 Good morning, everyone. I hope I'm audible. Super. So the idea is very simple. We were, Suman and I were having a conversation sometime back, And we were like, let's not have a formal session. Let's have a conversation between four friends. Right? So that's what we'll try and do. And when four friends are talking, feel free to interrupt. Right? So that's our love to start. I think also I'll say that it should not be built. We have just started building, so it should be built. We are in the process of building, so. I think we have got 0.01 percent done, so to say. And the whole ecosystem is growing so fast. Right? So I'll try and divide the conversation into culture And commerce. Right? Two important fundamentals. Culture is built by organizations which have people first. Commerce is built by, you know, organizations who have Business first. So what is the right intersection of it To create the right communities is what we're trying to Well-being to. To begin with, maybe starting Himanshu and we'll try and go in this order. Maybe a quick round of introduction. And you could also speak about, you know, your favorite Experience of building a community. Or, you know, one of your best learnings as a marketer. So, hey, hi. I'm Himanshu, co-founder for Social Punga. I was the first mafia at Punga. Thanks a lot for inviting me. Thanks a lot for hosting this out. So culture, I believe culture is not having a bean bag in your office. Right? A lot of time people have seen bean bags as a culture piece. Right? Culture is built by what kind of work that you're doing. Right? The merit of the work also defines a culture to a larger extent. Right? So all the organizations, all the companies, global setups, right? It's defined by the products they have built. If you look at Meta, if you look at Google, right? Or if you look at services company with respect to the value That delivered to the client, right? And if all of us as an organization is aligned to that one goal, right? Is what defines a culture to a nutshell. It could be anything. It could be service excellence. It could be customer-first approach, whatever it is. You pick up Amazon, you pick up Flipkart, you pick up Mentra, Indian global context, right? It defines that one goal. And everybody in the organization think about that goal. And then you define your mission, vision, and other pieces to it, right? And when everybody is aligned to that one goal, it kind of moves in the community space, right? So if you look at it non-professionally, I'm a cyclist, right? I have a single goalpost to do a 100 kilometer on a Sunday. So everybody has that one goal in that group in a community, right? So professionally you have one goalpost. Personally you have one goalpost. That defines a starting point for a community to say. Very interesting. Maybe if you could also touch upon one of the... I think Manipal Hospitals is one of your star campaigns of the year, or any other campaign which you would have done, which is community-first in nature, and maybe some learnings out of it. So it's just not about campaign, right? So take an example of Mama Earth. So we have been working with this brand for a while now. The starting point of that brand, I think everybody is aware of Gazel and Wanon, right? Gazel became mom and then post that the brand was built. They leverage community to a larger extent, right? That community becomes a starting point for her to experiment, to do a pivot on the product, and then see people have a response to it, right? Again, what is happening these days is people start thinking, hey, how are we going to monetize the community? Correct? And that's the first step that you should not take. That's in a don't space, not in do space. What are you adding to the community as a starting piece? And then you start doing a brand integration. Interesting perspective. How about you, Vikas? Yeah, I think audible, right? Everyone at the back? No? Not audible? Yeah. Can we just hold it closer to the... Yeah, I think picking off from what he once said, I think it's really about creating value, right? And people need to feel connected. Who are you trying to build a community with need to feel connected, right? And that's really at the heart of building those communities. And that means the brand that's creating it, or who is creating that needs to add value, needs to be able to be authentic and allow others in the community to be authentic for them to really take out the value, right? And that's what we've seen with many of the brands that we worked with. One of the examples would be Dhan, which is a trading app, right? And what we tried to do there is actually build a community of day traders, build a community of folks that live a life being a trader. So right from building Anthem and a song that they can relate to, to actually having, you know, communities on closed-door channels like Telegram are also public channels, right? And I think being able to connect those dots to people who feel they're sitting in a room and working from nine to three, looking at a screen, and they feel neglected, right? And that's the insight that we tapped onto and looked at how do we build that community. So it's really about connecting those dots. And like Himachal said, it's not about selling anything at all. That community is to exchange ideas, insights, learnings, and really connect with folks that know what you're going through, and that's what makes that community really work. Yeah, I agree. Art of selling is, you know, genuine value addition, right? If you can genuinely value add, right, people will buy, right? How about you, Suman? I mean, I sincerely believe that building communities, you know, as a first-time entrepreneur, we started with a product and for, and Buffalo Soldiers happened by accident. All of us needed to realize that are we entrepreneurs and not, right, and we bootstrapped it all along. So for me, building communities starts right at home. Himachal was talking about culture, and I so agree with him because I think when we started off, we all call ourselves start-up. And I feel that because we are independent and we are able to say this, that if we call ourselves start-up, we need to start behaving like start-ups. I think one of the things that we enabled, one of the things that we enabled at Buffalo Soldiers is that we give equity to each and every member. So that for me is something that is non-negotiable. So I feel that another thing we have always talked about, right, is that everyone comes and a lot of people have experienced this, all of us, people think it's a fun place, right? The journey doesn't end there, right? It's a fun place to work. So what happens is that building that culture talk I feel is really easy. For the first two years or three years, we practically grew from, and I've said this enough, from five and a half people, there was one intern who was double timing in one room in my house, two just hundred people now. So we feel that while we were talking about this culture, we never really saw that culture coming through until about last year and it happens very organically as it kind of permeated through the ranks. And now we see the benefit of that culture happening. So I feel it all starts that while we start building communities, the community should be built at home and then we take it across to clients. Interesting. I, in fact, also loved your name. Can you tell me more about what's the logic and what's the meaning of the name? All my other co-founders were coming. I was driving one day. We had still not quit my job and they were coming up with normal names. Bob Marley, of course. I love the song. So that's how the name came through. I've tried to give many other reasons at different places. I have like one reason every month, but it's Bob Marley's song. Interesting. Let's jump on to another whole new beast. The new beast, which is the most spoken about beast these days, is Gen Z, right? Have you been building Gen Z first communities and what's your experience dealing with them? Any of you could pick it up? Again, first and foremost thing, having an awesome sneaker or having a tattoo, it's not Gen Z. Let me put that on the table. So as somebody who's a millennial, I'm speaking to a lot of Gen Z folks the way people used to speak to me 10 years back to build on that consumer insight, I figured out very, very clearly these two things doesn't define Gen Z. What we have noticed, this is something which I have noticed last 40, 40, 50 years fashion in a way also defined what kind of mindset people is having. In fact, I saw one of your LinkedIn posts when you visited something, right? Why Gen Z likes to wear loose clothes? If you go double click on it, right? It's a sense of freedom. I don't give a damn. Size doesn't define me, right? It's a mindset piece, right? And when you kind of truly understand people, right? Fashion is one of the way, if you look at 70s, 80s, 90s, our fashion days of 2030, correct? Is one of the area, right? But nobody defines us and wearing clothes with a specific size is one of the pieces, right? X hundred other things to it, right? I own my own space and that's also driven by what is happening to India from an economical standpoint. Like for my parents, roti kapala makaan was big stuff. For us, we moved to the next level where convenience was one. Uberwala came into pictures, Zomando and all came into pictures. Now that's by default. What's next for them? That hits about me. It's not about our stuff. So I'm not talking about community, but to understand that mindset and start building products on top of it. So I always believe there are two things going to define the next 10, 15 years of a journey. One is Gen Z. Second is luxury, right? Because everybody has a purchasing power to it. So if a product or a community could be built on top of it, we're going to prosper in the next 10, 15 years. Interesting. Let me speak more about this particular post which I had written. So it happened exactly at Geo just right across the doors. I was attending this event called All You Can Street. Right at the entrance of the event, there was a hooding which said, a banner or whatever, which said, if you're not into street culture, it would be a culture shock. And it was a culture shock for me. I'll narrate what exactly happened that day. So I walked into one of the stores. I probably was the only single person in the 55,000 square feet, big conference or even whatever it was happening was wearing a jeans. So already I was feeling out of place. So I walked into one of the stores and I asked, I was seeing some styles and I was like, can I see a medium sized t-shirt in this? And they were like, what? Did you just ask for a size? That's how people buy. No, that's not how Gen Z is by. We buy what we like. It doesn't matter what the size is. So I was literally convinced by stairs to buy two sizes more than what I generally wear. I honestly still not have courage to wear that, but I hope I wear it sometime soon. So yeah, some very, very interesting things happening. And like you rightly mentioned, it's Gen Z do not want to be defined by predefined global norms. I will choose what I want to wear. If it fits my size, great. Or else I'll be comfortable in what I want to wear. So that also is an insight for so many brands. So many brands have been thinking certain set of verticalization of sizes and verticalization of a lot of cultures or protocols which were there. If they start thinking horizontal, they start thinking design first, thought first, then I think magic can happen. Vikas, how about you? Yeah, I think going deeper into what they like, and that's really where our jobs and marketeers begin. And often the way we connect those dots is they have their own preferences of freedom, their own preferences of trying new things. They experiment a lot more. And I think that's really how we pick up the kind of brand messaging that you want to do. So for brands that we work with, often it is about also the kind of content you create because they have a lot more options. They have less patience than many of us have. They get distracted very quickly. And that's really what you want to try and do. So the kind of communication we create for a brand that's targeting that audience would be very, very different. And frankly, building a community for Gen Z is not easy, right? Because they have zillion options. They have enough to keep them distracted. And hence, while we try and do that for some of our brands, it's really about can you still connect with them and can you build that brand love? I think that's still something that we've probably tried to achieve and do. But building a community where they really feel connected, I think that's still probably work in progress in some sense. Interesting. Subhan. I think Gen Z's fashion and contradiction, right? They like vapes a lot too. On a serious note, I mean, I think we have been talking about the millennial world culture, right? And I think I have met with Gen Z's, especially in our office, who are two different kinds, right? The one that you were talking about, who have fleeting sense of they move one from one thing to another. And I have met the other kind, which are very, very, you know, kind of millennial work ethic. So it's very difficult, as you were saying, to bracket what exactly is a Gen Z, right? But when we were working for brands like, say, Fast Track, it's very important that we let some of our very young folks, including somebody who was joined like two months back from NIFT, to lead that conversation because, you know, they kind of understand, they kind of bring those contradictions together beautifully. So I feel that that something that is not defined enough, I think as we move forward, we will understand how the generation of Gen Z kind of settles in. So, I mean, it should be an ongoing process. So I heard two things, because you mentioned about millennial work ethics and distracted. The sense, I personally spoken to a lot of those in organization outside also. I believe they're just different, the way we were different for our parents, right? So when I started back in 2003 on my first company, my father and my mom and dad couldn't even understand what we're doing. So the way my parents couldn't understand us, I think we're not able to understand Gen Z. Suddenly feeling older. Suddenly feeling older, right? I always, I think for old people speaking more Gen Z. Interesting. So let's slightly tangent further. I'll jump to digital campfires. Now what I mean by that is, you know, when the whole social media revolution started, the whole fundamental was, you know, let's get to know the world. Let's get to, you know, expand our network. Let me try and meet so many new people, maybe meet a lot of people of my past. But I think a lot of things within the digital ecosystem are maturing enough where the original subconscious strategy was expanding the network. Now the strategy or, you know, the mindset is to narrow it down to relevance, right? Now what I mean by that is digital campfires like a reddit, digital campfires like a telegram group, right? So there are so many of these new age telegram groups, or new age reddit groups, or whatever. There are so many discord groups and what not. Have you seen some initial success or some success in communities beyond, you know, your traditional social media, as I call it? Yeah, I think, yeah, we've done some of it in Quora, some of it in Reddit, and I think what we realize over time is authenticity there is very important, right? You want to be participating both as a brand, as well as maybe consumers that love you and have that connect with you. But if that contradiction or what you're saying doesn't feel real and authentic, I think that, you know, starts breaking apart. I think the other part is consistency, right? Because brands, obviously, say, So you have to find what is it that second or third channel that you really want to go deeper into, and often brands that have succeeded are the ones that have consistently built that with the right kind of content and value, found the right influencers, real consumers to be part of those communities, and that's when that flywheel starts working, right? Because otherwise you do it for a few months and it doesn't work. Building that community is a journey over many, many quarters to make that really come to life. I can think of an example of Maggie. I think they did this globally as well, where they monetized WhatsApp by investing in content. What they did was, and again, disclaimer, we've not done this campaign. I read about it online. What they did was this... Oh, lovely. So, yeah, of course, why don't you speak about it? I think it's an interesting campaign, right? One recipe a day, right? You're talking about the same campaign? Yes. So I'll touch up on the campaign in a bit, but speaking of what you mentioned, right, or the community piece, I think what is happening with multiple platforms, right? You pick a platform like this called, right? Every platform, every generation, field gets my platform, correct? For us, our parents were Facebook, Insta, then Reddit came, Telegram came, right? So I was just chatting with one of my cousins who is in college, right? He is lot more on Snapchat versus on Instagram. So his photo sharing... Texting, like their routine texting is Snapchat. Is Snapchat. It's not on Insta. It's not on WhatsApp also. So what is happening is that the moment they feel that this platform, this called Snapchat, whatever, is for me, is where my friends are, not family, right? Is where they start building on the community piece. Okay, Maggie, do you want to... Yeah, sure. So Maggie, you know, what I saw was every single day, they used to, you know, they curated a whole community of people who are cooking food by themselves. So what they would do is every single day, they would send in a recipe. So a new recipe every single day on your WhatsApp message, right? As simple as that. It may or may not have a Maggie Masala in it. If you're not talking about noodles, of course you're talking about Maggie Masala, right? So that's what they did, right? They genuinely curated the whole community. Last I checked, they had about 200,000 active subscribers to that community who are regularly seeing recipes on that, right? So that's genuine community creating outside of an Instagram, outside of a Facebook, outside of a Twitter to genuinely add value to the lives of audience, yeah. So yeah, that's it. Coming back, you were saying something? No, I was just saying that our entire journey actually didn't begin with Buffalo Soldiers. It began with football because I'm a complete football fanatic. So we were building something called Football. And the whole idea was because football fans, I'm a huge Arsenal supporter and a Barcelona supporter. So football fans on any other of these apps do not have like affinity-based community and we were trying to build that. So what happened was, you know, recently when we were leading, you know, the entire Global Chess League and for the first time chess was being played in a team event and all of that, we realized that a community was being built on YouTube, which was so interesting because we felt that the community would be built on maybe on Instagram because some of the players, we thought it might be built on Twitter because Magnus Carlson is there and Vishwanathan Anand is there. But it started building on YouTube and that's the difference. So it's so fractured right now, right? Some are using, as you were saying, discord. I started using discord like about six months back. There are a lot of communities which are happening on Snapchat, but that Snapchat community right now is so low that, you know, we are not kind of, I think for the last two years, people have been always thinking about experimenting with the Snapchat community, particularly in India, but we haven't done that because I don't see the numbers there. But I think, yeah, it's a very fractured community building that's happening between different age groups right now. The Snapchat just crossed about 100 million users in India. So numbers are crazy on Snapchat and increasing by the day. That's true. That's true. Coming back to numbers, right? We're in a world where everyone wants everything yesterday. Correct? How do you, and again, happy to hear all your opinions, how do you justify long gestation periods in building the community? What are the success matrix which you said as expectations for your clients? When you're building a community, when you know that there's going to be nothing in the next six months, you just put in effort and make content. Right? What are you going to see later? Right? So what are some success matrix you try and convince your clients with or you convince yourself with first more than your clients? Isn't it the same roadmap of building a brand? Exactly. It takes time, right? So Maggie is fine. So I was aware of that community which you're referring to. It also boils down to what level of brand building you are. Right? When your existence is questionable, right? When you're starting a brand, starting a company, when your existence is questionable, you can't go back to a brand and say, let's make a community, right? Let somebody, let somebody try the product, right? First, my product itself has a question mark to it. Versus a legacy brand of ABN Bev, Maggie, Nestle or the world, where the product is already there, right? And then you start making peripherals on top of it. Right? So we also need to understand at what level or journey the brand is. That is point number one. Point number two, like I take an example of Mama Earth, right? Where there was a common interest of a founder, right? She genuinely wants to understand what's happening and organically you start spilling it off, correct? It was not started with the Mama Earth, it was started with Ghazal. And then obviously it finally boils down to the Mama Earth piece. That is second. Third, you ask for a period, right? The moment you start looking at six months or a year as a time frame, after that I'm going to monetize the brand, community. That's where downfall starts happening. You have to be extremely, extremely open, right? Like take an example of Maggie. Sometimes you don't even put a product there, right? It has to be driven by an interest, not by a common brand. Common brand is packaging it, but it's not a driving force to it. So for me personally, I cannot put a time frame to with six months or 12 months. It's a very long-term piece, right? But why is there a builder community around sports? But it's consistently doing it year on year on year on year basis. Nike, I think everybody has seen the movie and read the book, right? The community have been built consistently year on year and being honest to that piece. Whatever the sponsor is, Nike is always there. So third is more from a consistent point of view. Interesting. Yeah, I think, I mean, you mentioned a lot of big brands and I think, you know, that's what I wanted to touch upon that, you know, if you look at it from far, it looks like communities are built by large brands. But actually it's probably the opposite, right? If you look at many of those small Instagram handles, those smaller brands, those one outlet retail stores, they have powerful communities. They may only be 500,000... Micro-communities. Yeah, 1500 folks, but they know the brand. They know who runs it. They know what quality to expect. They know the service that they can expect. They exchange feedback. I want this. Can you make it, right? And I think that's the myth around who is it relevant to. I think it's relevant to every brand. Can you find consumers that love you, love your brand, your product and start scaling that, right? And figure out what the common thread is. And that common thread could be anything, but you need to figure out what that is. And we didn't touch upon this, but at the heart of it is having an amazing product, right? Because you cannot build communities around something that's subpar. So in many ways, even if it's a small brand, and probably there are folks that work with smaller mid-sized brands, find those consumers who love you and start from there. And you'll eventually find a way to connect those dots and make that happen. I so agree with Vikas. There's nothing more powerful than a micro-community. I mean, we worked with... You were talking about retail, right? We worked with Uran. So a lot of people go to social media and think that what are the kind of followers you want? So the one of the things that we kind of guided them to was the people who have their apps and the order from their apps, the retailers, the Kiranawalas, we ensured that those Kiranawalas are actually following them on social media because, whichever Facebook or its Instagram, at least wherever they are present, can you also follow them on social media because you are using this app as the lifeline of your business, right? So I think micro-communities are the way to go. Yeah, I just want to give an example. I mean, we didn't work on this. I was actually listening to a podcast about Zerodha and how Zerodha actually scaled, right? And actually, Nitin was talking a lot about how they built the community of, again, traders who didn't like all these bigger companies and bigger apps because they didn't have a product that was catering to them, right? And they actually built a complete forum and community on the web, and that's actually how their flywheel started working for them, right? They were very small back then, and this is almost seven, eight years ago, and that community is what fueled every big trader in India to start using them, and then the rest is history, so... Interesting perspective. There's a brand called Snitch, if you heard about it, they're Bangalore-based. They have Sharklang, Siddharth. So they started with building a community around Gen Z and obviously product around the same. Now they opened a first store. Same thing, started with the community and then moved to the taking a point. Another interesting thing, I think, because that's upon which, as marketeers, and I always tell my team as well that, you know, we are marketeers first, then we are advertisers, right? So the fourth piece of marketing, it starts with product, right? Product place, price promotion. We are the fourth P of marketing. If the product gets fixed, then the rest of the P can get fixed, right? We've got the last couple of minutes. We started with culture. We moved towards commerce. So maybe, you know, you could possibly speak about your concluding thoughts in terms of how are you fostering a culture-first, you know, community within your organization. Each one of you could speak about it. I'm sure each one of you have been doing some fantastic work in terms of curating some great culture. So... Yeah, no, absolutely. I think for us from day one, it was really about the team, the culture. We are about 350 team members now. And I would about... 80% of our leadership team has been with us for upwards of five, six years, some even for eight, nine years. And I think the key to that is a mix of the right kind of work. You need to have the right brands, exciting work. I think that's one big part of it, because that's where the learning comes from. That's where they feel excited. They feel they're doing the right thing. That's one big part. The second is being able to have a culture of continuously learning, continuously, you know, it's fine to make mistakes, but continuing to try new things, what Harsh has spoke about, being agile, trying out AI. I mean, and we in fact have a huge task force internally to make sure everyone experiments with AI. And then you figure out where the use cases for each team are, right? But that agility, that ability to keep learning, I think that's the second part. And the third is, you know, the basics around having a great HR team, your incentives, ESOPs, and I think all that plays into play. In fact, I was mentioning to somebody else that we in fact do a performance appraisal every six months, not every year, right? So there's an opportunity for top performers to actually get, move up the value chain in terms of increments and promotions twice a year, right? And today, folks are restless and we try and cater to that to some extent. It needs more work, it needs more effort, but that's how we build it up. I think we have spoken enough, the time is up also out there. I'll just say one single line. If a first-term manager is treating his mentees or subordinates the way founders treat everybody, that clearly defines the culture because come from top to the first-term manager. There's no rocket science around it. That's a good way to look at it. Interesting. So one quick closing thoughts. I think, you know, as one of the targets that I had for myself, what is my role as the CEO? I think one of the roles is hiring, right? So from an intern to anyone who is joining us, I make the first call. I close the last call. I will do it till about 200 or 250 people. That's my target. And I know it does get hard. Ask me about it. Let's be honest with ourselves. All of us, we call ourselves marketeers and all of that, and we tend to think that, you know, give it a lot of importance. We tend to think we know everything. We don't. We are idiots basically. We are trying to figure out we have a mere approximation of the truth that we try to find out, right? And that's what we try to apply to many situations, right? Some of our best campaigns have happened like that. Some of our best work has happened like that. When we went out of that window, took a bet on a gut feeling that we had. One of us had, maybe I had, maybe, you know, my co-founders had, maybe my creative lead had, right? And that's how one of the most important things we do is make sure that we are successful. So I think, yeah, I mean, as Vikas was saying, right, we have started investing on AI. I think people who know how to use AI, and that's what Harshal was also saying, that they are the ones who will be successful. That is so very important to understand that every time it has already started in the creative teams, it has already started in the strategy teams, it will spread across, right? So, yeah. Super. Thank you very much for the lovely conversation, lovely insights. Thank you very much.