As part of our endeavour to identify and share some of the compelling startup stories, we invited Nitan Jain – Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Vaizle to share with us his interesting journey and the way forward. Let’s read more.

Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Nitan:

Tell us everything about your startup, what does it do? What were the challenges of setting up and scale? How did you overcome them?

Vaizle is a social media analytics tool that allows to perform competitive analysis and create benchmarks. It can be used by freelancers, startups, and enterprises. Basically, we wanted to bring social media analytics to everyone.

Our first challenge was to understand what exactly our prospective customers wanted. We started by asking marketers in general, social and digital marketers in specific. Our objective was to understand the problems social media marketers were facing before we begin building the structure of our software. Most of the people we met suggested that the tools they were using diagnosed the problem, but didn’t suggest a remedy. Secondly, it took people a lot of time to make sense of graphs any social media analytics tool offered them. After the conversation, we knew we had to come up with a solution that made social media analytics simple and gave actionable insights.

While researching competitors, it was also clear from our discussion that not everyone could afford social media analytics, even if many marketers wanted too. One way to look at it would be that people probably don’t need it. When we went into the market, talked to marketers, and people in the industry, it was clear that people needed it.

Another challenge was building the product itself. We had a limited budget to scale our cloud servers. The only resort was: building algorithms that run efficiently and don’t increase the cost. And our CTO, Shavi Pathania, did. This helped in the long run because it was only because of this episode we learnt we were able to keep our prices lowest in the market. It also gave us another important lesson: it was only when we were working with a limited budget that we were able to make the best innovations.

How did you come up with the idea and what was the Eureka moment?

It all began in January of 2016 when I, Nitan Jain, came up with an idea to track the social media performance of Indian Premier League (IPL) advertisers and sponsors. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Well, it’s an event where advertisers roll out hundreds of crores. So how they were getting the RoI in terms of social media performance was an important thing to track. Plus, Nitan liked cricket too. So overall, it made perfect sense—work and have fun.

Now we thought we can do something bigger with this. We started perfecting our tool so it could track more. By the end of the year, we could track over a thousand profiles with the same server. We tracked 100 Indian startups for a quarter and published it in a social media report. Well, we got over 400 downloads!

At the same time, we also received a project from DAMAC Properties. They wanted to perform competitive analysis in Saudi Arabia’s real estate market against their key competitors. Apart from completing the project, we also became confident that this is something which brands across the world needs.

It was now that we thought this can turn into a great product.

How did you build the core team (co-founders and initial employees) – How did you meet and how did everyone align to the idea? What is the total team size?

We were friends from the very first semester in college. Back in college, I actually found Siddharth and Shavi. While the former was good with words, a voracious reader, the latter was a Computer Science student, zealous, superior in his tech skills, and a go-getter. I formed a team back in college to create a team that would publish a magazine. That’s when we raised money for the first time! We went to students across the college, told them our proposition and asked them to subscribe magazine for 1-month, 3-month, or 6-month.

It was a great start but we ran out of budget after the third month.

By the time we ran out of money, we were started getting recognition. Eventually, we reached college administration who allotted us funds to continue it and helped us form an editorial club, which had its own office. With our new budget, we not only published magazines but also came up with newsletters.

I always wanted to start something of my own. By the end of the college, having worked together for three years now, I knew I had a great team. I convinced Siddharth. And we launched our digital marketing agency back in 2014 which eventually led to Vaizle. So in 2019, we have been together for nine years now! Right now, we are a team of four, with Ashima, who is heading our customer success and business development.

Having worked as a digital marketing agency, we already had an understanding of individual social media platforms. And we always wanted to build a product. The way we landed upon the idea of building a social media analytics tool, it made perfect sense to all the team.

Give us a background of your core team and yourself with the age.

Nitan Jain, 26, is the Chief Executive and Product Officer of Vaizle. With his extensive research in the industry, he has precisely decided every single feature in VAIZLE. A believer in lean-startup methodology, he helped the team develop and offer the social media analytics tool at the lowest price. His brainchild, social media reports on Indian sporting events and startups, helped get company coverage in national and international media.

Shavi Pathania, 26, is the Chief Technical Officer of Vaizle. He developed the technological stack in just two years building software architectural design and algorithms single-handedly. A graduate in computer science engineering, he carries an unflinching interest in physics and technology. He’s also an official contributor in the Angular community. When not coding, thinking, or studying algorithms, you can find him reading about stock markets and entrepreneurship or meditating.

Siddharth, 26, the Chief Marketing Officer of Vaizle, is leading content and marketing department for VAIZLE. Having worked as a performance marketer, he has helped clients spend over $1 million in ad budget. He has worked for INC500 companies and also provides consultancy to digital marketing agencies for creating marketing funnels and content marketing strategies. An ardent reader and student of philosophy, he loves to watch drama and war movies.

What has been revenue, traction and growth from the date of inception till now?

We generated revenue close to $150,000 USD since the launch of the beta version in April. Right now, we have 2000+ customers across 66 countries.

What is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors and what’s your revenue model? – Who are your key clients? How much do you charge them?

We are distinct from our competitors in three ways.

First, unlike other social media analytics tool, we do not just provide graphs and numbers. We also interpret the graph for you. It comes with actionable insights which give you insights that you can actually implement and improve your social media performance.

Second, we have the most customizable social media report builder in the market. Users don’t have to meddle with choosing graphs and its placement. They can add sections into the report with a single click which will have a graph and its interpretation. Most importantly, they can also add notes and comments in the reports for each section and graph.

Third, Vaizle is simple. Although it may not seem obvious, our users have confirmed that Vaizle is indeed easy while using. In our research, we had noticed that marketers were overwhelmed to see multiple graphs on a single page. It was difficult to make sense of it. Our UI is designed in a way so that the user can set up a dashboard in less than a minute. Moreover, user sees just one graph at a time and shuffle through them very easily.

What are the unit economics and margins for a business like this how does the model work?

Vaizle is currently running on the SaaS model.

Right now, we offer a free forever plan, in which users get three profiles which they can use for Twitter. Again, if you compare with competitors, there’s probably no one who is providing a free forever plan. With this plan, we aim to make social media analytics accessible to everyone.

It’s an established fact that cloud-based SaaS businesses are high margin providing the customers can stick for a longer period of time (high CLV).  The model is simple for us: keep your cost per customer acquisition as low as possible and focus on to increase the average lifetime value of a customer.

How are you funded?

We are self-funded. We have been managing our funds with our digital marketing agency which was able to cover up costs for development and keep us afloat.

How does the product work? Detailed answer on the workings of the product or how does the platform work? How does your service work?

A Vaizle user can compare a brand’s social media performance against its competitors and also set benchmarks to measure performance.

When a user signs up, she has to add a company’s social media profiles and its competitors’ social media profiles. It just takes a few minutes to set up the dashboard. Right now, users can perform competitive analysis for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. Users can either choose to look at data of each individual platforms or do a cross-channel analysis combining each platform’s data. Or they can even club two social media channels together.

Each graph a user sees is accompanied by its interpretation written along with it. Since we wanted to make a tool simple to use and navigate, the user sees only one graph at a time.

Vaizle also gives a lot of focus on content. There’s a section dedicated for content analysis called Smart Insights. With Smart Insights, users can look at the top posts (in terms of engagement) in a specific period of time among all their competitors. This can again be sorted based on engagement type: applause, amplification, and conversation. Also, users can see top posts for specific post types including Gifs which became extremely popular in 2018. We have kept a special focus on content analysis across all the features. With every graph, a user sees, whether, for a brand activity or brand engagement, they can check it for a specific content type.

It also provides value to digital and social media agencies who can use Vaizle to acquire new clients and retain the existing ones. This is enabled with our report builder, which agencies can use to create custom, white-labelled reports. We have also allowed a user to add comments and notes in the report so that they can add their own interpretation for graphs. With other tools, users had to download the report either in PPT and then add their comments. Now they can do it even before they download it.

We are also focusing on great customer service with live chat and quick support. After a new user comes in, we have email automation campaigns set up to greet them and guide them through the tool. We’ve also created self-help video tutorials which user can access right from the dashboard in a single click. To answer users queries and enable a group learning, we also launched community in December which has given us over 300 users in the last 30 days. To educate our customers, we also run webinars every 2-3 weeks so that they understand analytics better and be able to user Vaizle at its best.

What are the costs of building something like this (approximately) or basic idea at least? How long does it take?

It took us one and a half year to build this product and then another six months to bring it to the market. Even with our lean approach, which we have always focused on, we spent around Rs 25 lacs in building the product. We had every required skillset within our core team. However, if you don’t have a co-founder CTO or CPO, it would cost more than Rs. 1.5 Cr to build the tool.

Tell our audience about your future plans

We’re in growth stage now. Naturally, we think we’re in a position now to be looking to raise funds this year. Our objective is to expand our tech team and infuse more technology into the product.

We already have shared our product roadmap with our customers. Our customers are helping us decide which feature they would want to see by voting. Also, they are giving us amazing input by requesting new features. In a sense, we know the direction we want to take this product in.

 

 

You may also like ~ Interview with Aditya Arora | CEO of Faad Network

 

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BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, Stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.

Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.