Brief Profile of Mr. Ishan Jindal
Ishan Jindal, an engineer turned VC turned Entrepreneur started Wobb in 2020. Wobb has quickly become a known name in the marketing industry with 300 of India’s largest companies using it for all their influencer needs.
Ishan graduated from IIT Delhi and is a repeat founder. His previous ventures included building a road crash detection app -Safely Home, a workforce management solution – Total Visible, and a Delhi-based Italian QSR – Pizzabox. Over the last year and a half, the team has grown to 30 that carries a combined experience of over 30 years in the influencer marketing space.
The team of young Wobbers are making it easy for marketing managers to find and manage influencers at scale. With an ability to find & hire relevant influencers in minutes, bringing trust through escrow-based bulk payouts, simplified content approval and revision mechanisms, influencer & marketing manager two-sided rating mechanism, they simplify the otherwise complex transaction, bringing in more trust & accountability and making the experience hassle-free.
Passionate in Marketing caught up with Mr. Ishan Jindal to discuss about ‘How this new-age startup – Wobb changing the game of Influencer Marketing with its AI offerings’.
Tell us about your journey. What was your Eureka moment that led to the inception of Wobb?
After graduating from IIT Delhi, I worked as an investment analyst. Many D2C founders I was evaluating were leveraging influencers for growing well. However, most struggled to scale the influencer channel as influencer marketing is manual and time-consuming. Finding the right influencers is hard; sending products, coordinating content revisions, disbursing payouts, and tracking progress is a severe headache for any marketer. I quickly started evaluating the space to find startups using technology to solve this problem.
For months, I tried to find a startup we could invest in to solve the problem. After not being able to find half-decent a solution, the urge to solve this myself led to the creation of Wobb. At Wobb.ai, we are simplifying influencer marketing. Marketers can quickly post their influencer requirements for free on the Wobb platform. Wobb Influencers have their dashboard where they can see all requirements & apply for relevant ones instantly. This way, Marketers can find and hire influencers within minutes on Wobb.
Tell us more about your technological integrations. How are you leveraging the power of AI to enhance your services?
Wobb.ai uses AI at the core. Our algorithms can find the right fit influencers & invite them to participate in brand campaigns. Finding relevant influencers can make a massive difference in the returns generated in any influencer campaign.
Elaborate on the present market scenario. What kind of business opportunities do you see in this segment?
People of all ages spend more time on social media, further accelerated by Covid. Brands need to be present there to be on top of mind. A myriad of influencers sharing expertise also supports them. The influencer market has grown to $14Bn worldwide.
There is also a massive shift in spending from celebrities to macro and micro-influencers. The number of influencers is rising; many have now full-time employment. As this increases, we will see increasing income opportunities and businesses created around influencers.
Could you shed some light on your tie-ups and partnerships so far? Are there any agreements that are in the pipeline?
Since our inception, we have completed over 5000 campaign transactions. We work with 300 of India’s most prominent brands and over 50,000 influencers. Our successful campaign results are proof of how seriously we value our collaborations. We have wired with legacy brands like Emami, HDFC Life, Makeup Revolution and startups like Plum Goodness, Biba India.
What are your expansion plans for the coming 3-5 years?
We are growing extremely fast, and Wobb has become the go-to influencer hiring platform for many marketers. We would expand our active influencer base to over five lacs+ influencers across all genres, including beauty, personal care, fashion, finance, education, home & kitchen, gaming, fitness, travel and more.
We want to simplify influencer hiring for all D2C brands in India and generate the best bang for their buck. At the same time, for our influencers, we want to help them all make Rs 50k every month on the Wobb platform promoting brands they love, so they never have to worry about their finances.
What are the USPs of Wobb that make it stand apart from the competitors?
We’re building a marketplace where marketers can quickly hire trusted influencers. Marketers post their influencer campaign requirements on the Wobb.ai dashboard. Influencers on their dashboard actively scout new and open opportunities and apply for ones that interest them. Quite a few of our brand marketers have hired influencers & launched campaigns in under 30 minutes.
The key USPs of Wobb is:
1. Speed of hiring – Brands can hire influencers in minutes
2. Disintermediation – Easily manage thousands of influencers without the need of an intermediary/agency
3. Quality of Work – our influencer rating system ensures accountability and rewards them for good work, ensuring quality delivery, reduced back-outs, and highly responsive influencers
Throw some light on your business model
Marketers can post their influencer campaign requirements on Wobb for free. They can run four kinds of payouts on the Wobb platform – Barter (where you send products in exchange for promotion), Fixed Cash payout to all influencers, Flexible cash payout (different payout to different influencers based on bidding), and finally Commission based on sale generated by influencers.
We do not charge anything from Marketers today. They can run a completely free barter campaign on Wobb or a commission-based campaign. On the influencer side, we charge a 10% fee for cash income generated by our influencers via the Wobb platform that takes care of the transaction fee and our expenses.
The model is highly transparent and affordable, especially in the influencer marketing industry—multiple layers of middle-man lead to bumped up costs for marketers and low in-hand for influencers.
What is the role of technology in revamping the Influencer marketing industry?
Technology will help in finding the right fit influencers. It will increase hiring speed by bringing influencers & brands on a common platform engaging in real-time. It will make an incredibly complex interaction between brands and multiple influencers easy to manage at scale. Using technology such as the Wobb tracking pixel, brands will also track influencers’ performance like traffic and conversion for the first time.
About Wobb
Wobb is the world’s fastest influencer hiring platform that connects marketers with verified social media influencers for paid and barter campaigns. Being one of its kind martech startup, Wobb is also recognized as India’s largest and AI-driven platform for influencers and marketers. Incepted in 2020, the startup is trusted by more than 300 brands and agencies and over 1 Lac influencers across the country.
Influencer marketing is getting bigger with social media platforms coming up with new content ideas and new ways for brands to engage with their potential customers. This makes influencer marketing an integral part of an influencer’s work life and influencer marketing – the key to unlocking creator supply. However, running influencer marketing in the present competitive scenario is extremely hard due to – high turnaround times, manual, lengthy execution process and no focus on the quality of work. To meet the challenges of the burgeoning creator economy, Wobb creates an optimized workplace to enable brand and influencer interaction during hiring, execution and post-campaign processes. This AI based algorithm allows both the influencers and campaign owners to browse and post campaigns respectively; thereby simplifying the mundane task of hiring the influencers.
Since the influencers are present on the platform itself, Wobb allows brand managers to run and execute their campaigns in record timeframe of 30 minutes. Right from hiring the influencer to launching the campaign; brand managers can do it all in the minimum span of time with the help of Wobb.
Speedy Influencer hiring – With millions of influencers being present on social media channels, influencer discovery and reaching out to the right influencer as per the brand’s objective is daunting. Furthermore, negotiations and contracting with influencers make it a week-long process to hire the influencer and get through with the marketing objective. Wobb expedites the influencer hiring process for marketers and brands which in turn reduces the turnaround time.
Relevancy of Influencers – Influencer marketing seems quite easy in the beginning but as you look for the right influencers for your second or third campaign, manual hunting can be a daunting task.
Furthermore, in this fast accelerating social media age, it is often tricky to identify and differentiate between the stated profile of influencers and what they are really followed or known for. Wobb’s machine learning engine continuously evaluates profiles of influencers to match them to the most relevant campaigns making it super easy. The growing number of influencers signing up on Wobb makes the pool big enough for all your future campaign needs.
Ease of execution – Marketers’ put a lot of effort in collecting the influencer’s addresses for product deliveries, content revisions, and approval, payment management for influencers, tracking campaign progress & collecting insights. This is such a waste of precious time doing grunt work that machines can do so much better. This is where Wobb focusses on providing a campaign experience that removes the heavy lifting from running a campaign.
Accountability like never before – If you’ve ever run an influencer campaign, you would know the influencer backout is so common. There was no real way to keep both sides accountable, and therefore a two-sided rating system just how you rate an uber driver and the driver rates you bring more accountability. Top-performing influencers who take their work seriously have the opportunity to build great ratings and reviews which helps influencers gain marketers’ trust.
Business growth and performance
Wobb was launched in September 2020 and has successfully raised angel and seed rounds of funding. Furthermore, it has built a team of more than 30 young professionals to build a disruptive marketplace for influencers and marketers and boost the creator economy. In a short span of time, it runs over 100 campaigns per month. Apart from this, it has completed 5000 campaign transactions with influencers since launching with an average of Rs. 5600 earning per campaign for the influencer.
Market overview
According to the stats – the global creator economy is estimated at $105 Bn and projected to cross $1 Tn making it one of the fastest-growing markets. Furthermore, global influencer marketing is valued at $17.5 Bn out of which the Indian market makes $354 Mn in 2022. In the present world of marketing, influencers form a dominant part of the creator economy. Close to 94% of creators have done at least 1 brand deal in 2021 and 42% have 16 or more. The scope of the market is broadening and Wobb leverages the opportunity to solve influencer’s biggest pain-point of today, which is sponsored brand deals, placing itself in a position to widen its offerings for tomorrow.
