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Saurabh Singh is the owner of multiple patent-pending technologies, Founder and CEO of Flickstree – a company backed by the likes of Samsung Ventures, SOSV, Facebook, and LionRock capital.
He has been a speaker in international forums like WEBIT, a panel member of business voices like IAMAI, Featured in Economic Times, Forbes, TechInAsia, Times Of India, Livemint, and multiple business and financial media.
Saurabh worked for 12 years with Multinational corporation Asian Paints, then left the company to create a platform that enables thousands of apps, websites, and influencers to make sustainable revenues through premium video content. The business is now scaled to 50M+ users across multiple countries, called Flickstree.
Today Flickstree is the world’s largest, AI-enabled video publisher network.
Flickstree creates and aggregates short, engaging videos. Websites and apps embed Flickstree’s video player on their platform, to engage and monetize their traffic, without any investment. These videos that include entertainment content and performance marketing content are localized in multiple languages. Flickstree works with 650+ advertisers to monetize publisher traffic. OTT platforms and telecom companies license these videos to play the video content on their video player.
In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Saurabh says:
Keep things simple. Most startups try to be cool, and in the process, lose the big picture. At Flickstree, our marketing is not about jargon and lingos – it is communicating in a language that a 7-year-old can understand.
I would listen to or read stories of a lot more successful and failed founders and businesses. While experience is the best teacher, some learning can always be derived from those who’ve done this before.
I would also learn to code for a hobby. Because in today’s World, even if you’re not the chief coder – you should know the possibilities that technology can bring.
Read on to know more about Saurabh Singh and his journey.
Saurabh Singh: My name is Saurabh Singh. After my post-graduation in management, I did a corporate role for 12 years in a large Multi-National Corporation called Asian Paints Ltd. Problem-solving, marketing, content, and media always excited me. So I spotted a huge problem for digital publishers (websites and apps) to drive traffic to their platform and monetize better.
All consumer-focused websites and apps need better content to engage their users and monetize better.
At Flickstree, we enable apps and websites to make money via video content and video campaigns!
Saurabh Singh: We started the company in India. Indian Internet users have grown very fast, thanks to falling Internet data prices. Watching videos on smartphones went up from nothing to 60% of Internet data usage.
All websites and apps realized that people have stopped reading, and they’ve started watching. So they wanted to show videos to their users. The problem is to show videos, they need investment in creating content, they need investment in technology, and they also need investment in sales teams to monetize the content.
At Flickstree, we solve this problem for apps and websites. We give them a tiny piece of code to copy-paste within their platform. And we stream premium videos on their platform using our technology. We also monetize these videos with branding and performance marketing campaigns.
Saurabh Singh: Flickstree is an AI-powered video publisher network. We enable apps and websites to earn better revenues and engagement with our proprietary video content and video campaigns. We are a Samsung invested company, backed by SOSV of USA and Lionrock Capital, Singapore, and Facebook.
We primarily have two focussed products:
Video Content Embedding: Now You Know Series
This is our flagship premium product that works across mobile phone OEMs and other apps. All videos are available in English and Hindi. We add 4-6 new videos daily.
Here’s a sample of videos.
Following integration opportunities exist for websites and apps (publishers):
We embed all these videos on publisher properties on Flickstree video player. We use our ad tags to monetize the same
Publishers license our videos for a license fee and play these videos on their video player. We shall share all these videos via MRSS feeds or any other method that the publisher prefers.
Video Commerce: Monetization through Affiliate and Performance marketing
We have 100s of advertisers with high commission payout across the globe. For every campaign, we create exclusive videos that are proven to convert. We give a Publisher dashboard, in which websites see all campaigns available to them. They can choose and pick campaigns that suit them best.
Following integration opportunities exist for websites and apps (publishers):
To sum up, as a business Flickstree has two divisions
Saurabh Singh: We have raised about USD 5M so far from the likes of Samsung Ventures, LionRock Capital, Accretio Investments, SOSV, and Venture Catalysts.
Saurabh Singh: We are a publisher-network. We embed our video player on apps and websites. So our consumer acquisition strategy is always B2B- B2C. Acquiring high traffic publishers grew our traffic by manifold. Our top-notch strategy to acquire publishers has been through LinkedIn, email marketing, and references.
Saurabh Singh: Satisfied publishers are the best marketing tool. We don’t use lead generation software.
Saurabh Singh: Keep things simple. Most startups try to be cool, and in the process, lose the big picture. At Flickstree, our marketing is not about jargon and lingos – it is communicating in a language that a 7-year-old can understand.
Saurabh Singh: All organizations need capital to scale. For us, it has been the same. Funding is also an external validation that what we are solving is large enough and validated by serious professionals.
We partnered with an investment banking firm that made us some great introductions in the VC space. Once we had our initial set of investors, they also helped us with some great introductions.
Saurabh Singh: While fund-raising is a full-time job, founders waste a lot of time and energy in talking to the wrong people during fund-raising. Focus is vital in each aspect. Introductions and references work best. The worst thing is to blast your pitch deck across all investors’ database. Founders need to create a premium factor for their business.
Saurabh Singh: Our user base is growing rapidly, and our revenues are multiplying despite the global slowdown. We are punching far above our weight!
We shall raise USD 20 M to expand globally fast, especially deep into South East Asia, Middle East, and some identified western markets.
Saurabh Singh: Our business has three aspects – content, publishers, and advertisers.
We go for content exclusivity as that gives us a competitive edge, so we shall work with creators across identified markets to scale faster.
Publisher acquisition is not a challenge, as we are flooded with multiple inbound queries across the globe. All publishers need better monetization solutions, and ours is easily one of the best out there. We shall keep the publisher onboarding and servicing the team locally.
Lastly, advertisers follow where the ROI is highest. Our model caters to advertisers with great branding and performance solutions. We work closely with agencies and brands across geographies. Our tech stack is highly scalable.
Saurabh Singh: One size fits all never works. Every market has local dynamics. Identifying key markets and working with local partners scales a business much faster than doing mass promotions.
Saurabh Singh: Scalable businesses are found by solving a problem. After a startup identifies a business problem to solve, the solution has to be simple and easy to adopt. So there have to be two tests:
In our case, Flickstree is solving the problem of digital publishers (websites and apps) to monetize their traffic better or buy traffic for their platform with a better arbitrage.
We give publishers our solution embed video player to make money with premium content without investing time and money on creating content, or technology, or advertiser onboarding. Just copy-pasting a few lines of codes does the entire job for them.
Saurabh Singh: To keep things simple is the best advice that we received early on. It always pays off.
Saurabh Singh: I would listen to or read stories of a lot more successful and failed founders and businesses. While experience is the best teacher, some learning can always be derived from those who’ve done this before.
I would also learn to code for a hobby. Because in today’s World, even if you’re not the chief coder – you should know the possibilities that technology can bring.
You can follow Saurabh Singh here.
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