Shouut launches fund for bloggers, travel writers, critics to fulfill content needs

Shouut launches fund for bloggers, travel writers, critics to fulfill content needs
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Highlights

Shouut, an app-based recommendations platform, has launched a fund for bloggers, travel writers, critics and social media influencers to fulfill its content needs 

This tech startup has started a Rs 10 million fund for creating content

Shouut, an app-based recommendations platform, has launched a fund for bloggers, travel writers, critics and social media influencers to fulfill its content needs

A tech-enabled startup is all set to spend Rs 10 million to engage with audience by creating content.

Shouut, a recommendations platform, enables discovery of places, events and offers around you. It uses technology to provide users access to places, events and offers around them across categories like food & drink, nightlife, travel & stay, shopping and leisure & hobby.

Being a platform, the company needs a lot of content pertaining to details about the places, food and nightlife. And all this is in the form of recommendations basis real-life experiences of experts in respective fields.

The startup, only a few months old, has been able to generate revenue and is also investing to make the platform more robust.

To know more, TechGig.com spoke to Praveer Kochar, the startup’s founder and CEO:

What is Shouut all about? And what is the investment of Rs 10 million going to be like?

We are basically a recommendations platform. We aggregate premium recommendations from expert bloggers across India. In the last 4-5 months, we have worked with 200 bloggers across India and we have aggregated recommendations for various places, restaurants and night-outs etc. So a food blogger will recommend places to eat, a shopping blogger will recommend places to shop, et al. This way we have five categories including food, travel, accommodation, outdoor and nightlife. And we have bloggers across all categories who have been working with us.

In the past five months, we have been able to manage close to 27,000 recommendations across India, which is wide and deep curated content.

I would say we are the largest recommendations platform in India today, because we are made up of a lot of other recommendation platforms that curate content for us.

But, our need for content is everlasting. We don’t put dozen and dozen of recommendations so we decided to launch a programme called Shouut Discovery Fund.

The fund is essentially a programme for bloggers, travel writers, critics and social media influencers, who can pitch an idea about what they want to discover near them, or travel across the country and discover. What we do is we either back the idea with whatever money they need or in a lot of cases we take their ideas to brands, who are also looking for quality content. And between us and the brands that we are working with, we co-fund the idea.

So in return, we get some original first hand ideas and the brand gets some social media content from the travellers and the travellers get to travel. That is how Shouut Fund is structured.

How long has Shouut been around for? And what kind of funding have you been able to generate?

We started the idea about 8-10 months back. It has been a long and hard journey to develop the platform, the app and convince these 200 bloggers to give us content. We recently raised half a million dollars. You can call it an angel round from a single investor. And most of it has been spent on product development like getting our website up, which actually mirrors our app. So one doesn’t actually need our app to consume the content, you can do it on the web also.

We are not an app first ecosystem. We believe the web also has enough power, more shareability, more attraction and easy to achieve. We have done a soft launch in the last couple of weeks and we’ve seen good attraction.

We’ll be hitting around 10,000 users on the app and around close to 15-16k users on our entire ecosystem in March. So that’s the kind of attraction. We will officially start pushing our marketing by mid-April. That’s when we will start ramping up our promotions.

Where did you feel the need for this kind of platform?

Other than expert recommendations, there is another aspect of Shouut, which is about local retail promotions. The whole idea behind Shouut was to build an integrated discovery platform. We aimed at building one single platform through which you can discover any city in India. So, we looked at three things that were on people’s mind to discover. One was places like places to eat, places to shop, to party, travel, stay and places for leisure. So for this, we aggregated 27,000 recommendations from bloggers. The second vertical is about events and experiences.

What events, parties, gigs and festivals are happening around your city? We curate that content also from experts. The third vertical is about local offers. These are not like deals what other platforms have, these are local retail offers.

We have created a platform for retailers to promote their store-level offers. If an end of season sale is happening at a store, a lot of people don’t come to know when it starts and the company spends a lot of money in hoarding, leaflet distribution and window branding. So now, we told them they have a digital medium through which they can promote their local promotions. These are the three things that we feel are the most important when it comes to discovering one city. So, we have integrated all of that in one app. We think it’s a big need. Currently to do this, you would need about 6-8 apps on your phone. But we are offering a consolidated solution.

How many users do you have at this point of time and how many users will you like to have by the time you start your promotions?

The fact that we have built a platform that is national, and also the fact that we have built a platform that is not restricted to India, the need we are solving we feel is a global need. Our plan is to launch Shouut in India but also take it across other geographies. When we start here we are looking at around minimum 5 lakh users in the first year. This may be look doubtful at this point, but I think that is fairly achievable, seeing where we are and the kind of need we are solving. But then, there is no end to the number of users we would like to ideally have.

What is the kind of approach that you had when you started with it? Can you share some of the challenges you faced and how have your overcome them as a start-up?

I’ll tell you about two types of audiences that we have interacted with over the last six months. One audience is the bloggers and the content platforms. The Daily Pao from Mumbai, Lonely Planet India magazines and many more such names are included in our partner list. These guys are established content creators. So, to convince them to essentially give us a part of their content was a difficult part. Because they can be insecure in terms of what will happen to their content, where will it go, will it be used or misused and many more such concerns haunted them. So that process took a lot of effort. Once we were able to convince half a dozen of them by telling them if they can publicly display the content, why you can’t publish it on Shouut, the process further was easier. The best part about Shouut is that we give equal credit to all our partners. All the content that is displayed is actually displayed under their name.

We want to promote them; we want to get them more visibility, so that they as individual bloggers get more traffic. Initially, we had to travel the country, and meet with 300-400 bloggers and travel writers, convincing them to come on board with this platform. I think we have been fairly successful there.

The second challenge was to talk to brands, with the kind of user base we have right now, we already have three paying brands. In today’s world to talk about revenue even before reaching scale is unheard of. Next week, we will actually start making revenue from three national brands. That was another difficulty to explain why brands should adopt Shouut. Primarily, we told them our USP which is that there is no single platform today where offline brands can reach out to consumers who are in the online space and drive traffic to the offline retail stores.

The current trend is that people are going from offline store; they’re going online, ecommerce. We told the brands that we are here to change the retail. We want to tell consumers that there is so much happening in the offline retail that you should walk in to the store. And they also understand this because footfall is an important part for any brand. And our entire model is designed around driving footfalls and awareness regarding what is happening at the store.

These were the two challenges for us. One was content acquisition and second was brand acquisition and I guess we have overcome both of them. Now it is just about consolidating the partners we have and building on the partners we have.

Diksha Gupta

Source: TechGig.com

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