With a heart on ‘democratizing influence’, Do Your Thng (DYT) is constantly trying to automate the technology perspective so that more local people could engage and create content. The platform is organically making its footprints on the community creators.
In an one-on-one interaction with MI, Ankit Agarwal, CEO & Founder, Do Your Thng opens up about its journey and reach so far.
Excerpts here:
Q) Take us through your journey so far.
Ankit: I have been in the content/influencer marketing space for a long time. Two and a half years back, I decided to come to India and start my business. It is when DYT happened. We have grown more than eight times in terms of revenue. We have 100 thousand users on the app in terms of users. It’s been a pretty good journey. However, the product has evolved over the years from what we started. The core remains the same; we want creators to make money from our app.
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Q) The market is much crowed right now. How do you foresee the influencer market?
Ankit: The influencer marketing category, specifically, is pretty overcrowded. A lot more creators, agencies, and platforms are coming out. For us, it’s a clear differentiation; we are not an influencer marketing company. We are community creators, and influencer marketing has become one of the things. We are a platform that allows creators and influencers to create content for various brands and earn through it.
Q) How does the app work? How is it helpful for brands as well as influencers?
Ankit: We have two extensions, one for brands and then creators. For brands, we have a web panel. They can put necessary details about the campaign on the dashboard, like content, costings, etc. Then the algorithm would automatically give them recommendations for the creators. Brands can either choose from the suggestions or can select manually. Once the creators are determined, they get a notification on the mobile app. It is end-to-end management for the brand.
For most brands, the panel is straightforward because all things are in one place. They know precisely who the creator is, how much they are paying for the job, and what the outcome is. It is possible from a single dashboard.
Q) Since inception you worked with a lot of brands. What is the one common thing that has worked for all brands?
Ankit: The most common thing for all brands is the single dashboard that covers multiple items a brand has to go through, right from selecting multiple agents, looking at the content, and finding the right influencer. It becomes super easy for brands to manage all things from one place. The second thing is transparency.
Q) Working towards “democratizing influence”. What does it mean?
Ankit: When we launched DYT, we saw massive discrimination in terms of talent distribution in the industry. Some creators were huge, like Bhuvan Bam and Dolly Singh. But if you watch, most of the talent is in the middle class with good followers. These people are good with content creation. But brands usually go for the big influencers and do not even consider picking middle-class ones. So we aimed to democratize influence. We want to make these creators discoverable. A brand can go with the big or middle-class influencers when planning a campaign. We want to give equal opportunities to the creators, irrespective of their position in the market.
Q) What are the opportunities for influencers or micro influencers in this market? How to create more opportunities?
Ankit: There are many new parameters for the brands that earlier they could not consider. Besides influencer marketing, there is a lot of open challenge from the brands. First, D2C brands are looking for creators only for content creation and not for influencer marketing. So rather than going to agencies, brands prefer to find influencers. Then they use the content on their social platforms and website. These brands also do product sampling from the influencers, like structured feedback on their new product. If we consider the breadth of influencer marketing, it will be more mature than before. Length-wise, a lot of new age great methods have started coming up.
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For creators, a lot of new developments have happened already. Earlier, the brand’s income used to be 90-95% of the total revenue that the creator would take. Now, this number has gone down to 75%. So the incomes coming from non-branded sources have started picking up. Creators have the capabilities of doing paid campaigns, subscriptions, etc. The creators now also have avenues of entry and ways of making money online that have also gone up multifold. This industry has a lot of potentials. The international creator economy is mindblowing. In the next 5-6 years, both the creator and brands will explode and grow multifold. There will be a radical change.
Q) What are trends you have witnessed in the Fintech market?
Ankit: From the brand side of the creator economy, the first trend is the number of avenues has grown up. And the kind of creators that have been picked up. Second, micro and nano creators have been utilized. Third, podcasts are going big. Audio influencers are coming as well. Fourth, new categories of influencers are coming up. Such as crypto and gaming.
On the creator side, the trends are the percentage of the brand. It is expected to go even more down. Many new income-making avenues are coming up, like NFT, subscription plans, and webinars.
Q) What are the steps you are considering to educate people?
Ankit: We have a full-fledged academy module on the app and the panel. It educates the brands about how the campaign you should be doing. It also educates the creators about its content. To make better content and to earn more. As the sector is growing multifold, somebody in the industry needs to be there and educate the brands and creators closely.
Q) How do you reach people?
Ankit: It’s always organic. We have not performed any paid advertisements till now. It is because we are overwhelmed with our results and numbers, which are coming organically. We generally cater to the people who find us organically on the creator side. On the brand side, we have a sales team that reaches out to the brand.
Q) What are demographic details?
Ankit: On the creator side, most people are 18-28 years old. They are primarily metro-centric, like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Kolkata. The second biggest city other than the metro is Jaipur and Agra. Regarding gender ratio, we have a healthy split of 55% females and 45% males. We have a crowd for different categories ranging from fashion and lifestyle to crypto and gaming. We also have fintech, fitness, and sports. About 55-60% speak English, followed by 30% in regional languages like Hindi, Malayalam, Gujrati, and Kannad. We are officially tied up with four platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube at the API level. We also work with Indian social media like Chinagri, MX TakaTak, Trell, etc.
Q) What are your future plans?
Ankit: We want to grow this sector and category. We want to educate both the brands and creators. At the same time, we want to infuse technology in all the other avenues which are coming up. We want to automate wherever possible using technology and ensure that it is accessible by not only the more prominent brands but smaller ones as well. So the local Kirana store should be able to use DYT, get the influencers within the range, and create campaigns for its store. At the same time, we want this to happen at the creator level also. So people can use and create content wherever it’s possible.
