Hi Saurabh! Welcome to our podcast! You were of
course part of our original Season 1. Would you believe that that was 2.5 years ago,
back in November/December 2021. Just to rewind and refresh at that point of time Eloelo
had raised just about $2M and you were 2 million in downloads. Today you're #1 on
the Google Play Store. So firstly, Congratulations! Thank you. Let's start with maybe how
it all started and how has the last two years been for you and what an amazing journey it's been.
Th
ank you, thank you so much for having me here Anjali. Always, always great to be back here and
chat with you. You know it's been a great journey. We spoke when we were at about 2 million downloads.
Now we're north of 50 million. So just in terms of sheer volume of learnings and just
in terms of sheer scale, the last two years have been phenomenal. I've seen a lot of phases -
like at that time we were just a app which had a few formats in a couple of games which we used
to do. A few hundred cr
eators, few thousand users being very active and a few lakhs users possibly
at that time. Now the way the app has grown, it has almost touched the local, I would
say it has touched the cultural fabric of the country. It has transitioned from a live game product to a live
social media product in its purest sense. It has multiple formats now - games being one of them.
It has formats across motivation, across chat, across astrology across interesting categories
like breakup as well, entertainm
ent etc. So the app's journey has been very interesting. I
think one thing that has not changed from then to now is that the problem we were solving for, remains the
same. We're still equally excited. Every day I get up, that problem really excites me, that we're still
solving for a Creator's needs of one really owning its audience and audience's attention in a very
meaningful way, and enabling creator-fan interactions and second is their monetization
needs, which we're trying to right now
solve for. Second being for an audience we're trying to solve for
their belongingness needs and I think that feeling has not changed from a 2 million to a 50 million
plus Journey but I think sh skin sh number of people who've joined us uh the kind of investors
who've come on board and supported us the love we've seen in the country I mean beating products
like hotstar Gio and coming on top of the country has been a phenomena yeah and that's what I was
going to allude to when I said number o
ne on the Play Store you're actually completely redefined
not just one but several categories and you're #1, ahead of folks like Zee, Jio, Prime Video, Disney
Hotstar. It is an incredible feat! So congrats once again. And when I say multiple categories
I wanted to allude to what you said. The app is like this beautiful intersection of
- we can have meaningful live social interactions across a gaming format, astrology
format, like talk to friends , build online communities and just really cr
eate
that sense of community and belongingness in a digital safe space. Given your
vernacular focus, people would tend to believe that it's mostly a Hindi language app, but the
beauty of Eloelo is that more than 25% is now beyond Hindi into 7-8 other languages.
So take us through beyond Hindi, what are we saying in terms of entertainment and
co-creation? So beyond Hindi, this is one of our favorite topics and for this AOP, the
way we look at it is, beyond Hindi there is a huge huge number
that we want to chase and grow. For the
simple reason that we are an app that really talks about access. For the Tier I audiences
or if you look at Bharat, and divide it into multiple strata, there's the top 100 million for
whom there are multiple products that have been built. Then there is the middle India and then there
are the strivers. The 400-500 million there and about 600 million there. I think there has been
not a single product that has been talking to anyone other than the top Ti
er I, in terms of a
social media right which can go to a significant scale. what we realized was that while for the top
100 million, escapism was the bigger problem solve because there is time density, they're taking
shorter breaks and they just want something which can feed into their dopamine for about 2-3 minutes.
I could be doom-scrolling, I could be passive scrolling for about 2-3 minutes
and I'm having fun at that. But when you start looking at the nerves of middle India, you have to
talk about emotions of belongingness, loneliness. Their social fabric is just evolving and
there are not that many people who are talking to them in their language in their interest areas
and in a manner that is acceptable to them so we solve for the manner first by saying that we'll
be live first they're going to talk about for for every other product live has been nich so
far we decided to unbundle that and said we're just going to be about life and that in itself
you know when we think
about a decision it still gives me goosebumps because Li picking on live
as a category in itself was a defining moment that you know will you just have this as a tab
or will your entire product revolve around second was if you are going to do something around life
people want to talk to people who are relatable the emotion we were going after was relatability
and what better relatability if you and speak the same language yeah so where the app started as an
app for madhia Pradesh Rajasthan
up Patna biar so that entire built Right and started going towards
north at that time now after launching newer and newer languages suddenly Bengali has become so
large for us Telugu is becoming really really large Tamil is becoming large marati is becoming
large gujara so there are multiple languages which are now starting to come together and become
very very interesting the lowest first common denominator across each is just two things one
we've hit the right cultural narrative yeah so e
verywhere there is something cultural that they
want to talk about it could be something as simple as morning greetings how they are doing what their
day is for many other things that unite them our category really sort of stands around giving them
a we what we call ourselves is a feel-good or a positive social media product like where we're
talking about everyday life we're talking about things that could be better for you everyday life
so people share their problems and I would like to lo
ok at our creators as their digital companions
who talk to them in their language so imagine the aha moment you get that if you are a marati
language speaker you're currently just able to watch faing content in marati but able to talk
to people so now if you're actually able to go into a live room interact with someone in your
language and they are talking about something which is relevant to you then you can spend hours
and minutes and whatever into that product so I think that is one of t
he reasons why nor Hindi
stting to scale would say it's very very early days and we want to be at least 3x of where we are
at right now fantastic and you spoke about just not how you have a diverse set of languages uh
but it's staying on your audience side of things I want to briefly touch upon viewer polarization
and what I mean by that is you have multiple types of people and archetypes of audiences that come
on to the app right you have say shop owners who come in the afternoon when the
Duan is closed
I've always said how we have like TS of women who come in the morning and then you have like formal
economy workers go back home in the evening I log you on to the app so take us to how you've been
able to cater to these verying you know archetype needs of your audiences as well beyond just the
format which is gaming Astro chitchat Talent Etc and the language yeah sure I I think that's bang
on that's a great articulation of what we look at as well I think in India right every
thing
started off and if you go into a 30,000 ft view the connectivity needs came in ially from just
passive viewing and then people would Bond over certain things that they are watching together
started as a living room Entertainment Television product for everyone right that neighbors and
others are coming together watching something in that bit common context yeah now think of
that but now coming in for a digital product where the format the actual live or the actual
content may not be
as produced as what it is in television it's extremely relatable that was one
that we had to s for that how is it going to be relatable how does it change from time of day like
for example a lot of your morning lives typically center around astrology motivation starting the
day on a great note your typical other formats pick up in the afternoon and evening and that
is where two very interesting Tes come in shop owners of course is a very last easy because they
would typically shut or take a
break from about 2: p.m. to 5:00 p.m. what is the product where
they can really sort of Jael they can come in life and how we stumbled upon this is that
we have this co- streamer feature which I can of course talk about in future but uh we could
see people in that fragment who are coming in in the backdrop is of a shop yeah I was like
who are these people who are always in the afternoon coming in from there did some user
calling and realized that hey while we are not really asking for any
data around this this is
definitely a big TG tap down second big TG top tap down in that segment itself were Homemakers
as well so people who were free after about 12: p.m. to 600 p.m. and they would say that this is
the product that I want to socialize with because there are people like me I can relate to them Etc
and in the evening of course the genz Millennials would come back onto the app the geni typically
would come back and you would see a lot of live streams around breakups Love Gam
es many other such
things and that sort of picks up at that time so the idea has been staying true to the format one
ensuring diversity of creators so we of course screen but we also allow ugcs to come in having
B of formats like audio and video coexisting is a very important factor because not all the time
can you watch a there are times where you want to just sort of listen yeah that's where audio
sort of folds through as well and then just being really focused on ensuring that the one th
ing we
never compromised on was that it's supposed to be a very very safe space it's supposed to be
very inclusive and social so once you do that then many sort of pgs can come together of course
I there are certain pages that chosen not to sort of address for like for examp example hardcore
Gamers may not really find a lot of value to the audience a core dating audience may not find Value
here but anyone who's coming in for socializing entertainment just pure connections I think they
end
up finding immense value in what we yeah you touched upon audio so I maybe pick that up that's
one of your more recent launches and audio has always been a segue uh for new users and you know
early early adopters of the app who maybe are uh you know don't want to like show their video
Etc to come on and experience but even the audio format is not what they're typically used to it's
not like getting onto a group you know WhatsApp audio call uh you have made that to be immersive
and topical y
ou have like these backgrounds and screen savers that talk about the most recent
things that are hitting headlines today so take us to some of those features you've built to make
the audio experience unique and differentiated and immersive as well I have a fun story to share
with you yeah and I think it's the first time I'm going to be talking about this ever yeah we built
we chanced upon audio accidentally yeah there was an aishman kurana movie coming called Dream Girl 2
yeah they wanted t
o do something with eloo and the whole idea of audio was that we didn't think of
building audio at that time we were all video and we had said that we will do a big Reve because Dre
girl is about him talking like another character and then revealing himself we were like yeah we
need to build out Tech where somebody can be on video but switch off the video momentarily and
then come like and by switching of video we had accidentally created audio and we and the way it
got built was everyone o
n the screen the Creator the co-creators could all switch off video yeah
so when we were looking at it we were like now they are suddenly talking very freely yeah and
we were doing a dry run for that nothing else no inhibition no inhibition because we like this
is a dry run it's fine we just kids playing in a park and figuring out the movie wants to integrate
with us we'll do that ultimately that integration went to a different direction but we realize that
this is a great format we've stum
bled into and can we now build deeper into this yeah that started
audio and then when we started building that we realized that look eloo never mentioned that
we are only going to be a means of expression visually yeah it's about connecting Indians
and connecting people who have a common fabric together through these guided sort of digital uh
companionship which your sort of offers it stays through the live and interactivity absolutely
it stays so we had certain things that does this St cor
e to our values yeah are we able to do
a great job of contextuality in this and when we came into contextuality the V1 of audio looked
very different from what a V3 which is right now looks like right so then we realized that
you know in video when you enter a Life by the means in which you're dressed by how your hand
gestures are how you're movie I can understand what you're talking about but in an audio it might
take some more time for me to get the pulse of the room so how do we solve th
at we decided to give
creators a lot of tools we've always been about Creator empowerment that's our DNA I come from
a creative background myself so I was like let's give them a multiple set of backdrops and these
are nothing but things which we essentially get from the internet depending on what is important
in the country in the kind of categories that they good at so it could be people talking about
relationship advice it could be people talking about motivation it could be people talkin
g about
how their day is going it could be Sports it could be many things for example right now there's an
India England match going on and we have sports wallpapers so what that gave was people who
would enter that room they would suddenly get context like you could vertically spite enter a
room and you could be like oh there's something around sport going on conversation triggers
and yeah now it's about building on that so now we building noise cancellation now we are
building audio filt
ers which nobody has built in India that I can talk in a slightly thicker
voice I can talk in a slimma voice I can voice modulate and imagine the kind of powers I
can give to a Creator because they can hold their own my manime kind of a show Without Really
sort of professionally rehearsing for it because of the tools we've given so that can take your a
interactivity to the next level and that is really what we've been about that people should connect
and people should have a great fun time
and the host should be the central point of the entire
narrative it shouldn't be just peer-to peer so yeah also just to give our viewers and listeners
sense the diversity of content would love to talk about the ram Mand opening live stream as well
I think that was also very very surprising and also iconic with the number of millions of jam
stickers that were used during that you know live stream but maybe you could talk about that
yeah yeah so you know being topical has always been somethin
g we've tried to do as part of ourd
as a product that is inherently social we have to always talk about things that the people who
are watching are interested in right so at that time and I can give you a couple of examples along
with that as well so when Ram Mander was happening earlier just two three days before that the whole
cultural Fabric in this nation was changing right people were like something great is happening and
we could suddenly see gifts that are being sent changing sckers
are being s changing and like
you know this is giving us a signal that people really want to interact and there were hundreds
of platforms where you could watch it live so that was really not really the challenge the challenge
was that how are you creating an experience where hundreds and thousands who are watching it live
can actually chat so we added custom stickers we ensured that key moments are clipped well Etc
so that became a great highlight secondly like for example with Valentine's
Day launching now we
launch shies we launched codes this was live as well as theing so we now are trying to go wider
as well and said that now you can launch and put your own photos Etc and share that because you
essentially want to express yourself we are all about expressing in Ram mander's live room you are
essentially watching ramd and you are essentially chatting with others who have the sh same passion
as you do uh in a motivation sort of a quote you are sharing it with people becaus
e it relates to
you so the idea is to be topical within the the areas that we CL and really sort of have diversity
because a static social platform is really boring so we should address a various you need fresh new
content all the time yeah I think that also leads me to the interactivity piece right and maybe we
should touch a little upon how more than 25% of your audiences actually become co-creators yes
uh and there's several Lean Forward interactions that the app you know is designed for
but take us
through both from a feature build how easy it is for folks to become interactive with the Creator
and the host and what do you think the trigger is for people to first come in as maybe a viewer
and then very quickly become a co-creator I think being a co-creator is such an integral part of our
product BMF right I think if you take a step back from eloo and figure out that every platform has
that one thing that is very different about its DNA which no one else has like for Faceb
ook it
was the wall the feed photos of you where you're being tagged and you're like this is really
different for snap it was stories for inst it just became a gradual Evolution first was just a
beautiful app on photos and video and then it sort of added more and more things with eloo right we
realized that initially live streams would have gone into two directions it could have just been
a broadcast that there could have been millions of people who are listening to a live sort of a
chat a
nd we realized we don't want to build that because that's one way there's never going to be
a meaningful dialogue and that way the platform is going to really value add a lot of people
YouTube is doing a great job of it others are doing a great job of it we wanted people to talk
to their favorite creators and then gradually it's a part of a flywheel of you talk to them you
realize that hey I on a I'm on a stage now I like five to 10 followers myself now do I want
to be a Creator do I want t
o swap sees and do I want to be the one who's holding this experience
together so that really sort of kicks off the fly and then you want to earn money and then you want
to sort of really become very loyal to a platform because now you're sort of building an audience
you're monetizing or growing with that platform so co-creation is a huge part of the DNA how we
made it very simple was through two things one we are a platform that until you do a meaningful
action does not ask you to lock in
right so it's initially about just setting up trust because
you're talking to a middle India user for whom there is inherent trust deficit right that
there are a lot of new platforms and you're a new age brand you're a two and a half year old
brand not everyone knows about you so it's about giving them a very low friction start and saying
that hey just experience a product we can trust us Crow of others trusters Etc and then when they
meaningfully want to engage is where we ask them for the
ir name their profile pick because a host
needs to know all of that before they take them on a call by then the trust has already been buil
and you have to first think of things other than Co streaming that they will start with so it's a
real journey building so it's commenting sending hearts sending following sending stickers Etc and
then sort of you go and become a co- streamer and we realize that as more and more people were doing
this retention improves people are coming back at scale e
ngagement time improves because you're not
just sometimes waiting in a queue that when you would get accepted and then you want to talk
as well so that's been a massive learning for us and it's all changed in the last one and a
half years for us that's fantastic I think the other big reason your engagement levels and your
retentions are so high is that whole relatability Factor you spoke about as an audience I relate
not just to the content and not just that it's in my own language but also
with the host or the
Creator who's moderating that particular room and you briefly touched upon how you're not really
chasing the celebrity co-creator or the celebrity Creator SL poost uh but you have actually now
almost created your own Stars within ELO and you have several creators who have more than a million
followers and their own micro communities within eloo right the reason I co-create is because I'm
seeing and talking to somebody who's so relatable to me my Persona and my life pro
blems um take us
to how have you managed to curate on the Creator side what are the toolkits that you give them
because you don't just push them into rooms you set them up for Success right both in the product
side we spoke about toolkit uh take us through how have you been able to so successfully curate
creators and set them up and enable their success on the app you know one thing that has a product
we're very proud of yeah is that right from a large celebrity yeah like a Kik Aran to some
body
who's just on the internet on in their first or second month we can help both on eloo build an
audience yeah at scale at scale and I think that in a nutshell as what product building is about
yeah right because if you have to do that there are certain things which become non-negotiables
and that I could articulate as three points one is tools right that what are the right tools that
you're giving them right from Creator onboarding just like you've heard of an FPU there's an FPC
as wel
l a first time Creator experience so lot of guided navigation that this is where you see your
gifts this is where you see this and it's a lot of progressive disclosures we will not directly
bombard you that do this do that and stuff we go very very easy on in terms of how to create and
stuff giving them the right Tools in terms of visual filters audio filters Etc second is trust
and sa this is very important for us because what we've realized is that when you feel home like
right now I'm ta
lking to you I feel at ease so there's the best version of a person that can
come out when a Creator feels at ease they they're far more likely to be impactful they're far more
likely toage touch a lot of Hearts engage so just ensuring so what we never compromise on is that
as a host you should be able to mute others unmute others switch off someone's video you should be
able to be in charge of your own so think of it as your little Roblox right where you can play around
with who should com
e on uh the call who should go uh who should you sort of mention who you should
not everything it's all under your control third is context so uh setting context is about your
thumbnail uh your room titles your room backdrops so that you are able to tell people people are
not going to spend more than 5 10 seconds into your room to understand what is happening yeah so
we set you up for success by saying here these are the things and this is where our training comes
so we have a proper team t
hat looks after content training and they would say that and we can't
train everyone yeah so certain things are done by product some others come into a training Loop
where we would set you up for success in a more nuanced Manner and then you sort of grow with
us so I think a combination of these three is what we seem to be doing with and I think the
other big win so far has been just the amount of time people spend right your power users are
spending more than 75 minutes on the app so it's
actually cont that is getting consumed in Long
format forms and this is live non format which is even harder to do right um and I I always have
said it's a like culmination of all these things that you've done whether it's co-creation whether
it's vernacular multiple formats Creator products and tools of the fact that it's continuously
new relevant very topical seasonal content but the interesting piece is that even the number of
sessions people do is like multiple right and I'm actually sw
itching from room to room host host to
host uh so just wanted to touch upon this almost beautiful intersection this wonderful kind thing
we have created where the video is consumed in law format but there's like multiple options and
varieties and there what over 100,000 daily live rooms that people choose from right so there is
no parto here people are really spread out like wide across the app but take us through like you
know how did you get to this point and from day one you've been at s
uch a high engagement time
right uh but what is that magnet that kind of draws people to like spending an hour plus daily
on El yeah so for a product in our space which is in the social entertainment area the economy that
you want people to spend first is their time yeah right you're not in the convenience economy so
I'm not helping you save time in something but you are ultimately giving them a value payoff
for the time that they are giving you right I like to look at this and I always der
ive examples
from offline earlier and you could also relate to it because I've come from a time where Gio
just started yeah where you to be the entire vas economy where people would call 111 and you
could talk to somebody you could consult someone there was jobs there was matrimonial there was
Astro gam absolutely right so vas was a billion dollar Plus Market and then Gio changed the game
with its own sort of pricing and a lot of this so behaviors don't change because people used to
do tha
t now people start looking at other avenues of expressing themselves and while everyone went
into short video and other who once is we thought that this is such a massive Behavior how can
we bring this and catalyze this and that is what live streaming is eventally about so for all
the people who spend a lot of time that time is divided into rooms and into various sessions right
so the whole idea is that whether it's a four five minute conversation whether it's a small round
of game whether
it's an astrology consultation whether it is a problem solving discussion the
typical time for that is about five six minutes so instead of looking at it as one 60 70 minute
thought it's about delivering them several such value moments where then they are like hey I like
this person I want to follow and the next time you're live I want to be notified of that and that
Loop is what we are sort of really excited about because then as a social product you're then
talking about attention you're
talking about people coming back more and more often and that
that's a channel flipping behavior on TV that people do exactly and I call it we internally
call it something called as meaningful sessions yeah right because it has to be a session which
is Meaningful it needs to have triggered some aha moment so that user whether it is a conversation
whether it is sharing something whether it is a game whether it is anything which is sort of
there in the product we've tried to build it in a way
that you're able to get some value yeah and
again this ties back to the earlier question you had said about hom makers about Merchants about
students many others are supposed to get value depending on what you like so how the product has
not changed around around this we always had rooms we always had context now it's become more Lan so
now you will see rooms there's a tab called nearby where when you click on it I I was like I'll share
a incident we have a Creator in our office yeah I cli
cked on nearby and I the first room that I saw
was him streaming from the other room and I was so happy that wow this is working so well and imagine
the joy that if you are in Patna you want to then talk to people who are host who nearby so if I'm
in darbang somebody else is in dabanga I can have conversation about food I can have conversations
about everything and where else in India would you get to talk like that and that to in a safe Manner
and you know we've seen to many incidents so t
ime is essentially a function of people giving time on
the platform and people talking about this off the platform as well that people discussing that he
this was a Creator who we met here can we plan to meet offline like there have been so many people
who have connected online Ono and then connected offline to catch up so those stories are like
numerous and that just shows that we've sort of been able to touch a own nve there yeah and I
think what local has also done is create these micro
communities now right I think a key Insight
recently as scale has happened for you and is these digital micro communities right that people
are Bing and I know that you people were anyway creating WhatsApp groups and they were discussing
the feed that came through hiloo who's streaming next or what they can look forward to this evening
in terms of of content creation uh tell us about how you're bringing that onto the app and this
whole piece around digital communities that you're now creati
ng yeah so you know anything that we
want to build out yeah the first thing we like to check is whether there's an offline behavior for
it because behaviors are very tough to change uh you can only adapt to behaviors you can't build
new behaviors right uh what we realized at iloo was that uh we have a bread of creators right our
top creators have as many as 10 million followers yeah right and there are some so many creators
like you said previously with more than 1 million followers so ther
e were people who would create
WhatsApp groups were typically like fan groups around these creators that when is RJ Goldie going
to come live next yeah or taking clips of the live stream and sharing it there yeah and all in a
very very fun great when they would tag RJ gold and they would say that you know we on your fans
uh because a single notification of iloo may not suffice you might miss that notification so they
like to stay connected like that how we are sort of solving for that is we
believe that a community
may not be built in a very traditional way like the most dated format of community is that it's
a group I'm sending a message and an attachment or a broadcast we believe that live in itself is
a community it's a very very Vibrant Community and it can have levels it can have associations in it
s there could be some people who I might want to talk one-on-one with there could be some people
with whom I'm talking in a broad broadcast with now we are basically trying to
get people to also
see other sides of that Creator in terms of you know what else are they doing besides their live
stream maybe they want to share a BTS maybe they want to share another clip about something else in
their life and that is something that we already sort of working on because we believe that eloo in
a nutshell is a digital Community right of people coming together really socializing over common
interest yeah so that's something of course that is there on the horizon for that
once of products
being built but that would be hopefully something that you could enjoy in the next few months see
it also want to touch upon how you mentioned that it's a safe space right I think that is super
critical given especially the scale at which you're operating right now that as we said spoke
with a diversity of audiences you have genz folks you have Housewives you have shop owners owners
multiple languages multiple content formats the contradiction really is that people come on
to
eloo interact with a bunch of strangers but the big insight and takeaway has been that they still
feel that it's a safe space to share literally not just audio but video as well and really interact
with the hosts as well as the other people in that live room take us through typically for a Creator
how are you protecting them from NSFW content and also how have you managed to create the sense
of safety so that there are no inhibitions and people are okay sharing vulnerabilities in an
on
line safe space let me again come back and tell you a story yeah right I I've so far visited
about five different towns of India as part of my market research and the question you're asking me
is a question that we asked users as well we were like I asked them very point and I was very Blown Away by the
inside they'll call me when I go there right the problem the problem we face is that
our friends are not available at all points of time when I call them and I talk to them maybe
I'm prepari
ng for UPSC and I'm having my own struggle and when I call them, they are like
"Yaar, you are always complaining about your life. I don't want to hear this I have my own problems"
I was like okay I didn't even get... A lot of times it's about an outlet. Mental health is not
very actively discussed in India and sometimes a product just becomes an outlet for them, that
let me chat with people where the first fabric that we tried to crack was it's going to be
non-judgmental. So your host is su
pposed to really welcome you. They listen to you and while they
are no experts, so they can't give you solutions, sometimes, just listening to you is part of the solution.
So that has been the one insight that really changed the way we operated the platform. That
was one. The second aspect around the whole safety aspect is Tech. When we first understood that
people want to talk then that means there are enough good actors in the system. But you have to protect the
system from bad actors. It'
s not to say that we don't have bad actors. It would be a lie to say that we've not encountered any situations. So how do we solve for that? We solve for that in
2-3 ways. One is essentially - the intent is very high. So we use a lot of AI here in terms
of parsing a live stream into images of not just your host but co-host. There are text models that we see
for comments, there are visual models we see for video and there are audio models we see for voice.
So for all three, we can get instant
feedback that if there is something that crosses a threshold, we
can auto-end it. We have like a Thanos feature inside the app. We actually just auto-end it,
if we feel that this has crossed the threshold. We have hundreds of manual moderators. We have
in-house as well as those working with BPOs who are working in shifts. This number has
constantly been going up. When we started I was the moderator along with a few others and we would keep
watching that everything needs to be okay. Now wit
h the kind of scale we have, we soon need thousands of
moderators. So they're just essentially watching in overall. Here we not just get to moderate the
livestreams, we get feedback about the quality as well. And our product tagging - our product essentially is a human talking to an AI and making the product better. So that really helps. Third, now
we are essentially trying to create products where the Creator and their family takes control.
If I trust you, then let me focus on the great sho
w that I'm talking to people. You are
there in my life, you can moderate on my behalf. Because you are, essentially what I call it
internally is, my "Guardian" in this live stream . So we're introducing those aspects that somebody
can be your Guardian, somebody can moderate on your behalf, whoever you choose to. So with this the
entire concept of trust and safety gets solved. We really overeducate Creators. In terms of how
this is. We will talk to them up front that you know, this is how yo
u mute someone, this is how you
switch off video. You are in control whether you want to allow people on the video or not. It's all
up to you. As a product, one thing we can't change is that we are live. So the quantum
of delay is just 2 seconds from what you said to what a user hears. So in that we have to be the
best format possible. So that essentially means what our APIs have to call back in about 300ms
right if there is something our moderators have to be on the ball at all points of t
ime you have
to equip us with the best tools possible and we do the best job in all these three so at this
point of time if I talk about a metric we have it's called incident resolutions or incident
rates. We're right now, I would say about 99% free of any incidents. That's fantastic. That
actually takes me to the team behind all of this. You've really gone from one person to now over
100 folks and you've built out this fantastic leadership team around yourself. So take us through
hiring p
laybooks. Maybe for founders listening in today, what has worked for you and not worked for you?
How have you built your strength around hiring around the founder and maybe even
take us through some examples of what has worked for you in your leadership hiring. Sure. I think the
credit that I would give for this is to Flipkart Because I come from a Flipkart DNA. You know
that. You come from a Flipkart DNA and you could relate to that. Over there, the culture
is that you're thrown into the f
ire very early on. And you need to figure it out. And you figure it out.
And I realized that I figured it out like that. I think it's very important to understand
and be very honest to yourself that who are the kind of people who you like working with. For me;
Bias for action; Yes! I like working with people who are high on energy, high on action. I'm extremely okay
if we make mistakes because I know I would make more mistakes than the founder next to me. Hire for
attitude. So that has bee
n very important that if that is something that you resonate with we'll
have no friction and we'll at least work very well. Over here because we were growing at a very very fast pace, it was very important that I not just strengthen the CXO
team, but the middle management as well. I think we're really getting there. We're now about
132 people at Eloelo. So it's been an exciting number. People have really sort of stepped
up. For example, in product - Yash has been with us for about three year
s. So he's sort of really stepped up. Nisheeth who's been my friend since
like six years, he's joined us recently as the COO. He's someone I know from way back and has the same
bias of action as I do. Kushal leads our content, our strategy our business and even advises on
parts of product. So he has sort of come in - somebody I know since like a year year and a half now.
Stellar background, comes with a very high bias for action, responsibility. Same. Saatvik looks at our performance marketi
ng.
Ankit, Amresh who look at our engineering. Folks who we've worked with, what we have realized is that it's very tough to
get it first time right. I would say that I would be lying if I said I had not made mistakes.
And the mistakes are not in the people that I've worked with, it's in my choices.
Sometimes no one is a great hire or a bad hire. It's about whether they gel with your working
style or not. So figuring out what I want for this company was very important and what I realized
is that there would be so many decisions you have to make. If you get more than half of them
right, it's great. So for me, it was about just understanding that, "Hey, this is what I like.
This is what this person brings to the table. If I don't have to micromanage and I can just go
about doing my task and a person can take this up on their own, then it's essentially about trust."
Right. My way of working with my leaders has been that I'll give you all the trust and I don't want to take it ba
ck. Yeah. So that is the way the entire equation
has worked and it's now come to a level where we are strengthening middle management. We were
always great at execution. You think of an idea at 10 PM, we would be live with it at 12:00 a.m. That's
been our DNA because we are restless people. I like working with people who are very restless
because I know for a fact that if you text me at 2 a.m. with an idea I would probably be preparing
a blueprint for that at 9:00 a.m. and talking to you th
at hey this is what I've thought through. So working
with people who exchange that energy is fun. You've actually had very little attrition in the
leadership team and most of your CXOs have been with you for 2 years plus and that two years
is especially relevant because like you said you were at less than half your scale just a
little under two years ago and you're almost grown 20X in the four journey that you have had. What
do you think the culture is? Clearly you're doing something right.
Take us through a day in the
life of being at the Eloelo office or being an Eloelo? I think our culture has evolved lot like our
culture before I even tell you and talk about a in the culture we've gone from various mistakes in
that is well and that's uh a lot of times we tend to tell the positive side but not the learning
aspect like we've gone from a lot of mistakes which led to attrition because we were not we were
hiring for urgency that who is available in the next 15 days scaling up
that yeah who's available
in 15 days and let's hire a lot and we cigar it out yeah at that time I realized that maybe that's
not the right way right because you're just just filling certain roles rather than really solving
for that couple of folks in Android and back end they've been with me since 3 years and two months
now right that's from the time we moved from a react native to a cin massive shift these guys
have been with us and now they are like lead engineers in the respective fors h
ow you go about
building culture with such guys is one you trust them and but you trust them with the fact that you
have to first explain them and give them context you can't just uh say that you do this without
giving them enough context of what is expected of their delivery so trust with context has been one
yeah second has been massive respect for execution right we a very very execution first company it's
a speed over Perfection kind of a concept that we believe in that this has to corr
ect so let's
ensure that we at least doing 10 things so that we can get six or five of them right if we only
do three things then there's a chance that our final efficacy would be much much lower how a day
in the office goes with these two things coming in is that it's one been very high octane high energy
second is we we are very ambitious people yeah right so in our town halls you'll see me standing
some chair and we have like it's very tough to do this but we have a Anthem yeah I'll recr
eate it in
a non crazy way for you we chest TH or clap and we say H ha ha yeah this came from my Z turning
where we had said that eloo is a company just is was the thing we had said we said yeah we are
not I'm not a repeat founder yeah for me to learn things I've had to do a lot of Daka in my life
and so my people as well we said that you know we're in a market which is not really a market
where everyone say be saying that your users want to pay creators want to retain you have to go
about
and Beyond so the is D it's not everys we said and we do this every town hall stening yeah
that is what you see that in a nutshell is whato culture is about so whenever we do something which
is crazy like last year for Valentine's we did a reality show where we got six called n house where
we got six couples inside a guro villa yeah and we live stream for about 120 hours trade this year we
did I remember you in a suit and me making fun of you so and I could say people who had no
experience
of doing this doing this live and being up for like 72 hours straight and we had
so many issues that time no gear nothing like uh you go to a large production house they would do
this for about 3 4 CR we did it this did this in a net budget of 24 lakhs yeah so that was our
entire DNA right so we are action oriented we are higher energy we are very ambitious and we are
Frugal in how we think like if something has to be done we are like does is this really important
can we figure out a creat
ive way of doing it our mind works on a lot of thck yeah let's do
something interesting it's very in it's very much around Innovation yeah I would say so that is
brought be our culture oh fantastic and that you had a very successful Valentine's Day campaign
and this year you did something different your best campaign so far uh can you give us a sneak
peek into what's coming up next what's the next big thing that's breing anyo yeah I mean this
Valentine's Day campaign was the start of what i
s coming in next as well like we realized that
out of our entire TG the one uh audience that we're connecting with the most is the Youth of the
country and we realized that as a brand you need to have a small uh slight Persona right like you
can't be a gesture a caregiver everything together as a and we are a bit of a rebel in our nature
that uh we chose live as a format where everyone was going eing uh we choose interactivity where
everyone in live would look at broadcast we get celebritie
s to come and talk to their FS live in
a very sort of trusted way so we realized that we flipped the narrative even on Valentine's
Day we said that Cho Valentine's Day we call it kuara div yeah because why should singles
ever say that this is not an event for me and we did an entire campaign that then we got the
X Big Boss winner manav to sort of come live on the app and launch newer and newer features so
now how the product is scaling is that we're a live first social media product but you
can
do so much more here you could have guided conversations with or have digital companions in
form of creators who are essentially going to be talking to you about anything in your life
it could be around uh things they are good at it could be on motivation asro relationships
anything that you sort of looking at number two is about just having a great time in socializing
because that's the start then you really connect with more people so you could chat you could play
you could play Gam
es Etc that's how you sort of do that and now we are adding more things like
you could share stuff outside of the platform because at 12 way maybe you are not in the mood
to have a long 30 minutes live stream but maybe you could see something and you want to share
that uh speaks to your state of mind yeah so what would not ever change is that we are always
talking to the core India right their language in formats that they love everyone's asked me
that where what is the Tik Tok of India lik
e what is going to be the bite dance of India for
us for the first year it was always fake it till you make that maybe we are maybe we are not but
we going to shout on the roofs yeah now we know that we will make it because we want to become
that and we know that we will 10x our product offerings we will ensure our Tech becomes even
better than what it is we will appeal to more and more users and we believe that this is a
product that would connect every Indian together over these live conv
ersations so that's the future
more communities more formats more and more things where creators can earn money uh users can have
a great time both paid and non-paid can have a great time so that's broadly how the platform is
involving and I think I'm want to end by saying that you're number one but you're not stopping and
just like continuing to run so to always being The Runaway leader uh three big chers to eloo and to
always being like a runaway success and to always innovating first uh
and doing Innovation fugly
so all the very best to everything that's going to come rest of this year and thank you so much
once again Sarah for being here thank you thank you
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