This is our journey…
Tiki is a short video app that we started from scratch, and in this session, we will share our early progress, insights and learnings.
To give you all a context of what Tiki is. Here is our Crunchbase
“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. In anything we do, we want 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 were an option, people would find some ways. Early when Instagram, YouTube, and 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, 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 that Creator-Users are retained?
So, we look psychologically at 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 of 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 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. In the short term, this works well; however, in the long term, users will be conditioned to only enjoy external content, and new creators who come 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 videos 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 and requirements, like in a Role-Playing Game. Make it hard so it’ll be worth it.
Real People Content—We have Real original content from our creators vs. duplicate or non-original content from all other competitor apps. We are improving creator content. We purpose content to entertain, not random meaningless videos.
Real people allow viewers to view People Creator. To aim to be like them. Mimetic theory
Community—A platform where we want to build relationships between creators and fans. “Approval of peers”—Building a metaverse within Tiki itself. Second identity—ensuring Approval Among Peers and retaining 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 who were platformless during the ban, we provided them with the best traffic/fame and allowed them to grow as content creators with Tiki.
We gave them Blue Verified ticks—the best resources. We want to make them belong. For example, some competitors left competitors to join us because of our fame resources.
Feedback, some creators have been 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 creator’s content was pretty bad, vulgar, meaningless, and random lipsync. We had to set the guidelines & requirements… The 4 values are spread happiness, Share knowledge, Storytell experiences, and Showcase rhythm. To think about the viewers.
We had much 1-on-1 feedback with our creators. Expectations & why
With our content moderation team 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 a 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?
It turns out the hypothesis was proven, as our users were retained with the content and really liked that they could 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 who 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 a 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. Its 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 be found in the market, it needs hard Proof of Work. New creators have to earn it.
We launched our Tiki trainee challenge, which was harder to pass than getting to Harvard.
The success rate was only 0.15%
Over 300k content is 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 an exclusive nightclub that has a bouncer/bodyguard deciding who to enter the premises 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 would decide whether they should rise up the ranks in their category.
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 who 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 can also learn from the Blue V as role models, and many of them can replicate the same quality as our Blue V.
With the recent experiment of increasing Grey V traffic, 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 gradually rely more on internal incubation of our own Tiki talents, which would benefit both brand image by echoing the original idea of making stars and 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 did 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 comments to give them stars rather than focus on improving their content.
It was a chicken and egg problem at that time. If we showed 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%. Many probably gave up because 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 percentage of traffic. 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.
For example, the North India creator is not able to relate to the Southern audience
We believe localization and personalization are important. With our WhiteV UGC, we will be able to scale in different parts of India and 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 and stay for the community.
We have identified 5 types of communities that can be built into the app
- Blue V & Blue V
- Blue V & Grey/White V
- Blue V & Fan
- Grey/White V & Fan
- Fan & Fan
Tiki Star Award for the best of the best…
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 helps 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 and student). Grey/White wants to learn from Blue V, and Blue V likes to feel like a Champion or Star.
We can run the following activities: 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 and reach more creators in our ecosystem. We created an MVP for a family guild competition, which resulted in the formation of more than 5,000 creators and 90 families.
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 ambassadors and communicate our brand values
- 98% of participants apply their own team Avatar pendant to show they are part of a clan.
Meetups
We build offline meetups to reach our community of local talents in different parts of India.
As we mentioned, 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 finding 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 have been a part of a few of these meetups, and this has created a sense of Fear of Missing Out in Tiki.
Blue V & Fan
Relationships are through the idol/fan army. Activities we can run: Tiki Angel Club, where the top angels can receive perks by supporting us by giving Stars. In the future, we can also create Tiki merchandise and have special meet-and-greets with their favourite Blue V star.
Grey/White V & Fan
The relationship is through the Underdog story. Fans who 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 the Blue V.
Fan & Fan
This is your Wallstreetbets or Neihanduanzhi, where users feel a sense of belonging in the app. We believe that if we build and cater to the above four, we can 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 of 3 target segments: Tiki Active Users, Tiki New Users & Tiki Inactive Users
Tiki 1st impression: Good video quality & content
- 24.2%of users’ first impression of Tiki was its good video quality and good content;
- 8.57% of users felt that Tiki was a TikTok 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% of users prefer to watch HD videos and have no worries about their data usage;
- 53.6% of users were willing to give stars to their favourite content or creator.
Tiki Creator: To gain views or traffic is the biggest motivation for 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 views or traffic from Tik,i and 18.9% of them need tutorials 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 stars 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 was 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 has a strong desire to be part of the 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
