately after, you know, me and Arun graduated, we took a house, just opposite to IIT, you know, there was a small one, PHK, right?
00:27:57
Speaker
We used to be like 10 people living over there, including founders, as well as a lot of interns. So the same place used to become an office in the morning, right? And at night, the same place used to become a place for sleeping. So... You had Jadaas in Dalmari or something, or Radhkum. Exactly. I thought that we are living a life similar to a movie, right? In a movie that you see that, okay, morning, we have a lot of work to do, and Radhkum has a lot of work to do. So I was like, okay, exactly. This is what is happening here.
00:28:27
Speaker
But yes, those are days. And we had to kind of, you know, had that environment to attract some interns, right? So especially if you are kind of looking for interns from IDR, they'll ask you 10 questions right before they are like going to say, okay, I'll work with you. So we had to kind of make sure that we are professional there and at least give them an environment where they feel like that, yeah, there's a fun, you know, place to work, right and contribute. So
00:28:54
Speaker
That is how essentially we started Kickstarter's journey. Right. For building the product, for managing the community. So by then we had already discovered these insights, right? And we wanted to build a product on top of it, right? So it took some time for us to build the product and for that interns were helpful.
00:29:13
Speaker
or even for kind of managing the community events that we were organizing, right? So, and we used to offer, you know, interns free food for the community meetups, right? Because we used to tie up with, let's say restaurant or the places, used to invite a lot of bloggers, you know, the places used to kind of pay for food and everything because they were getting popularity. And that's how we made some initial bucks. That's how we ensured that interns are happy and hence we were able to kind of float in the initial days. Okay.
00:29:40
Speaker
So, that event, it wouldn't have funded even your server costs. How did you pay for this server cost and all that?
00:29:50
Speaker
I think ecosystem has been kind to us. There were a lot of credits that all of the platforms how they provide to the entrepreneurs in the initial days. So AWS had a program. We got selected in Facebook start every start program through which we got some credits. We were also selected in NASCOM 10K program because of which we got certain credits. So we used to apply to a lot of these startup programs which facilitated
00:30:18
Speaker
us, you know, with the initial credits. And I think that is that is how we were able to manage some of the tech costs initially, right. And then after that, it was a, you know, definite time wherein once we had the product launched, we had like, I think around five or 10,000 users, we thought this is a good time wherein we should meet some of the potential investors and see if they would be interested in this idea, right to invest. So when did you start meeting investors? This was in 2016 end, right, typically around
00:30:47
Speaker
you know, October, November, right. So I think we met that was the toughest round, right of our life, right. So we must have met like more than 300 folks, right through and these were like a small level like like angel. Okay.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, everybody, like you call it senior to to ultra senior to somebody who's been ex entrepreneur, who's currently an entrepreneur. Right. So wherever we got an opportunity to pitch, right, be it a cafe in Mumbai to, you know, some, some random bar to a lift. Right. Wherever we got a lift. Wherever, you know, people used to invite us, he used to go and elevate the picture. Correct. Correct.
00:31:29
Speaker
And we didn't know all of these thumbs at that point of time, right? Because this was our first time in pitching, right? People used to ask us these questions that, hey, do you have your company registered? We're like, OK, we need to get it done. And they used to ask us that about, hey, can you share with us your cap table?
00:31:48
Speaker
We are like, we don't understand this term at all. So we used to, you know, pitch one investor, ask the other ones who have, let's say, shown interest that, hey, do you know what is capital? Can you help me with that? And that's how we used to kind of get certain things done initially. But I think, you know, ecosystem was kind to us in a way that they made us meet a lot of folks. They are not kind to us in the sense that nobody used to believe initially that these guys would do something because
00:32:18
Speaker
at that point of time, building a community or a social network was not so successful in India, right? I think we were the... Well, people would have thought that Facebook had already social media market captured, right? Correct, correct. The most common response would have been that only, I guess. Absolutely. They used to be like, you know, Facebook would do it. Facebook had a lot of time in 15 years to do it, but they couldn't, right? So why would they do it now?
00:32:44
Speaker
So I'm sure people used to have all sorts of doubts about this space. And at that point of time, definitely the ecosystem was not mature to understand how communities and social networks could be formed out of India. So I think in the initial go, we got more than 30 angels together to build our round. So we had to pitch to more than 300 to really get them on board. But I think that was the toughest round.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, most memorable round as well. But did you have clarity? I think we had the clarity about the fact that how much we need to raise so that we'll just survive for the next, you know, 12 to 14 months, right, which would allow us to build a product in a more mature manner, right. And we had the clarity of the fact that more than money, we are looking to find the right people on board, right, who can
00:33:43
Speaker
you know, believe in us. And even if there are downs, they could guide us, right, in how, you know, we could, you know, overcome it. So I think we were looking for those initial believers and backers, and we were fortunate to find some of them, like, you know, a premier, Radhakrishna Ozak's taxi for show founder, Neerav Chokshi, who happens to run credible, right, which is a fintech startup now, then Harsha, he happens to be our
00:34:08
Speaker
you know, alumni from IIT Bombay and he's been a mentor, right, since day zero. So these are some of the, you know, initial folks who had shown a lot of, you know, kind of faith, right. Similarly, Ramesh never blew. He used to kind of lead strategy for housing.com at that time. Right. So these are some of the folks who just helped us in kind of meeting the right side of people, thinking about it in the right way. Right. And yeah, yeah, that's how it ended up. How much did you raise and when did you close this round? So the fun
00:34:38
Speaker
around closer to almost like six months, right? We raised around 200,000 at that point of time, 250,000 at that point of time, $250,000. Yeah. Yeah. Almost like 1.6 year. Yeah.
00:34:52
Speaker
OK, so then what next? Like, how did you use that money and how did the growth happen? So by the time you close it, what was the numbers like? Like the MAU monthly average users? I think we didn't use to count monthly active users at that point of time because very, very young. We are still learning about some of the metrics that are the right way to evaluate our business.
00:35:16
Speaker
We used to count at that point of time the downloads and registered users. We had like more than 20,000 downloads, like most of the users coming from the community that we have already built. So there was zero money spent on marketing, literally for us. So the community we built on Instagram, they kind of came to the app, started using it. And that's how we got the initial users onboarded.
00:35:39
Speaker
Then after that, I think the next six months was more about refining the product, refining the use case of the product. So that's why we kind of launched it in the middle to 2017. We had this MVP on which there were certain users using it, but we had to refine it almost like 19 times before we launched that final product. Then we landed it correctly.
00:36:00
Speaker
And from there on, the growth journey started happening. We built some of the inherent viral loops, right? Wherein we asked users to, you know, come, you know, post their content on trail and then they share it on their own social channels, right? Be it Instagram, be it WhatsApp, be it, you know, whatever Twitter, et cetera, right? You made it easy to share, like single
Trell's User Growth and Features
00:36:20
Speaker
click.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, single click sharing. Right. So you create your content here and then you share it on your other channels. And that's how more people discovered us and they started using. Share, share just the link to it or share the whole video. Both. So we gave them the ability to share the link as well as the video. So let's say if you have shared a three minute video on trend, we'll create a teaser or a video for you, which will be almost like 30 to 45 seconds. Right. Like a trailer of your video. And we allowed that to be shared on your other social platform.
00:36:48
Speaker
And that would have the trail branding on it so that people get to know. Correct. So it used to have follow me on trail, username, follow me on trail that way. So a lot of their friends used to ask them that, hey, where did you create the school video? And some of them came to tell, they followed them and started sharing more content. So this is also what I think helped TikTok also, to build the initial awareness. Absolutely. I think they had also built this viral loop.
00:37:17
Speaker
But when they came to India, we came with a bag full of millions of dollars. When we started, we came with a bag full of nothing. So that was a difference. How did the user growth happen over the next year or two? When we launched this version in mid of August,
00:37:45
Speaker
We almost kind of grew 10 to 15 next year on year from there. It's almost been three years. The first year we grew from zero users to more than 80,000 monthly active users with more than 200,000 downloads. In the second year, we grew to close to around 2 to 3 million monthly active users. And the following year from there, currently, we are more than 35 million monthly active users.
00:38:07
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So how does, what does 35 million MAU look like? If you can compare, for example, like, you know, this product has these many users compared to us, like if you can just place it in a larger context. So just to give you some context, right? We are larger than, you know, the monthly active user base of Twitter and Pinterest on mobile in India.
00:38:36
Speaker
right? So we are larger than them. And this is this is like, you know, at that point of time, when we reach there, we were like almost one third of Instagram's, you know, monthly active users, right, right now. So so that is the kind of a scale at which we are, you know, kind of looking at, you know, the pace of growth. And yeah, I think this is larger than, you know, most of the, you know, vertically commerce platforms that you see today, right, this is much larger, you know, kind of
00:39:05
Speaker
volume than any of those platforms typically. Okay. And it is essentially like a made in India video, like a vlogging platform, right? So what is the monetization strategy? Is it through showing ads or what is it?
Monetization Strategies on Trell
00:39:28
Speaker
Sure. So I think just before, you know, jumping over there just to, you know, kind of summarize the journey today now is a, you know, storytelling platform, visual storytelling platform for our users, where they create like three minute vertical videos about their interests and passion in the lifestyle categories like fashion, beauty, recipes, gadgets in their own languages.
00:39:48
Speaker
Right. So it has become a community. One question is, so users can tag it. This is fashion and this is Bhojpuri, for example. Yeah. Yeah. They can tag both languages and, you know, the category of content and hence increase invisibility with the like-minded audience on the platform. And when I sign in, you will ask me my language and my interest and then accordingly show me on my feed relevant. Okay. Correct. So when you kind of log in, we ask you about your demographic details, right? So as to show you the right.
00:40:18
Speaker
personalized content, right? According to your interest. So that is how, you know, kind of trail got structured and, you know, it kept on growing from there in terms of let's say monetization, right? So just before that, right? We just realized that while, you know, a lot of people were sharing this distinctive and unique content on trail, a lot of them are becoming popular, right? And they were becoming influencers on trail.
00:40:42
Speaker
We met a lot of these influences and tried to understand why they are sharing content, what kind of content they are sharing. We discovered a lot of these people were sharing suggestions and recommendations about either services, products that they used to enhance their lifestyle. So for example, if you are somebody who is deep into beauty, you would share about some of the cosmetic products you use to style yourself in a certain way. If you are somebody who is passionate to talk about
00:41:10
Speaker
let's say, you know, how do you take care of your hair, you would kind of take certain, you know, kind of shampoo or a certain kind of conditioner, and you would kind of talk about, you know, how it benefits you to kind of have better hair as compared to the others, right. And they would kind of talk about all of these problem solutions. And we said that if you see it, you know, holistically, because a lot of these instances are already talking about some of the products and services, we started looking at the comments, you know, what consumers are commenting on the platform. And
00:41:39
Speaker
There were very interesting comments that consumers posted like, for example, one of the comments was, right? And all of those comments where people were asking more and more information about these products and were looking for the way in which they could buy it seamlessly.
00:42:00
Speaker
Some of them are also not very confident and well-versed to kind of use e-commerce platform. So we kind of try to reach out to some of these consumers and ask them that they are using e-commerce apps. And they seem to be not so confident or sure about the fact that they should use it. They didn't have enough trust on it yet, which was because they were very new to the internet. For them, every website is the same in a way.
00:42:26
Speaker
We discovered that a lot of these influencers were enabling people to discover new products and services through which they could enhance their lifestyle. And consumers were looking for a way in which they could buy those products from the website, from the app, I mean. And this is when we said that, hey, let's enable this exchange of information and buying of goods on the platform in the form of social commerce. So six months back, we kind of enabled this journey wherein we tied up with a lot of
00:42:55
Speaker
brands in beauty, cosmetics, personal care, and wellness space, caught them on board and enabled a lot of influencers to talk about their favorite brands, whatever they feel like. And if consumers like it, they could buy it from the platform itself. So that was more around enabling this natural habit or natural behavior which was forming on the product. And that created a business model out of us. So that's how it works. When we get a brand,
00:43:24
Speaker
Whatever orders happen on the platform, we get a commission for it. We share some of those commission as incentives with the KOLs or the influencers and consumers get a convenience to really discover the products and services in their own language and also buy that from within the platform.
00:43:40
Speaker
Tell me how does it actually happen? Like if I am an influencer, do you like personally reach out to me or is it just on my app only that there is a list of products that I can sell? You know, how does that happen? Like matching an influencer with a product?
00:43:56
Speaker
Sure, so right now we are curating that in a way. We have only enabled it for some top 100 influences on our platform. The reason being that we wanted to make sure that we test this out properly, right? And we first see that how the top influences are, you know, kind of reacting to this whole, whole enablement, right? Because we build a community after, you know, by putting a lot of effort and wanted to make sure that it's trustworthy and it's authentic, right? Even when we kind of launch commerce, right?
00:44:25
Speaker
Initially, we kind of went out to our top 100 influencers who are getting content in these categories, enabled this matchmaking process on the app itself. So they have a dedicated dashboard through which they are able to see what kind of brands are there. And they have the ability to choose the right product and talk about it and tag it on their own kind of videos. So this is not visible to everyone. This is only visible to them.
00:44:47
Speaker
Okay. So for a consumer, when he's watching a video, buy now? Yeah. So for example, let's say when you're watching a video on trend, you will see a product image and a buy now button with the pricing. Now while you're looking at a video, you can either choose to click on it or you can choose to ignore and move to the next video. Let's say if you decide to buy, you can click on that button, you will be taken to a product page and you can make the payment and you'll receive the product at you.
00:45:18
Speaker
So you are handling like a full e-commerce solution also, like in terms of the logistics and warehousing and all of that, or like, how did you build that part of it? Or is it with the brand? The brand is just receiving the order and then they take care of the rest of it on their own. Sure. So imagine it's like a launchpad for a lot of upcoming internet first brands or D2C brands, right, in India.
00:45:45
Speaker
So all of these brands have typically the infrastructure and supply chain to make sure that they could fulfill the orders that they receive from whatever channel. We become a channel for them to receive those orders. So at the end of the day, we are more of a technology enabler for them and a consumer experience advocate, which ensures that people receive goods at time. But the supply chain is typically taken care by the brand today. Yeah, that's how it works. So it's a marketplace where
00:46:15
Speaker
be more on pass, you know, the orders to the branch, branch, take care of the fulfillment and consumer gets a product. And how does the brand integrate, you know, inventory health, something is out of stock too. So there is enough infrastructure made in the ecosystem through which you can do that. So there is a complete SAS tool, right, which we have developed and integrated with a lot of other partners as well.
00:46:40
Speaker
through which order management is done, through which the tracking of the order is done. Like you integrate with Shopify and all of these. Correct. So imagine we are a kind of an influencer like Shopify for these brands. So they are able to kind of integrate everything and the whole information flow happens smoothly through that. Okay. And how much comes to the platform and how much to the influencer, like broad percentages?
00:47:08
Speaker
The influencers get enough that they earn more than what they would usually do if they are into a job. So to give you some of the numbers, our top influencers in the last month earn close to around a lakh of rupees in just one month through sales. And that's the kind of money. And how many sales? How many items do you earn?
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I think they must have sold products like worth almost 15 lakhs, right? Almost 15 lakhs of product worth they must have sold right to get something like that.
00:47:45
Speaker
So that is how the earning structure is like. And typically, the way it works is that if you see from the influencer's perspective, we have just enabled a lot of things for them. Now sitting in any kind of a city, be it a tier 2 city or a tier 3 city, they could just show content. They can share post-content.
00:48:05
Speaker
You can also choose to partner with the favorite brands and, you know, kind of make a living out of it, right? So for an influencer, it's a completely automated platform, right? It's complete handholding to help them in, you know, making a living while sharing content. Right, right. And it's much easier than doing it through Instagram and all. What I like to integrate a buy button, I don't think is easy to do. Not easy to do. It's technically challenging, right? Both for the influencer at the same time.
00:48:32
Speaker
Like imagine, uh, you know, if you have to do it on any other platform and influencer would need a manager who would help them in managing the brand collaborations, right? Because influencers job is to create content. That is what they're great at. They're not, you know, somebody who does, you know, BD brand, you know, business development, buying up with brand negotiating deals. That's not their fault. And they shouldn't be kind of indulge in that kind of activities. Right.
00:48:54
Speaker
So that would take its own time. Then secondly, when you kind of share all of this content while you're collaborating with the brand, you need to give a call to actions. You have to create a report, send it to the brand. Then brand will kind of transfer the money or to keep a track of that, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of to and fro that happens today between a brand and an influencer, which makes this whole system very inefficient.
00:49:17
Speaker
Now, with the help of Trail, you don't need a manager. You don't need to negotiate on the deals. You are assured of the fact that you will get a payout at the end of the month if you're creating right content. And people are loving your work. So that way, we have really simplified the life of creators in one way.
00:49:35
Speaker
If you look at it from the brand's perspective as well, today, if you think about any, you know, upcoming internet first brand, they go to an agency, try to tie up with like 50 or hundreds of influencers, you know, share content. They're not, not a short of a certain reach that they will get. They're not a short of certain sales they can get. Very performance driven marketing.
00:50:00
Speaker
Correct, in a way. And a brand gets a more conducive environment. They get a platform where they are able to tie up with these influencers seamlessly. And at the end of the day, they are assured of certain performances, metrics that they will get. So for a brand, it becomes much easier as compared to otherwise how it was fragmented. And definitely for the end consumer, it's like the smoothest process they could imagine. While you are consuming content, you also get to
00:50:25
Speaker
you know, you really get that act to, you know, card button and you can just make a transaction or whatever you like, whatever thing you're watching. So it's a moment for that. So yeah, 35 million users, how many of them have ever done a transaction like, you know, like conversion rate?
00:50:47
Speaker
It's pretty good. I definitely cannot take the numbers right now. I can't talk about the numbers there. But that's pretty much in hundreds of thousands. So hundreds of thousands of users have purchased from the platform today. And we have not yet opened the e-commerce for the entire audience. We have only opened it up for around 25% of the audience today.
00:51:09
Speaker
And we'll open it more and more as we get more comfortable with the supply chain process and customer experience that we're getting on the platform. So our main focus is to make sure that once the user buys the product, that their experience is really good. And if that is good, then we can keep expanding this reach that they can get. Okay. But the plan is to kind of open it up and allow anybody to choose a product and promote it.
00:51:37
Speaker
Not anybody. So let's say a journey of an influencer would start from first gathering audience, building that trust among the community that yes, they talk something which people love to kind of show belief in. And after that, we'll enable that window for them to really collaborate with the brands. So it's a natural community progression. You come here to create content, exchange ideas, et cetera. Once you become popular, you have these avenues of monetizing through social commerce.
00:52:05
Speaker
They would need to hit a minimum follower count or a view or something like that. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. So, you know, the biggest problem with user generated content is porn, you know, like, how do you handle that? And tell me about that part. So just to give you a context about the platform, right? You know, we have more than 65% of our user base, which is females in nature.
00:52:34
Speaker
right? And they contribute like more than 75% of the content on the platform. So we had a very female friendly platform. And one of the, you know, the initial, you know, decisions that we took was the fact that we don't want to stand for a raunchy or NSFW content, we want to make sure that there is no NSFW and raunchy content on the platform, so that people have higher level of trust, and they could do, you know, conversations and, you know, share share more meaningful stuff on the platform.
00:53:02
Speaker
So that way we have a very strong community guidelines and curation policies. You wouldn't find even a single NSFW content on trial being floated on your field because it goes through multiple checks. It goes through automated machine learning algorithm, which kind of curves like 95% to 99% of all of this content. Then it goes to the community leaders who are already part of our community who kind of
00:53:26
Speaker
flag any kind of content which is not safe for the larger masses. And then our team kind of always keeps a check about what people are watching, which content is getting more views, and is it safe for the larger masses to look at. So these community leaders are like volunteers who have agreed to do some moderation. Absolutely. They take a lot of pride in doing that. So that is a beauty of community. The people who have been there on the platform for a very long time
00:53:55
Speaker
They are so enthusiastic about what's happening on the platform. They are so committed to it that they have become a self-policing cycle. They have played a self-policing cycle wherein they don't want the pureness of the community to really get lost.
2020: A Year of Growth for Trell
00:54:14
Speaker
Got it. Amazing. So give me highlights of 2020. It's been like a pretty monumental year for you. Tell me about that.
00:54:24
Speaker
I think it's been monumental in so many ways. So one of the very obvious things which people know of is that we grew from almost 2-3 million monthly active users to more than 35 million monthly active users in the last one year alone in 2020, which was a huge group. Part of it was due to the China ban, right? Absolutely. There were multiple factors which kind of contributed to it. One of the factors was
00:54:52
Speaker
One is definitely lockdown. Because of lockdown, a lot of people were spending more time on their smartphones. They were looking at new apps to really spend their time and engage with the audience. And they found trail and started engaging with it. Second was definitely lockdown. I mean, after lockdown, definitely the Chinese app ban, which led to a movement for people to adopt more Indian apps. That led to a really, really good
00:55:19
Speaker
you know, traction or, you know, organic growth for us, then essentially, you know, some of the, you know, great, you know, marketing activity is done by the team, right? So the whole community building where we launch our own anthem. So you're the first and the only app in the video space which launched its anthem with Suprinde Singh. And then you must have seen a lot of people kind of followed and, you know, copied the similar stuff, right?
00:55:43
Speaker
So we did a lot of innovative community building exercises, which ensured that even if we don't spend much money, we are able to kind of really grow well. And that turned out in our favor. So these were some of the highlights for enabling growth in the last one year. I think apart from that, our team size almost grew to 2x to 3x, which was a huge feat. Most of the team members were hired remotely. They worked remotely.
00:56:12
Speaker
And they stood together when all of this was happening. So it's a very kind of, you can say, stressful as well as exciting experience, wherein you have to cater to such massive growth happening on your platform. And team came together, they spent odd hours to make sure that they would do justice to the experience for the consumer. So that was another monumental, I think, learnings for us.
00:56:41
Speaker
Right, right. And you also got validation from the investor community. Correct, correct. So that is another milestone in the journey. We got like validation from the investor community, you know, to kind of, you know, partner with us in the journey ahead. And lastly, we launched, you know, social commerce, you know, entirely by working from home. I think we are the only, you know, startup which achieved that, right. And we are kind of scaling it up really, really well.
00:57:08
Speaker
So I think these are some of the really good highlights of 2020, which will stay with us for a very long time. So tell me about the funding. Like, you know, the first time you had like a really, really tough journey with 300 plus pitches. So how was it like this time around? So I think, you know, whenever you kind of go for the progressive funding, you have more signals and data to back you up. Right. While you have kind of more data and signals to back you up, definitely the doors kind of open up.
00:57:38
Speaker
So I think this funding was more of an outcome of the incredible execution that team did. There were a lot of people who were interested to kind of be a part of this journey.
00:57:48
Speaker
We are looking for the ones who really would stood with us in both good times and bad times and were ambitious about the way we were progressing because we are building something which India has not seen before. So I think we got some good partners, we got some really really ambitious and
00:58:09
Speaker
those believers in those kind of investors who onboarded us. And this was much better as compared to how we raised first time, because when we raised first time, we had very, very little signals or data or metrics to back us up. So how did surge happen? I think surge happened much before. So while we were kind of growing in our second year,
00:58:33
Speaker
We got in touch with the search team. They kind of looked at what we are building. They identified that we have a very differentiated content. We have an amazing community. They're spending a lot of time on the platform. And they mentioned that, hey, this seems like something which has a huge potential. And they decided to invest in us. So I think that happened more organically than anything else. And yeah, the relationship stayed and continued from there.
00:59:04
Speaker
So any advice for young entrepreneurs, people who are early in their journey thinking of a startup or maybe thinking of that, should they think of a startup? I think the way to think about the startup is you don't do startup for the sake of doing a startup or to, you know, you know, earn money. Right. The reason why fundamentally you should be starting up is because you are so passionate about solving a certain problem. Right.
00:59:32
Speaker
impacting the masses with positive way, right, with your solutions. So I think, you know, for anybody who's looking to start up and who is, you know, or is aware about a problem that they believe that they can solve in the best way should definitely jump on to this. Right. And I think, you know, as an advice, you know, I would just say that they should dream, they should think big.
00:59:52
Speaker
Because if they didn't really think big or break the status quo, they wouldn't make such large outcomes or large impact of the large organizations in India. So I think people should be ambitious and they should think big and they should really solve the core needs of the audience in India. I think there's the best time to start up.
01:00:15
Speaker
There are a lot of problems that we can solve. And India is becoming digital much faster in the last few months as compared to what it was earlier. So there's the best time, I think, for anybody to solve large problems.
01:00:30
Speaker
Believe it or not, since we recorded this conversation, Trell has added another 10 million monthly active users and they now stand a clear leader with 45 million monthly active users. Do check out the Trell app at trell.co.
01:00:50
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit the Bodham.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N dot I-N for a complete list of all our shows.