Tiki – From Zero to 100M: How We Built India’s Most Engaged Short Video Community

To give you all a context of what Tiki is. Here was our Crunchbase

It’s a short video app that we started from scratch and in this session will share our early journey, insights and learnings.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a little fortune, must be in want of more social capital” – Jane Austen

Humans are Fame seeking monkeys – It applies to everyone in anything we do, we would want to have the most recognition. Status is a relative ladder.

By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

In Schools, University & even now in Work. We all want to be recognised.

Humans Seek ways to accumulate social capital – if there was an option people will find some ways. Early when Instagram, Youtube, Vine started, the early adopters became popular

You can take the monkey out of the status-seeking game, but you can’t take the status-seeking out of the monkey.

Thus we decide our business should use this theory & provide Fame as a Service.

 

In your youth, the approval of peers and others in your demographic tends to matter more than just about anything, and social media has extended the reach of the youth status game in just about every direction possible.

Young people have a surplus of something which most adults always complain they have too little of: time. The hurdle rate on the time of the young is low, and so they can afford to spend some of that surplus exploring new social networks, mining them to see if the social capital returns are attractive

A new Fame as a Service business must have some proof of work or some skill to differentiate.

Let’s look at something like Prisma, a photo filter app which tried to pivot to become a social network. Prisma surged in popularity upon launch by making it trivial to turn one of your photos into a fine art painting with one of its many powered filters.

It worked well. Too well.

Since almost any photo could, with one-click, be turned into a gorgeous painting, no single photo really stands out. The main selling point is the filter, not the user, and so it didn’t really make sense to follow any one person over any other person. Without that element of skill, no framework for a status game or skill-based net

a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users.

Facebook launched with one of the most famous proof of work hurdles in the world: you had to be a student at Harvard. By requiring a harvard.edu email address, Facebook drafted off of one of the most elite cultural filters in the world.

It’s hard to think of many more powerful slingshots of elitism.

Even the recent Clubhouse use an invite-only proof of work to create a sense of exclusiveness in their app. But they weren’t able to retain the users in their app.

The celebrity hype was a good cold-start strategy, however, when they left there was no replacement for good speakers that were able to sustain the user consumption needs.

For Tiki, how do we ensure Creator-Users are retained?

So we look psychologically on human needs.

From Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, if we are able to cater to most of it. Then we will be able to retain most our creators and users

All these apps derive status value from some type of scarcity

What is the one fundamental scarcity in the age of abundance?

User attention.

 

 

We market research most short video apps & even TikTok.

We had to have our key differentiation & value proposition. Not just create another short video app.

What was their brand positioning? Most use content base to connect with users.

In India, we found there’s a lack of good local original content. If an app has very good content but it’s not from that creator, the user gets entertained by the content but not by the original creator. Short term it works well, however, in the long term users will be conditioned to only enjoy external content and new creators that comes in will focus on scraping for the best content externally rather than creating it.

We thought why not start at First Principal thinking;

Users come to short video to enjoy entertaining content

Content needs a source or creator

There’s a lack of good local content

Tiki will create a platform for creators to create local original content to connect with users.

With this, we embarked on doing things differently by focusing on 3 business principles

Creator comes first – All traffic is given to top original creators vs Content Priority in other apps. No other platform can do this, not even TikTok.  TikTok won’t be able to give more than 50% traffic to a handful of creators cause they are an international platform. They have to show international diverse content. Tiki will focus on local original content

Our Creator Pyramid strategy is to give our users a reason to climb up the ranks on our platform.

Set the standard & requirements. Like a Role Playing Game.  Make it hard so it’ll be worth it.

Real People Content – Real original content from our creators vs duplicate or non-original content from all other competitor apps. Improvement of creator content. Purpose content to entertain, not random meaningless video.

Real people allow viewers to view People Creator. To aim to be like them. Mimetic theory

Community – A platform where we want to build the relationship between creator & fans. “Approval of peers” Building a metaverse within Tiki itself. Second identity To ensure Approval Among Peers and retain our stakeholders.

Here’s our first Creator Music Video

 

 

Our goal is to showcase the best local talents in the market. We also want to identify local talents to become high-quality content creators.

We created a proprietary pyramid system to do so.

We called it “Fame As A Service”

Where fame or traffic is the resource that everyone wants and to get it, you have to earn it

Starting with onboarding some of the creators that were platformless during the ban, we provided the best traffic/fame to them and allowed them to grow as a content creator with Tiki.

We gave them Blue Verified ticks – the best resources. We want to make them belong. Eg. Some left competitors to join us because of our fame resources.

Feedback, some creators have been a content creator for 5 years, and they felt Tiki is doing something different

Setting a High-Quality Content Standard

Before that, a lot of the creators content was pretty bad, vulgar, meaningless, and random lipsync. We had to set the guidelines & requirements.. The 4 values: Spread happiness, Share knowledge, Storytell experiences, Showcase rhythm. To think about the viewers.

We had much 1-on-1 feedback with our creators. Expectations & why

With our content moderation team who initially was about content safety, we also train them for content quality and not approve any meaningless content

Netflix vs Mass Tv Theory, UGC to PUGC,

Only use Video Stickers to enhance the video. Remember the Prisma App case study. If the main selling point is the filter, then there’s not much proof of work to differentiate

We had to create competition to find talents

Talent show-  some groups have a strong creator community, working as a team to win, a common goal, and engagement rate has also increased

Merchandise, Poster & Dream to build community & relationship between Creator & Fans

Music Video & media to strengthen the Fame As A Service dream for creators

The first hypothesis that we wanted to check was whether there’s a market for original local content?

Turns out the hypothesis was proven as our users were retained with the content and really like that they can interact with a real creator.

It also created a perception in the market that Tiki has the best quality content.

Even though our cold start strategy was a success, the next phase was ensuring that we could scale this for the long term.

Our initial challenge was that there were so many users that came to our app to post, but they didn’t get any traffic. Many were upset but this created a Fear of Missing Out or Mimetic theory of desire where most of them want to become famous through Tiki

Mimetic theory is a concept developed and advocated for by René Girard, a 20th-century French anthropologist. Mimetic theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them.

As more and more people want something and that object remains scarce, there is a conflict.

We want to maintain our high-quality original content positioning.

So to find from the market, it needs a hard Proof of Work. New creators have to earn it.

We launch our Tiki trainee challenge which was harder to pass than getting to Harvard.

The success rate was only 0.15%

Over 300k content posted per day. Only 2000 content showed per day

We set very tight expectations

We want them to understand our guidelines & to continue working hard.

“When is hard, they will feel that is worth it”

The trainee challenge was good at getting good quality creators however it’s not able to scale fast.

What we had to change was from Subjective selection criteria to Objective selection criteria.

An analogy I would say is like an exclusive nightclub that has bouncer/bodyguard deciding who to enter the premise which results in a long waiting line

What we want is to build an automated bouncer that can automate the process.

Transparency is one of the key differentiators here as we want to create an “RPG” system in our platform where a creator would know where they are currently at in our platform

They would work hard to improve their talent and the users will be the judge to decide whether they should rise up the ranks in their category.

As we want to keep the positioning of the platform for real talent. We decided to empower more talent to show up, with a more transparent system. Users are the Judge

Giving traffic to those that earned it is proven to effectively increase their intention and production.

Grey V we are able to scale by recruiting at a lower cost and internally promoting from our UGC pool.

They are also able to learn from the Blue V as role models and many of them are able to replicate the same quality as our Blue V.

With the recent experiment of increasing traffic of Grey V, we see a 2.3 x increase in the growth rate of Grey V video production.

Grey V creators share up to 38% of overall traffic to gain creator diversity and satisfy users’ consumption needs

Instead of external recruitment, we would rely gradually more on internal incubation of our own Tiki talents, which will do good to both brand image echoing the original idea of making stars and also build up a more sustainable content supply chain.

White V/User Generated Content

Finding good talent from White V/UGC is not easy as many were shooting lower-quality videos or content that does not add value to the audience.

Our Future star tab in Tiki was not able to find talent as the way of rising up the rank was through Stars, which leads to them begging others in the comment to give them stars rather than focus on improving their content.

It was a chicken and egg problem at that time where if we were to show the UGC/White V, they may not understand the rules and post-low-quality content.

Our solution a few months ago was to limit their traffic which resulted in a decrease in Creator DAU from 10% to 4% as many probably gave up cause they didn’t get any views or were not able to understand our platform goals.

With our New Creator System revamp, we are able to solve that by providing a small % of traffic and with our RPG game system, they would have to improve their Content and the users will be the judge through Consumption metrics.

From a product feature, we will launch a Discover feature that shows Nearby Content creators nearby to the community.

We also know that India is a huge country, some say a continent with many different countries into one, there are different cultures and languages and our Blue v creators may not be able to cater to their preferences.

E.g North creator is not able to relate with the Southern audience

We believe localization and personalization are important and that with our WhiteV UGC, we will be able to scale in different parts of India and also stick to our value of showcasing local talents to their community.

Our plan to build a Tiki community

Humans yearn for connection & approval of peers

Building a community in Tiki would be one of the secret key differentiators to other apps in the market. As we like to say, Come to Tiki for the creator, stay for the community.

We have identified 5 types of community that can be built in the app

  1. Blue V & Blue V
  2. Blue V & Grey/White V
  3. Blue V & Fan
  4. Grey/White V & Fan
  5. Fan & Fan

Blue V & Blue V Relationships are peer to peer, leveraging each other’s influence and collaborating with one another in their video.

Activities that we can run: Group Competition, Meet Up and Tiki Award (Oscar). Having regular creator community meetups, events and sessions help improve brand perception and create goodwill among creators. By meeting with like-minded creators, they would feel that their social and aspirational needs are being met and make them feel important to us and our community.

Blue V & Grey/White V

Relationships are through mentorship (Teacher & Student), Grey/White wants to learn from Blue V and Blue V likes to feel like a Champion or Star.

Activities we can run: Tiki Meet your Star – organised by the Blue V. Build stars within the community, invite those stars to interact with the rest of the creator community and share their key insights for success.

Tiki Family Guild

We wanted to find a way to scale & reach more creators in our ecosystem. We created an MVP for a family guild competition, we managed to get more than 5000 creators & 90 families formed.

Over 20% of Tiki creators joined their respective families

4000 users produced 16,000+ audition videos within 15 days in order to join the family

The benefits we saw;

  • It created a sense of community & family. Supporting one another
  • Activeness & interaction increase
  • Many join because they want to get promoted & famous on Tiki
  • the leaders were able to be our Tiki ambassador and communicate our brand values
  • 98% of participants apply their own team Avatar pendant to show they are part of a clan.

Meetups

The reason we build offline meetups is to reach our community of local talents in the different parts of India.

As we mention, with the rise of internet users, there could be many local talent potentials that we can reach through one of our self run Tiki Meet Up

We plan on scaling the meetup and find more Community Meetup ambassadors to organize in their city. We can have different perks based on the self run meet up organized.

These meetups have become a talking point within the creator community. Creators from the competitor apps who have been a part of few of these meet ups and this has created a sense of Fear of Missing Out in Tiki.

Blue V & Fan

Relationships are through idol/fan army. Activities we can run: Tiki Angel Club where the top angels can receive perks by supporting through giving Stars. Future we can also create Tiki merchandise & special meet & greet with their favourite Blue V star.

Grey/White V & Fan

Relationship is through the Underdog story. Fans that support them when they were nobody will build an emotional attachment. We also notice that Fans are willing to purchase Stars to support the Grey/White V more than Blue V.

Fan & Fan

This is your Wallstreetbets or Neihanduanzhi where they have a sense of belonging in the app. We believe if we build and cater to the above 4, we would be able to create a community brand.

What are Creators & Users saying about us

Understanding our stakeholders on a regular basis is important because we are building a platform to solve a problem in India and we want to see where we are currently at.

For Users, we ran a phone interview survey and had a sample size on 3 target segment: Tiki Active Users, Tiki New Users & Tiki Inactive Users

Tiki 1st impression: Good video quality & content

  • 24.2% users’ first impression of Tiki were its good video quality and good content;
  • 8.57% users felt that Tiki was a Tik Tok replacement, especially its video quality.

Tiki Content: Most for entertainment and giving stars

  • 13.6% and 15.3% users would like to watch more comedy and dance videos on Tiki;
  • 91.5% users prefer to watch HD videos and no worries about their data usage;
  • 53.6% users were willing to give stars to their favorite content or creator.

Tiki Creator: To gain views or traffic is the biggest motivation of creating videos on Tiki.

  • 61.4% of users want to get famous or gain more fans on Tiki;
  • 37% of them want to get more view or traffic from Tiki and 18.9% of them need tutorial or guidance;

Inactive on TIki: Personal time issues and stick to other social apps.

  • 25% of those users don’t have time;
  • 17% of them have no interest in short video apps;
  • 21% of them left because of no views in their video
  • 81% of those users prefer other social apps;
  • 16% of them would choose MOJ and MX Takatak (more local content they like).

Tiki Star → 54% willing to send free star and 22% willing to pay for good content and hardworking creators

How Creators View Tiki?

  • Creators’ overall impression → Full of talented creators, funny and entertaining, dynamic and energetic
  • Creators’ 1st demand →is getting fame, not payment. Tiki is born to build up local stars for creators that’s why creators come here
  • All want a creator community → Currently being built for blue v creators. Grey/White V are with strong desire to be part of Tiki creator community
  • 4.3/5 Rating →Best service and professional content guidance from creator managers and in-app product features.
  • Things to improve →Diversified content genres, control of repetitive content, engagement with friends & families, creator community development
  • Satisfied overall with Tiki → 90.4% Blue V , 81.3% Grey/White V

Most of them Brand identify as a Tiki Creator, even our competitors are recruiting our creators based on their Tiki followers.

 

To Summarise

We believe focusing on our Creator ecosystem, we will be able to grow and sustain in the market.

With our transparent creator growth & monetization strategy, we are creating a place for creators to earn.

Here’s what our For You Page looked like