Social Media Platform Feature - Chtrbox

About Chtrbox

Chtrbox (pronounced as Chatterbox), a technology powered Influencer Marketing company, helps brands discover & collaborate with their most relevant influencers. We offer brands and leading agencies access to 1,25,000+ social media stars and micro influencers in India, including the most popular and emerging Instagrammers, Twitteratis. YouTubers, Bloggers, Mom Influencers, Campus Ambassadors, and Early Adopters – all segmented across 16 categories, unique data points, and content buckets. Through proprietary technology, Chtrbox helps brands make data driven decisions and measure impact & RoI on their influencer led campaigns. Our brand strategy teams further help brands meet marketing goals by either setting up their influencer marketing plans, and/or supporting their ongoing campaigns via engaging the right influencer meida mix.

Chtrbox is a combined effort of an A team — Pranay Swarup (Previously, Co-founder of LetsIntern.com & Youth:ink) leads the entity, along with strategic support from Rohit Raj & Varun Duggirala (Founders of The Glitch). Roshan Abbas (MD, Encompass) and Gaurav Kapur (Media Personality) have come on board as Investors & Mentors.

Whom do we cater to?

Chtrbox is for all brands that have consumers on social media, and are keen on engaging them through people that consumers trust & tune into every day. Our users on the brand side are either funded start-ups, established brands, or their agencies – all looking to market to consumers in today’s digitally savvy world.

On the Influencer side, Chtrbox is for every active social media user – someone who has a voice, a passion, and audience that trusts and follows them. Chtrbox helps social media users monetize their digital voice by collaborating on brand campaigns.

What do we offer to our consumers?

Influencer Marketing is growing at an exponential rate and it’s rated as the fastest-growing online customer-acquisition channel, beating push display ads and traditional marketing hands down. We help Brands communicate with their TG, especially millennials, genY & genZ, in the most engaging and rewarding manner replicating and enhancing the good old WOM marketing or referral marketing model on social media. We sort this out for brands in India, from ideation to delivering results, and we’re really good at it. We’re also automating the entire process to make it more effective & efficient for all digital and creative agencies to run it easily on their own.

For Influencers, Chtrbox is the platform that helps them monetize their content & influence. Our SMV tool even helps emerging influencers set their fee by benchmarking it with industry standards.

What motivated us to start up?

The founding team have all been serial entrepreneurs, and everyone has their own unique story about what got them to start up. What connects us all is the passion to build innovative companies that have the potential to create a dent in the universe.

Rohit & Varun have been running Glitch, the largest independent digital & creative agency in India. They of course had first hand witnessed the increasing demand for a smart tech driven solution for Influencer Marketing.

Pranay was previously co-founder of Letsintern – that grew to be India’s leading platform for college students to find internships in India. Along, with that he & his team had also set up Youth:ink that focused on helping brands leverage Campus Influencers, at scale. Leveraging technology & automating the process would be the next step in this direction. Post Letsintern’s acquisition, Pranay was looking to build on the micro & social media influencer piece.

Good fate, and a common friend, connected us, and after some beers Chatterbox Technologies Pvt Ltd was born. Roshan Abbas & Gaurav Kapur came on board as investors. The new entity acquired the campus influencer business under Pranay’s previous set up, and we were ready to go!

What's in a name?

Chtrbox connects brands to influential people who love to talk, and it’s all made easy & accessible as a SaaS product – what better a name than Chatterbox which epitomizes this whole concept beautifully! The unique spelling behind Chtrbox because of domain name availability & to ensure we have a strong SEO on the term. Plus, it just felt right.

How do we see Social Media?

Social Media platforms were built for people to talk to each other. These platforms of course needed to monetize and hence Brand Pages and Push-ads were introduced. Brands sometimes force fitted themselves. Social Media, however, has always been a People Powered Platform. Hence, our approach of People Powered Marketing, where the People get to monetize their reach on social media but talking about brands they love.

Today every social media user owns their own digital real estate, across platforms. Much like an Airbnb, we’re helping brands monetize their real digital estate.

Platforms may come and go, but the People (content creators & influencers) are here to stay.

Currently we are....

Set up in April 2016, we’ve already come a long way. We have an awesome team of 16 across Mumbai & Delhi. We’ve learnt tremendously, failed fast & built even faster. Chtrbox has since then worked with 25+ leading brands (including Adidas, Flipkart, Godrej, HP, Koovs, NBA, Marico P&G, Pepsico, PrettySecrets, Puma, Rayban, Star India, Teach For India, Unilever, Zee & more) & agencies & media companies (Condenast, Encompass, Glitch, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy, 22TribalFeet, WAT Consult, etc) delivered tremendously successful campaigns. We’re cash-flow positive, and growing.

Our technology, vast & diverse access of 1,25,000+ Influencers from celebs, social media stars, mom bloggers, working professional early adopters and college influencers, puts us ahead of any competition, and we’re only just getting started.

Our biggest challenge was..

At start-ups almost every week throws in a new challenge. I suppose our biggest challenge has been establishing ourselves in an emerging market. We don’t really compete with other influencer marketing players, in fact we need to educate, do good work & grow the market together. Our real competition is other forms of traditional and push-marketing. People are typically reluctant to change, and a lot of validation needs to be done first.

We want to dominate the world by..

The last few years has given birth to thousands of content creators! We want to help democratize the space in India, and help creators monetize their content & influence.

We also see tremendous opportunity on helping brands market more authentically, and bring the power of recommendation and organized word of mouth to digital.

We’re making moolah by...

Chtrbox is absolutely free for Influencers, we don’t charge any fee to them. Brands pay us a 15 to 20% fee on all work we take up for them, depending on the complexity of the campaign. Influencer Marketing just on Instagram, is a billion dollar industry. India’s market share is on the rise, and we’re well placed to lead the space.

Our What The **** Moment

This was a fun one – our tech team was building and testing our SMV algorithm (Social Media Value, that helps influencers & brands know the market value per post basis of their unique social score). They were almost ready for an internal demo, when they tested the SMV on Chtrbox Founder, Pranay’s Youtube profile. The results were outlandish, and it just didn’t make sense!! What was then discovered was this absolutely no big deal paragliding video of Pranay that he had posted a few years ago, and had somehow gone organically popular gaining a whopping 156,000 views. Social Media works in mysterious ways sometimes. We suppose, it is true, there’s an influencer in all of us.

Industry as we foresee

Influencer Marketing on Social Media grew exponentially in 2017 and this trend is expected to continue into 2018 & 2019.Digital spends have increased by 30% this year, taking digital to a 14% pie of overall marketing budgets. A large part of this will go into content creation rather than distribution alone. Consumers have become smarter, have built ad-blocks, and are looking for quality content. Influencer marketing will become an integral part of digital ad spends of businesses in the coming years. Influencer engagements will not be restricted to niche product and digital focused companies, but will be seen across categories and industries. Companies will engage with their customers via Influencer Marketing not only in metropolitan cities, but also in tier 2& 3 cities.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes, we are for our offices in Delhi and Mumbai.