Varun Saxena – Founder, Bolo Indya

Please tell us about the journey of Bolo Indya. How are you different from the existing competitors? Started off in May 2019, Bolo Indya’s core proposition from day one has been to empower content creators from different languages to transform their social capital into financial independence. Our differentiator has been the ability of the platform to innovate to enable content creators monetise their content on the platform.

The ban on Tiktok and other similar platforms might have given a new lease of life for Indian companies. How do you look at this development? This is a unique short term window opportunity available to Indian apps to be able to acquire users at almost no cost, be able to let them experience the platform and retain them based on strong user experience. The race is not to acquire users or get installs, it is to retain users and

Short video platform Bolo Indya happens to be on a roll ever since the fall of Tiktok and other China-linked apps in India. Currently having 40 lakh monthly active users across Android,

IOS and mobile web, the app offers short video creation, consumption and knowledge networking in 12 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi and Bhojpuri. Varun Saxena, Founder,

Bolo Indya, speaks more about the app and the growing competition among homegrown players in the short video space, in an interaction with Ramesh Kumar Raja. He also shares his plan to go global. Excerpts:

have them spend close to 60 min on daily basis on the platform.

What are the traction details of Bolo Indya and the response so far on Google Play and App Store? Put together, Bolo Indya has over 40 lakh monthly active users (MAU) and 18 lakh daily active users (DAU) across Android, IOS and mobile web. Over 24 lakh videos across 14 Indian languages are created on a daily basis on the platform.

With a number of homegrown players joining the fray, how do you look at the growing competition in the short video space? It is always exciting to have competition. While a couple of our peer apps are pixel-to-pixel copy of banned Chinese apps, we along with some others had existed for more than a year, and with a good month-over-month (MOM) growth rate. It is on platforms to create their differentiators both for creators

and consumers and emerge as winner with time.

Are your servers capable enough to handle the growing traffic? Certainly! With serverless architecture and auto scaling in place well within time, we are all set to handle any growth in traffic.

What are you doing at the value addition front to make your platform more exciting? As shared earlier, on the creator side being able to empower creators to monetise their content and thus become Aatmanirbhar, is our biggest value addition in a market like India where platforms have always limited creators to just influencer led marketing.

On consumer side, innovating on different interaction features with those who share similar interests and languages is where we add more value. We believe in creating a strong interest driven community

for consumers which has been highly appreciated by the consumers.

Content moderation is an issue of concern for social media platforms. How do you handle it? We have a three-tier moderation system. It starts with automated APIS to filter out the unwarranted content. Then it comes the role of community which could report any content that is insensitive or not in the lines with Indian ethics and values. And lastly, it comes the role of manual moderation to ensure anything that is left and against community guidelines is immediately taken off the platform. This input also feeds our ML sets to strengthen the APIS on regular basis.

What efforts you are putting into marketing to make Bolo Indya more popular and increase its recall value? We’d been working on brand penetration. Ranging from partnering with the likes of Radhika Madan and Aparrshakti Khurana on Independence Day, we will soon have big names of Tamil, Telugu and Bangla cinema and media industry joining hands exclusively with

Bolo Indya.

Do you have any expansion plan to make it global? We are already offering Sinhala language to our users from Sri Lanka, apart from offering them the content in Tamil. Similarly, we have some users already from Bangladesh consuming Bangla content.

Our current focus is on deep penetration in our own country, however South East Asia is where the next focus would be.

Please tell us about the funds you are raising and how they are going to help your business model? We are looking to raise 5 million USD and these funds would be used to work on strengthening of brand recall in Tier 2 cities, onboard some of the best tech talents and invest in the platform further to introduce more exciting communitybuilding features.

“While a couple of our peer apps are pixelto-pixel copy of banned Chinese apps, we along with some others had existed for more than a year, and with a good month-over-month (MOM) growth rate. It is on platforms to create their differentiators both for creators and consumers and emerge as winner with time”

Since short video platforms have emerged as a big marketing tool, are you also looking for corporate clients to increase your source of revenue? We are already a revenue generating company and working with over 55 corporate clients to help them leverage the power of language driven video content and to benefit from the strong engagement which our platform garners from the users.

What Bolo Indya is doing to ensure the security of data in India? Regular tech audits and rigorous security test at the time of launch of any new feature has been made the regular part, considering the data security, which is of highest importance for us. We ensure to use the most cryptic algorithms and secured data servers with very limited private access to ensure the same. ■