Fake followers, real trouble: Hyderabad girl builds AI platform to sort out India’s influencer marketing mess

Who is fake, and who is worth the money? This question weighs on companies looking to bet their penny on social media influencers for promotion of their brand. According to a report, India’s influencer marketing sector estimated to be worth Rs 15 billion, as on 2022, is likely to increase at a CAGR of 25 per cent, over the next five years. Not to overlook, India has more than 80 million social media content creators. Streamlining this flourishing influencer marketing sector techies are working on automating the brand to influencer connect. At the age of 25, Hyderabadi girl, Krishna Priya Akella set up Krisattva Private Limited for the launch of Starbuzz.ai, an AI-based SaaS platform that automates influencer marketing. Speaking to Bizz Buzz, Priya sheds light on the transformative impact automation has brought to the influencer marketing sector

What led your interest towards influencer marketing?

As an engineering graduate I wanted to take the road less taken and join a startup despite being selected by four companies at campus placement. Working in a startup, with a small closed team, employees get to perform, observe and learn multiple roles. The same happened with me while being on the role as a full-stack developer. At the startup, the marketing team was working with a client on influencer marketing. I saw how they were executing it, right from discovering the influencer, negotiating, follower base, exchange of screenshots, and others were all done manually. In an era where technology is being put to use in many fields, why not introduce it for influencer marketing. With this idea in mind, I did some research and then took my plan to that startups founder Arvind, he liked the idea and decided to work on it together. This is how, Starbuzz.ai was born in January 2021.

How did you progress while building the software?

After Arvind and I incorporated the company, we took it to T Hub. Both, me and Arvind come from a tech background, so we know how to build a product but the challenge was of how to take the platform to the market. How to sell the product...T Hub through their mentors helped us understand how to place the product in the market and so forth. For the first 18 months or so, only two of us worked on building the platform, and later we slowly built our team. We started off with a marketplace for brands and influencers to connect, but soon we realised that much more data about the influencers, and how beneficial the collaboration would be, has to be provided. There were many such insights that the brand would want to make a decision, was missing. That is when we came with the idea of building a SaaS platform with all different metrics and data incorporated. We have eight AI algorithms that work in this SaaS.

What solution does Starbuzz.ai provide to brands and agencies?

We have two products, one for brands and second for content creators or influencers. For the brand, we offer software that automates the complete influencer marketing. For instance, if a brand is selling their product only in Hyderabad, they can come on the software and provide details of their requirement, such as their influencer should be in Hyderabad and their followers should also be majorly in this city, in the age group of 30 to 40, and they should be female and the maximum budget allocated is Rs 10,000. Based on these metrics, the brand immediately gets the list of influencers that have followers matching their criteria. The list of influencer along with their contact detail will be given to the brand. So the brand from their team can have someone reach out to the influencer and manage them or we can help them with managing the influencer, which means talking with the influencer, negotiating the price, discussing the content and so on. This is one feature called as influencer discovery.

Second feature is that we generate a report on each influencer which talks about their fake follower percentage, which is a big problem these days. We provide data on the count of genuine or paid followers they have, engagement rate, previously collaborated posts, etc. All this data helps the brand make informed decision. The other feature is campaign management and monitoring. A smaller size campaign with four influencers is pretty easy to monitor and track, in the sense, which influencer has posted, what have they posted, what are the keywords used etc. If a bigger brand is launching a campaign with say 50 influencers it becomes a task for the brand to coordinate with them. Through our software the brand can just create the campaign and give the 50 influencers profiling and then the software will keep tracking them.

The brand is alerted when the content is posted. It will also track hour by hour update of how each influencer content is performing, how many views, like, comment, shares they got, what type of audience has the influencers content reached and so on. Based on this data the return on investment can be calculated by the brand. They get to know how the campaign is performing and how each individual influencer is contributing to the campaign. So the value-add here is that if the brand has to do this manually they have to ask the influencer to share then screenshot of the insights. We are minimising the manual intervention and cutting down the campaign process through our software.

How is Starbuzz.ai supporting content creators?

The second product is for the creators. The creators get detailed profile analysis wherein the app analyse trends related to followers, their active time, the hash-tags that are trending and so on, which helps the creator to post the content. The app also helps with ideas depending upon their niche because after a period of time creators end up with a creative block. The other biggest challenge is that the top influencers get brand-connect, even though other creator’s content is good they do not get much collaborations, and money from these brands.

There are certain influencers in tier-2, 3 cities who want to become creators but lack the sense of direction. Through the mobile application we train them on case to case basis on how they should be creating the content, what the followers are expecting and what they should do to get better brand deals, and marketplace which connects these brands with the influencers to get collaboration. They also get to see trending topics on various social media platforms, how different algorithms are performing and so on. The app is currently free for influencers.

How many brands and creators have you onboarded?

We have 500 brands and agencies that are already using the software. For the brands the subscription fee starts from Rs 999 per month and it goes up to Rs 50,000 depending on the number of influencers they want to use, and campaigns they want to launch, they can upgrade their package. We have close to 70,000 influencers from across India.

What is the total amount of investment and revenue earned till date?

I and Arvind bootstrapped the startup with our savings of Rs 30 lakh, which helped the startup sustain for almost two years. After that Rs 40 lakh was bagged through Startup India Seed fund. We raised Rs 4 crore from an angel investor in Seed round in October 2023. The investment has been utilised majorly for product development and team building. In these three years we have grown from two members to 16. All the features listed out has been developed and released in the past six months and in this short period itself we got 500 users. So the product development has accelerated and team capacity has increased. From last four months we are consistently generating Rs 1 lakh per month from subscription fees.

What is your plan for Starbuzz.ai over the next two years?

Right now the software supports Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Going ahead we would be adding new social media platforms and giving its analysis, alongside concrete RoI and competitive report. As we have captured the Indian market we want to test overseas market, this investment we have recently raised will help us enter newer markets like UAE, Singapore, and Malaysia primarily. Our target is to count Rs 10 crore in revenue, add 2,000 brands and two lakh influencers.

How would you predict the growth of influencer marketing sector?

The market overseas has matured but it is at a nascent stage in India. I do not see it disappearing anytime soon. What the brand wants at the end of the day is to reach their target audience. The advertising trend was first though newspapers, magazines, then television and radio, later it moved to social media content, and now it is through digital influencers. So maybe it will become more organised and accountable. Initially when we started out people were trying to understand what influencer marketing was, and how to collaborate with influencers. Now, after three years, brands have understood the power of influencer marketing and they are expecting results now. Before it was for brand awareness, now they are calculating the RoI, and looking towards analytics. Our software provides indepth analysis of each influencer. Our app downloads among creators has mostly been butterfly effect. Here the awareness is pretty good as they understand that they get better brand deals if they are with Starbuzz.ai.

What impact has Starbuzz.ai created for influencers and brands?

A creator in one of the rural areas is on Instagram. He had 10k followers and wanted to grow more and get better branding. He registered with Starbuzz and our team worked closely with him. His follower base has surged to 100k in four months and he started getting better branding opportunities. While it comes to brands, a brand into dairy products wanted to reach the rural audience. They were very adamant about trying out tier-1 creators as they thought their brand awareness here will add them value. We took our bet and told them that for their customers they have to look at influencers from tier-3 cities. They collaborated with them and ended up earning back 100x of investment. And, those influencers from tier-3 cities had bagged their first paid brand collaboration.