 straight into our next very interesting, and I am eagerly waiting for this one. The year 2021 started off on a right for India's leading social media unicorn, Share Chat. That's right, our partner as well. The platform successfully captured the attention of users across all tiers in India and a monumental growth with 160 million monthly active users in just one year. Banking on India's lingual diversity, Share Chat launched India's most loved language first social media platform that currently includes about 15 languages, thereby accommodating the varying population of India. The brand also owns March, a short video entertainment app that earned about 120 million active users in less than just about a year. Thus, uniting the Indian millennials and Gen Z's on one platform. Telling us more is our next speaker and accomplished global media leader known for his business, syndicity and digital excellence. Please welcome Mr. Ajit Varghese, Chief Commercial Officer, Share Chat and March in conversation with our Assistant Editor for Exchange for Media, Tasmeh Laharoi. On the topic, Namaste, Vanakkam, came to how our brand love and language is connected. Over to you Tasmeh and I can't wait for this one. Thank you, Mithin, thank you. Thanks for the introduction. Hi, Ajit, thank you so much for joining us in this conversation. I was confused whether to start with Namaste, came to Vanakkam. So yeah, thanks again for joining us. So coming up. Thank you so much and good afternoon to everybody. So coming straight to the questions, 2020 was a year of huge growth for your brand. Share Chat and March put together, your user base grew from 120 million to about to 80 million. So walk us a little through what drove this growth and where did the maximum traction come from? I think Tasmeh, if you look at our journey, I think one of our biggest USPs and drivers for growth is a unique proposition and the focus with which we have done about launching the two apps, right? I mean, one is for the language first customer. I think that uniqueness is something that India has not seen while there were many as probably English dominated or also having languages. But I think our single-minded focus on language customers is our journey and is our driver for our growth. So if you take that out and now look at our journey into three phases, right? We started off as an easy to share format, right? People wanted to share stuff that they could discover and mostly in the dark social because not in the main line English dominated world but more in the other space. And that they could share it with friends on WhatsApp or any other dark social medium that they could. And this soon became popular because it was an inherent need in the consumer world across the 90% of the population of India. And therefore we had to quickly develop into a feed-based ecosystem where people could come back and discover more such content and share more such stuff, right? And therefore it became very important for us to actually understand the psyche of the consumer and track that code, right? Whether it's from the UX, whether it's from the text whether it's from the words, the type of shares even the type of colors and the formats in the app, right? And last but not the least the speed and accessibility in a relatively low internet population or a low internet bandwidth population, right? I think that became the first phase of that growth, right? But so as we started getting more and more users we realized there are so many different types of users who are coming across so many languages of India their tastes are different, their shares are different and therefore the whole ecosystem's dependence on personalization became very key. And that took me is the single point in the second phase of our growth which is the artificial intelligence which leads to the personalization, right? Both in the content discovery phase or in the product phase I think that backed by the artificial intelligence and machine learning is the real engine for our growth if you look at that success over the last one to the earth, right? Last but not the least if you look at our third important aspect which unfortunately happened during lockdown very unfortunate incident to have a lockdown but it also started giving us new nuances during lockdown, the innate hunger of our consumers to get into, you know, get different types of entertainment Right. And especially in the short video space because, you know, consumer attention span is pretty low there, you know, they want entertainment the world's entertainment that they're doing the tips and that innate need made us launch Moj within 48 hours because we had all these learnings about share share the ecosystems, the AI, all the discovery platform and the product knowledge that we had we could launch more than 48 hours and within 9 to 10 months we are at a 120 million user number and we can show the slides there across and across both the apps today we are at 280 million profiles across both the apps so that to me is the journey that we had and obviously the journey is still on Absolutely, that's very interesting, you know also since we spoke so much about reach, Ajit which with reach also comes brand interest, right and we see so many brands on Share Chat tell us a little bit about what are the kinds of brands that you're working with and what is the kind of reach and access that they enjoy on your platform So if you look at 2020 with the success of last year there were a lot of early starters which came in early brands, adopters who came into the ecosystem and these were wanting to test these brands were trying to test us you know what is the language customer or what is the reach the numbers were never a confusion but it's about how are we reaching it what are the interaction points what are the metrics that we're evaluating how is this consumer very different from what we are used to in the English dominated digital ecosystem, right So that was the testing phase in the last especially in the second half of the year What we have seen this year is more continuity we see big brands a plethora of brands at least 50 to 70 brands are now continuous brands they are not guys who are coming in for one month and going away next month so we have seen that journey now becoming more continuous we have now seen our performance ads and the performance ecosystem growing into at least 30% of our business if I were to take some examples of the brands you can probably show the slide there we are also trying new and new and new and new formats for the different brands and clients so if you look at the success of if you look at the success in the last three to six months it's actually language obviously is the first success story and second is obviously the innovative formats and the kind of interactive points that we generate in our ecosystem if you look at Fanta that we hashtag that we did it's the first time that we are doing a hashtag in March in the last one year and very using a very customized filter and very using occasion like holy to create some kind of happiness and celebration especially with the kind of coming out of the first phase of time and that immediately generated almost 625 million views I mean now that was a big success story for us because now it gives us the confidence that we can't talk about half a billion and one billion numbers as we go along so that again is a great case study for how brands can use our ecosystem there are many other formats like if you look at Flipkart and Mintra using different innovative formats whether it's interactive formats where you can use customer taste and brand content together and customize it in a dynamic way so that user interest and user response can actually be better looking at that type of a format versus compared to a static format or a video format even sometimes when there is a sales offer or a coupon code we created a spin the wheel contest so consumers have to make an interaction on the spin the wheel and depend on what the wheel stops at and you get the promotion for basis of that even a case study is like I am free which is the mutual fund body use almost six to eight languages across our ecosystem to create that connection in a performance side so in this performance ad but not in the regular English or one language they use different languages to make sure that the response rate and all of these metrics when we see across last two or six months we are so confident that this can only grow from that great, great so Ajit you spoke of so many interesting things you spoke about how you launched Moj overnight and then you spoke about the huge reach so many handling so many brands so you know how prepared are you with your ad tech capabilities to address this surgeon brand interest? See, if I look at before I talk the tech and the ad tech if you look at our single biggest USB as I already mentioned it's our artificial intelligence ecosystem platform and to me, that's our single biggest USB and that's the license that's the QL now we need to keep building this ecosystem based on artificial intelligence and because that is I mean, it's almost like matchmaking there are hundreds and millions of pieces of content being generated there are hundreds and millions of signals that consumers give you and we are trying to do the matchmaking we are trying to do the matchmaking between consumer interest and the content discovery especially the long tail of content to me, that is the key to be all the technology capabilities that we have now if I look at therefore what are the kind of ad tech capability that we have and we are building I would essentially bucket it into four big buckets one is on the ROI bit which is how do I make sure that there is better return on ad spend second is on the trust and transparency with where brands can know that what are the metrics that are coming for are they delivering it and what kind of measurement metrics are there and the third big part is the kind of tools that we can generate for either better reach or better targeting variables last but not the least is the influencer marketing ecosystem so let me just touch upon each of these I mean, when I look at return on ad spend we are looking at both ends of the funnel one is, one funnel is how do you create more brand love with the kind of formats that we have how do we keep getting into newer innovative formats or high impact high impact properties like the hashtag that we saw or filters or even some of these new formats that we just introduced on ad entry ads how do we generate this use this to generate unique experiences with our customers and create more brand love or our preference or any other metric that branding and brand marketers want to create and at the same time we also want to look at the other end of the funnel the deeper side of the funnel which is how can our AI engine fuel this whole conversion between advertiser and marketers objective into more deeper kind of metrics like whether it's registration whether it's clicks whether it's installs or any other conversion metrics and therefore give them a job and all this achieved at a reasonable cost so that it can be business building for them so one end of the ad tech is all about the return of trends the second part would be more about trust and transparency I think a lot of I mean, we are now programmatic enabled we are making sure that we are integrated with all third party tools like whether it's more or MMPs or double verify or mills and et cetera so that's ensuring that there is a enough amount of third party verification that we have in our ads serving capabilities we're also creating more dashboards in terms of deep analytics on promotions and metrics that brands can get so that's again, all this is being done to build more trust that we are in a place where we can get income and income and it's a fair market place Absolutely Yes Sorry, you were saying something No, no, AI interrupted, please continue Yes The third part is the audience tools I mean, I know even today for example, a lot of brands or clients want to target demographics or geographical I think we are now trying to look at generating new tools which can actually have new targeting variables like whether it's constant interest or in-app behavior or for better campaign performance and better campaign planning so a lot of investments are going on looking at audience insights more in the interest and behavior rather than just the variables that we have all been used to in the past we also are developing the new platform which is so that we can use today we have shared chat and more around 160 million and 120 million 280 million profits how can we use the unified audience network to make sure that we can make the bang for the buck better for our clients so that's something that we are again, investing on and we have recently launched the platform shared chat ads so that we can then use that for the unified audience ecosystem Last but not the least is the influencer marketing place I think I think we know that if you look at short video space and the apps that we operate we are a creator place and we are an influencer market place we are now trying to see whether we can create an influencer marketing info space where we can use them to lend their voice to big brands especially to the audience the language first audiences which was almost like an ignored population of India by the dominant of the global players English dominated players so that ecosystem is something that we are building and we want to own that space and we want to be the biggest player in that space some of the new things that we are also looking at is the video and livestream from us we don't have it now we have the tech but we have not launched it because we want to be very confident one how it works second is we will launch it at a time when we are confident that it can be in scale because currently it's not a tick mark that we want to do that we have this capability we want to come at a time when we think that it is scalable and it can use return on an input Right, perfect so there are so many new things and interesting things coming up from Share Chat what is very important also for any app like yours is monetization so tell us a little bit about your plans for monetization I mean this is the most tricky subject and tricky question that you can ask Yes for monetization I can be and everybody in media listens to only the valuation and even to the valuation question we are most curious about Yeah, I think we are still in the start-up phase I think we are backed by great investors who have put our trust on us I definitely as a team leader and I represent the entire Share Chat team we are aiming our first 100 million in that journey of generating that first 100 million I think the question really is how quickly we can get there and from my experience in the last 4-5 months that I've been here I think we can reach that faster than what I initially thought when I could join and I'm saying this with the confidence that I've seen in the last 3-4 months journey of how new formats have gotten new clients into our ecosystem how our performance engine is picking up for better deeper funnel metrics 30% of my business today is performance business so that says a lot from compared to last year to this year we have an opportunity of March opening up sales in the next quarter sometime Okay that's adding up to 120 million audiences more into our ecosystem we have just now launched this middle of this month launch the Share Chat ad platform which is the fuel of the growth of SMB sector and I'm confident there because SMBs will find this more useful because it is really talking to the Indian audience in their language and that's what they really want to connect with the brand audience and build scale so we feel confident that we are in that journey of generating that first 100 million pretty fast and then who knows then we can bring bigger Absolutely you know a chat on millions can go on for us but since we are short press for time I have one last question for you Ajit which is you know 2020 was a year of unprecedented growth for your brand for your platforms so do you foresee that kind of growth also in 2021 and lastly for this year what are your key focus areas? You know 100% I mean I don't know I mean a lot of us would have heard our co-founders talking about we want to reach the 1 billion number the number of users right so we still have a 25% number there right so I mean we can say it's unprecedented but we would continue to focus to drive that user growth and reach a half a billion number as soon as possible now whether it takes 12 months or 18 months but we are in that journey to reach that half a billion number pretty soon then take a larger window to reach that 1 billion number so the user growth and user retention will continue to be a primary focus at the top end obviously the second part is we already spoke about the artificial efficiency ecosystem I think that's absolutely key that's fuel to our ecosystem everything that we do remaining is actually powered by that and therefore we'll continue to invest learn, unlearn, learn, unlearn and that's doing the continuous process both in the content and user ecosystem and in the AI ecosystem so because it's the same engine which works right and last but not the least I think our super focus we are a pretty young thousand people organization today I think one of our primary focus into the future would be to invest in talent because we our ambitions are big and we definitely want to be the largest AI powered platform based out of India and so we need to invest in key talent and the people who have built this ecosystem so far to continue to feel passionate learn the ecosystem more drive that dream and potential to reach its end so talent is something that is absolutely key for us in going forward in 2122 and the way Right, right thank you so much for that interesting chat Ajit thank you so much for joining us we'll have our short video by share chat after this thank you thank you so much guys thank you, thanks a lot