CIE brings to our Deeptech community,
Fire Up Founder Insights series 3rd edition, hosted by our COO, Mr. Ramesh Loganathan. The series is brought to you as a part of Startup Gyan Blog series by CIE-IIITH where we feature our founders and talk about their Startup status and the journey so far through conversation on specific topics useful for other Deeptech startups and the community at large.
In Conversation with Abhilash, founder Samosa Labs:
Samosa Labs was founded in 2015 as a chat entertainment platform that offers user-generated Gifs and audios across Social media- Facebook and WhatsApp. The platform went viral in 2016 and witnessed 5,00,000 daily active users after the launching the video based content. Coming from a founder who has worked in Facebook and launched multiple products, Samosa Labs raised capital with Xiaomi and Sequoia Capital India followed by a successful exit in 2019.
“The idea came when I observed my friends and later other people, pasting the YT video link of specific time frame as a comment on Facebook”
The timed and quick rollout of the platform worked in favour and hence rapidly gained users. As told to ET in an interview, About 98% of the traffic on Samosa Labs is driven through chat shares on WhatsApp. About 5,000 videos are created every day by users across genres of romance, comedy, devotion including elements from pop culture such as songs, movies, images, etc.
Brush with the Investors:
On account of the virality and trending in India’s top 10 apps in entertainment in India, Samosa labs caught the attention from Investors.
“Investors and Market leaders are always on lookout for trends and what’s next to invest in”
Pitch for first Investor:
- Show the best – your milestones so far
- Know the numbers and your customers – users, customers visiting, in pipeline, reached out and so on and demonstrate the growth
- Be clear with how sustainable is your platform and how it is going to evolve with time
- It is okay to not knowing answers to some of the questions
- Build a good relationship with your first investor, it will help in the long-run
- Take charge of the conversation and give the reason as why they should be investing and where would you be in coming years
“Growth is the starting line for an Investor – We have grown xX in x months”
The Growth Hack tip:
Showing your presence in already flocked digital world is what you need.
Note to self: The times we are living in!
Keep watching this space for more under Fire Up Series.
Stay safe and sound!
– Sunita Kumari, Team CIE
