“Trell is more of a storytelling platform rather than a talent stage”
Trell is the go-to platform for users to share their experiences, recommendations, and reviews across various categories including health and fitness, beauty and skincare, travel, movie reviews, cooking, home-décor and much more. The lifestyle vlogging platform allows users to create 3-5-minute videos in their native languages along with a ‘shop’ feature that lets them purchase the products featured in the vlogs. Additionally, the platform also allows users to earn rewards, goodies and vacations through its interface. The app’s users can share or view experiences and reviews in categories such as cooking, movie reviews, beauty, and skincare through videos of not more than five minutes. The lifestyle community-commerce platform is breaking all the records by witnessing 15 million downloads in a matter of just 8 days, just after the bold decision made by Indian government to promote Atmanirbhar Bharat. Trell has recently launched its platform in three new languages; Marathi, Kannada and Bengali, making the total count to 8 languages (Additionally, Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam) active so far. Our correspondent Vivek Singh Chauhan spoke to Pulkit Agarwal, Cofounder, Trell, to know how ban on Chinese apps can create a difference for Indian short video platforms. Here’s an edited excerpts of the Interaction.
What has been the impact of the Chinese mobile applications ban on your business? The impact has been massive. Even before the Chinese apps ban, Trell was growing rapidly at a rate of 25 per cent every month. Since the ban, we have received an overwhelming response from our users where we have seen an influx of over 15 Million downloads in a matter of just 8 days. We have now crossed the DAU of Pinterest and Twitter apps in India. Similarly, our
creator community has also grown by 5X with over 5.5 Lakh+ new creators who have joined our platform and are creating unique content every day.
How much has your subscriber base increased (domestically and internationally)? At the moment, Trell only caters to Indian audiences, we have grown 10X since the ban, and our total user base now stands strong at 46 million+ downloads in total.
Security was one of the main concerns for the ban in India. How is Trell managing its customer database so as not to face a similar ban from other countries? We are an Indian company and all our user data is stored within the boundaries of the country. We comply with all the national regulations and user privacy and security is of the utmost importance to us.
Where is your main source of funding coming
from? How are you managing liquidity amid the pandemic? We have been fortunate enough to be backed by some very well known Investors in the Industry today. We have raised a total of $5.5M from Sequoia’s Surge, KTB Network, Beenext, WEH Ventures, Sprout Ventures, Rajan Anandan, Aprameya Radhakrishna, (Co-founder of Vocal and Taxiforsure), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, Livspace), Nitin Gupta (Cofounder, Payumoney), Anupam Mittal (Founder, Shaadi.com), Amit Lakhotia (extokopedia, Paytm), Shanti Mohan (CEO, Letsventure) in its existing list of angel investors. Even during the pandemic, we have seen an upsurge in the users on the platform which was already preparing us for more to come.
Going forward, what will be your major focus areas? What are your expansion plans? Our primary area of focus at this point is to ensure that our community is growing and fostering, our users are mankind meaningful connections among them and have unmatched experience on the platform by easily sharing their lifestyle tips, stories, and experiences with a likeminded audience.
Secondly, we are strategically working towards phase 2 of giving our users more personalized content and match-making those on the basis of taste/interest-graph by diving deeper into advanced Machine Learning Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence to further stimulate our product. Also, new features like a ‘Reaction Maker’, ‘Talk Show Hosting’ are going to be launched soon to give our creators more options to engage with their audiences in unique ways.
We are presently witnessing the most extraordinary growth and support from our Indian community, to reinforce this and scale further; we are in the process of hiring an energetic, creative and experienced team that understands the nuances of our Indian audiences.
What differentiates Trell from its peers in its segment? How are you competing with other apps? Despite all the current market comparisons, apart from the fact that we have user-generated original videos, Trell is more of a storytelling platform rather than a talent stage. A typical content length on Trell ranges from 2-4 mins as compared to 30s snippets on the other app . As a business, we are into social commerce and are focused on building a strong interest-based/ passion-based community of content creators (KOL’S) and their audiences in multiple Indian languages that enable our users to make well informed and suitable purchase decisions for better lifestyle choices. Hence, at the moment, there is no other Indian platform which is focused on solving lifestyle needs in the Indian languages that we are competing with right now.
Chinese apps were banned in India, Trell can be considered as a suitable alternative for which of these apps? The Chinese app ban has definitely left a vacuum to be filled. Trell is picking up on this opportunity and seeing a lot of organic traction. However, our platform is not an alternative for any of these Chinese platforms. We are very focused on building a tight-knit community in India that engages the audience with meaningful, life-altering lifestyle content.
What is your revenue model? Trell is an Indian Lifestyle Community Commerce platform where KOL’S (key-opinion-leaders) share their lifestyle product recommendations based on their personal experiences. These KOL’S are connected with suitable brands that have unique offerings that will benefit our audiences and also help them make suitable lifestyle choices. These products are then identified and auto-tagged through our algorithms and are available on ‘Trell Shop’ for users to purchase. Trell makes revenue on every purchase made on the platform and also shares a part of the revenue generated with the KOL’S for their long term sustenance and monetization.