This entrepreneur wanted to invest in an influencer marketing company, but ended up launching one

Influencer Sneha Kapoor saw her Instagram page gaining nearly 60,000 followers within three years of its launch. While she worked with several agencies, her biggest challenge wasn’t coming up with creative content; it was finding recurring sponsorships, tracking payments, and dealing with short timelines.

In October last year, Sneha found Wobb, a Gurugram-based startup that connects brands with influencers. Today, she works with five to seven brands.

Founded in 2020 by Ishan Jindal, Wobb helps connect stakeholders in the content creation ecosystem. It handles hiring, execution, and post-campaign processes for brands. On the other end, Wobb helps influencers by taking care of the business side of things, freeing their time for creative work.

Wobb launched a mobile app in March this year. The startup now expects to focus its energy on the app, instead of its website, to drive business.

How Wobb came into existence

Ishan, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, built a mobile app for auto crash detection during his college days. The app helped detect road accidents without any human intervention. In the third year of his study programme, he built a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) for workforce management.

He then ventured into the food industry and opened Pizzabox, a quick-service restaurant in Saket and Hauz Khas, Delhi.

In 2018, Ishan joined Lead Angles for two years and began his role as head of investment. He later stepped down as Business Head and Founding Member-Lead Angels Academy.

While at Lead Angels in 2019, Ishan was looking into investing in influencer-related companies. However, he couldn’t find any worth investing in.

The entrepreneur then decided to build a platform for influencer marketing.

“My idea was not to actually start this on my own, the idea was to invest,” Ishan who is also the CEO of Wobb, tells YourStory. “For about six months I was looking at companies in different spaces in evaluating them. I actually did not end up finding anything that could sufficiently solve the problems in this space which were active.”

The problem statement, according to Ishan, was this—can a platform help brands connect with multiple influencers and vice versa?

He decided to start building the platform in September 2020. “We worked for almost a year and a half. Since then, we have grown rapidly to become one of the most important companies in this space by just following the key thing of simplifying influencer marketing for brands and working towards making things easier for influencers,” he adds.

What's next for Wobb?

The startup raised Rs 2.1 crore in a Pre-Seed round last year October.

It has completed 5,000 campaigns which include brands such as Plum Goodness, Emami, Colorbar, Dabur, and HDFC Life, among others. It claims to work with 1.50 lakh influencers and 850 brands using its platform.

All the technology has been developed in-house.

As its fee, Wobb charges 10 percent of influencers’ monthly earnings.

Apart from focussing on its mobile app, Wobb also plans to grow in the South East Asian markets. “We want to expand our presence in SEA region. Though we have done minor campaigns in that and some other geographies,” the founder says.

Wobb has worked with influencers from GCC, South East Asia - Indonesia and Brazil.  It employs 55 people.

The market

The Indian influencer marketing industry is expected to grow from an estimated 900 crore in 2021 to Rs 2,200 crore by 2025, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 25 percent, according to GroupM INCA’s India Influencer Marketing Report

“The next decade is for creators and it’s not unknown that these creators are now setting up their own companies and are becoming a brand themselves,” adds Ishan

Sneha says she is happy with Wobb’s services. “I do not have to keep hunting for sponsors anymore. I can find the right fit brands, apply and get the status of my application within 2-3 days,” she tells YourStory.