Saurabh Singh- Founder And CEO Of Flickstree- World’s Largest Video Publisher Network Powered By AI!

Saurabh Singh is the owner of multiple patent-pending technologies, Founder and CEO of Flickstree – a company backed by the likes of Samsung Ventures, SOSV, Facebook, and LionRock capital.

He has been a speaker in international forums like WEBIT, a panel member of business voices like IAMAI, Featured in Economic Times, Forbes, TechInAsia, Times Of India, Livemint, and multiple business and financial media.

Saurabh worked for 12 years with Multinational corporation Asian Paints, then left the company to create a platform that enables thousands of apps, websites, and influencers to make sustainable revenues through premium video content. The business is now scaled to 50M+ users across multiple countries, called Flickstree.

Today Flickstree is the world’s largest, AI-enabled video publisher network.

Flickstree creates and aggregates short, engaging videos. Websites and apps embed Flickstree’s video player on their platform, to engage and monetize their traffic, without any investment. These videos that include entertainment content and performance marketing content are localized in multiple languages. Flickstree works with 650+ advertisers to monetize publisher traffic. OTT platforms and telecom companies license these videos to play the video content on their video player.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Saurabh says:

Keep things simple. Most startups try to be cool, and in the process, lose the big picture. At Flickstree, our marketing is not about jargon and lingos – it is communicating in a language that a 7-year-old can understand.

I would listen to or read stories of a lot more successful and failed founders and businesses. While experience is the best teacher, some learning can always be derived from those who’ve done this before.

I would also learn to code for a hobby. Because in today’s World, even if you’re not the chief coder – you should know the possibilities that technology can bring.

Read on to know more about Saurabh Singh and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background, and what are you working on currently?

Saurabh Singh: My name is Saurabh Singh. After my post-graduation in management, I did a corporate role for 12 years in a large Multi-National Corporation called Asian Paints Ltd. Problem-solving, marketing, content, and media always excited me. So I spotted a huge problem for digital publishers (websites and apps) to drive traffic to their platform and monetize better.

All consumer-focused websites and apps need better content to engage their users and monetize better.

At Flickstree, we enable apps and websites to make money via video content and video campaigns!

What motivated you to get started with your company?

Saurabh Singh: We started the company in India. Indian Internet users have grown very fast, thanks to falling Internet data prices. Watching videos on smartphones went up from nothing to 60% of Internet data usage.

All websites and apps realized that people have stopped reading, and they’ve started watching. So they wanted to show videos to their users. The problem is to show videos, they need investment in creating content, they need investment in technology, and they also need investment in sales teams to monetize the content.

At Flickstree, we solve this problem for apps and websites. We give them a tiny piece of code to copy-paste within their platform. And we stream premium videos on their platform using our technology. We also monetize these videos with branding and performance marketing campaigns.

What is your current main product, and (If there is any) can you share any product pivot story from founding to the current product?

Saurabh Singh: Flickstree is an AI-powered video publisher network. We enable apps and websites to earn better revenues and engagement with our proprietary video content and video campaigns. We are a Samsung invested company, backed by SOSV of USA and Lionrock Capital, Singapore, and Facebook.

We primarily have two focussed products:

Video Content Embedding: Now You Know Series

This is our flagship premium product that works across mobile phone OEMs and other apps. All videos are available in English and Hindi. We add 4-6 new videos daily.

Here’s a sample of videos.

• Why Series: Why don’t planes fly in a straight line, Why shouldn’t you charge your phone 100%, etc.
• What If Series: What If you laughed for 24 hours, What if you don’t sleep at all?, What if you swallow Chewing gum? Etc.
• Listicle Series: 5 Most Deadliest Plants around the World, 5 most adopted dog breeds, Top 4 hallmark signs you are in a wrong relationship, etc.
• How Series: How To Prevent Premature Grey Hair, How different is the human brain from the animal brain, How to pack a suitcase in 30 minutes, etc.

Following integration opportunities exist for websites and apps (publishers):

We embed all these videos on publisher properties on Flickstree video player. We use our ad tags to monetize the same

• Full dedicated Videos section on publisher website/app: This opens up additional revenue opportunities along with video ads as we will be able to serve banners and other formats of ads around the video player on this page. Embedded the link for reference
• Out-stream video player: Can be placed like any display banner on any dedicated placement on the website. The big difference from any other out-stream network is that we focus on premium content that engages the audience, improves the stickiness and helps us then serve relevant video ads to them
• In-Read/In-content player: Player comes while the user is reading any content. Again the big difference here is that we focus on premium content that engages the audience, improves the stickiness and helps us then serve relevant video ads to them
• Floating Video Player: The player floats on the screen as the user scrolls/browses the page

Publishers license our videos for a license fee and play these videos on their video player. We shall share all these videos via MRSS feeds or any other method that the publisher prefers.

Video Commerce: Monetization through Affiliate and Performance marketing

We have 100s of advertisers with high commission payout across the globe. For every campaign, we create exclusive videos that are proven to convert. We give a Publisher dashboard, in which websites see all campaigns available to them. They can choose and pick campaigns that suit them best.

Following integration opportunities exist for websites and apps (publishers):

• For each advertiser campaign, we also share a video over and above advertiser creatives
• All videos will have a corresponding tracking link. Whenever your user clicks a video or clicks the advertiser creative placed anywhere on the website, users shall land on the Advertiser website, and tracking would begin.
• When the user makes a purchase / performs the advertiser desired action (sale, lead form, registration, etc.), the publisher commission gets calculated

To sum up, as a business Flickstree has two divisions

• Non-fiction entertainment video content (Now You Know)
• Video affiliate marketing content (Video commerce)

How much money (funding) have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round?

Saurabh Singh: We have raised about USD 5M so far from the likes of Samsung Ventures, LionRock Capital, Accretio Investments, SOSV, and Venture Catalysts.

How have you attracted users and grown your company from the start? And which were your marketing strategies to grow your business?

Saurabh Singh: We are a publisher-network. We embed our video player on apps and websites. So our consumer acquisition strategy is always B2B- B2C. Acquiring high traffic publishers grew our traffic by manifold. Our top-notch strategy to acquire publishers has been through LinkedIn, email marketing, and references.

Which is the best marketing tool for the growth of your startup, and why?

Saurabh Singh: Satisfied publishers are the best marketing tool. We don’t use lead generation software.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing in general?

Saurabh Singh: Keep things simple. Most startups try to be cool, and in the process, lose the big picture. At Flickstree, our marketing is not about jargon and lingos – it is communicating in a language that a 7-year-old can understand.

What were the internal decision processes in determining when to begin fund-raising, and what were the logistics for this? And how many investors have you met so far, and how did you meet these investors and which channels worked best for you?

Saurabh Singh: All organizations need capital to scale. For us, it has been the same. Funding is also an external validation that what we are solving is large enough and validated by serious professionals.

We partnered with an investment banking firm that made us some great introductions in the VC space. Once we had our initial set of investors, they also helped us with some great introductions.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles in the process of fund-raising? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? (Your insight or advice on this would be very helpful for startups)

Saurabh Singh: While fund-raising is a full-time job, founders waste a lot of time and energy in talking to the wrong people during fund-raising. Focus is vital in each aspect. Introductions and references work best. The worst thing is to blast your pitch deck across all investors’ database. Founders need to create a premium factor for their business.

What are your milestones for the next round? And what are your goals for the future?

Saurabh Singh: Our user base is growing rapidly, and our revenues are multiplying despite the global slowdown. We are punching far above our weight!

We shall raise USD 20 M to expand globally fast, especially deep into South East Asia, Middle East, and some identified western markets.

How do you plan to expand globally?

Saurabh Singh: Our business has three aspects – content, publishers, and advertisers.

We go for content exclusivity as that gives us a competitive edge, so we shall work with creators across identified markets to scale faster.

Publisher acquisition is not a challenge, as we are flooded with multiple inbound queries across the globe. All publishers need better monetization solutions, and ours is easily one of the best out there. We shall keep the publisher onboarding and servicing the team locally.

Lastly, advertisers follow where the ROI is highest. Our model caters to advertisers with great branding and performance solutions. We work closely with agencies and brands across geographies. Our tech stack is highly scalable.

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global marketing?

Saurabh Singh: One size fits all never works. Every market has local dynamics. Identifying key markets and working with local partners scales a business much faster than doing mass promotions.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? (or What should all first-time startup founders know before they start their business?)

Saurabh Singh: Scalable businesses are found by solving a problem. After a startup identifies a business problem to solve, the solution has to be simple and easy to adopt. So there have to be two tests:

• What problem does my product solve?
• Is my solution easy to adopt by the target group?

In our case, Flickstree is solving the problem of digital publishers (websites and apps) to monetize their traffic better or buy traffic for their platform with a better arbitrage.

We give publishers our solution embed video player to make money with premium content without investing time and money on creating content, or technology, or advertiser onboarding. Just copy-pasting a few lines of codes does the entire job for them.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Saurabh Singh: To keep things simple is the best advice that we received early on. It always pays off.

What are the one or two things that you would do differently to improve your life (or what kind of personal habits would you improved?) if you could go back to 10 years ago?

Saurabh Singh: I would listen to or read stories of a lot more successful and failed founders and businesses. While experience is the best teacher, some learning can always be derived from those who’ve done this before.

I would also learn to code for a hobby. Because in today’s World, even if you’re not the chief coder – you should know the possibilities that technology can bring.

You can follow Saurabh Singh here.

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