
There is a vacuum in the social media market in India today, which has led to millions of creators and users to flock to homegrown user-generated content (UGC) platforms, which in turn has led Indian social media companies to witness demand and scale like never before.
In this journey of scaling up to meet demand and further growth, the role of tech infrastructure, security and sustainable growth strategies are taking centrestage. To understand the challenges of building the right workflows and tech stack, adopt best security practices, build the right tech infrastructure for sustainable growth, and more, Gobi Tarmat, Director of Presales, Media & Carrier Division, APJ, Akamai, led this interactive masterclass with some of India’s leading homegrown social media platforms.
The speakers included Arun Lodhi, CTO, Trell; Anish Khandelwa, Co-founder and CTO, Mitron; Aditya Kumar, Principal Engineer, Leher; Varun Saxena, Co-founder and CEO, Bolo Indya and Sameer Kumar, CTO, Tna Tan India.
The focus of Gobi’s presentation was on how to build a sustainable social media business today, and the core business strategies around acquisition, engagement and retention. This starts from app experience, video workflow and performance, user privacy and content protection, and how Akamai can help resolve these challenges.
The presentation was followed by a lively discussion between Gobi and the speakers on key challenges and focus areas of these social media platforms - from workflows and tech stacks to content monetisation to privacy and security.
The speakers also concurred that keeping users at the centre of the product was crucial and that over- engineering the product or solution can in fact be detrimental. They also discussed how parameters like the time taken for uploading videos, reducing battery and data consumption and content protection, among others, are key to building a successful social media company.
Gobi has over 20 years of experience in IT, Media and Cloud Computing industry across Europe and Asia Pacific & Japan. He held various roles in his career - from sales and pre-sales to enterprise architecture, project management and technical consultancy and programming. Gobi has designed and delivered large-scale digital media projects to scale, optimise, and secure customer online initiatives.
Anish is a young entrepreneur born in the town of Chakulia, Jharkhand. He graduated with B.Tech, CSE, VNIT, Nagpur, in 2011. Following this, he has had 9 years of experience in the tech industry - big data technologies, growth projects targeted toward user acquisition and retention, building real time gaming and live streaming platforms, as well as experience with large scale UGC platforms. Apart from work, Anish has played college level cricket and Badminton, and enjoys treks and road trips. As the co-founder of Mitron TV, he is excited for the entrepreneurial journey that lies ahead.
Varun Saxena is the Founder and CEO of a fast growing short videos in Indian languages platform, Bolo Indya. In a short span of 16 months, Bolo Indya has close to 40.25 lakh active users. Bolo Indya empowers Bharat’s creators to not only go viral but also to monetise their content with no upper cap. At Bolo Indya, Varun has put together the amalgamation of short videos, local languages, UGC as a driver and Passion economy as the fuel for empowering the internet users of Bharat, taking the penetration of peer to peer financial transactions to tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India.
Co-founder & CTO, Trell
Co-founder & CTO, Tna Tan India
Principal Engineer, Leher
Rohonesh Kar is the Presales Leader, Media, for India at Akamai Technologies. In this role, he is responsible for presales consulting, where his team works with customers to identify and architect technical solutions to complex problems in the OTT and Publishing world. He is also part of the leadership team that is responsible for accelerating growth and laying out the go-to-market strategy for the media division in India and SAARC.
Madanmohan Rao is research director at YourStory Media and editor of five book series (http://amzn.to/NpHAoE). His interests include creativity, innovation, knowledge management, and digital media. Madan is also a DJ and writer on world music and jazz. He can be followed on Twitter at @MadanRao