E-Paper
Startup Mantra: Boost your social media marketing efforts
Predis.ai (EZML Technologies Pvt. Ltd), a Pune-based startup, is helping brands, marketers and content creators ace social media and grow their business and reach
Amit Patil, a Pune-based cyber security professional working for a multinational company, is planning to increase his reach and follower count on a professional-networking platform, however, he does not know how to start writing creative posts, or how to increase its reach on the social media platforms. Despite attending several webinars and reading through a lot of generic stuff, many of us like Patil, do not find time to write engaging posts for our social media accounts and end up postponing our plans to become influencers. However, now you can easily create such ‘engaging’ and ‘viral’ posts in just a few seconds without spending heavily on any social media marketing agency. Predis.ai (EZML Technologies Pvt. Ltd), a Pune-based startup, founded by Tanmay Ratnaparkhe, Aakash Kerawat and Akshay Karangale, is helping brands, marketers and content creators ace social media and grow their business and reach. The company has built a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) models which gives ready-to-use posts publishable on social media platforms. Besides, static image posts, the founder trio is also launching ready-to-publish video-content posts very soon.
In the beginning…
Ratnaparkhe, a 2x founder, is a 2009 BE Computer Science graduate from the Sinhagad Institutes, who later started his first venture Torqus which was sold to Times Internet in November 2018. Post-acquisition he worked with the company for two years and decided to start up again. During this period, he met Kerawat and Karangale, both 2017 B. Tech from IIT Roorkee. The duo was working with a Bengaluru-based company as data scientists trying to build an AI for AI. The duo was also looking for entrepreneurial experience and decided to accept an offer by Ratnaparkhe to start Predis.ai.
Says Ratnaparkhe, “Only two per cent of all those claiming to be AI-powered companies have AI. When we started brainstorming in January 2021 about what product we can build, how to scale, etc. We were sure that our startup should be global and hence it had to be SaaS-based. However, with larger enterprises, the problem is on two fronts – the gestation period for closing deals and the availability of true data in a standard format. We realised that instead of enterprise data, one kind of data that is available everywhere is social media data.”
“Our first thought was to build a ‘Grammarly’ for social media, which could give on-the-fly suggestions to users. We asked, can there be an AI to suggest to users how to improve their performance. We got about 400 million Instagram posts for training our AI model and then launched a minimum viable product around this in April 2021. However, the feedback which we got was surprising. Users said that they needed such a product but their problems started one step before – what to write or how to create viral and engaging content or post. Instead of polishing the content, we thought can our AI model start making content,” Ratnaparkhe said.
Pivot – One step before
A few decades back, a board on a shop was a necessity to get widespread visibility. A few years back, the website became a necessity and now ‘active’ social media presence has become one. Every individual wants to post something on their social media profile and wishes that their posts become viral and the talk of the town. While almost all businesses have created social media accounts, very few are ‘active’ and regularly posting and leveraging their social media reach.
Ratnaparkhe said, “Content creation process is time intensive and difficult to get it always ‘right’, especially for small and medium enterprises, or solopreneurs. That is why we saw enough awareness among people about posting content on social media but very few understood the content, technology, and other aspects of social media engagement. We identified this problem to solve. Our AI model gives Instagram-ready posts which can be published to other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.”
AI on AI
Explaining how the artificial intelligence (AI) models of Predis.ai work, Ratnaparkhe said, “GPT3 generates the core text and our AI uses GPT3 first to understand what we must talk about. Then, the AI model searches for good, copyright-free images from various sources like Unsplash. The first search gets us around 300 images. The AI model then selects ‘good’ and ‘suitable’ images and generates captions. Another AI model looks up hashtags best suited for the content and shortlists them. The initial output is reassessed based on various parameters. We call it intelligence on top of AI. We have been doing this complicated pipeline building which is a mix of GPT3 and large public or open-source models which are trained for optimisation. We have built an AI on AI.”
“While displaying the engagement score, our AI model analyses 20 crore Instagram posts and compares the user-created post with other posts for better reach and engagement. We are helping social media users save time to generate content. Social media marketing agencies can also save on their resources-cost,” Ratnaparkhe added.
Next moves
Sharing their next moves, Ratnaparkhe and his team said, “We are looking forward to India as our market. But for at least the next three to five years, we are focussing on the US market. Interestingly most demo requests come from India, but conversions do not happen quickly. To scale up in a market like India is difficult. Currently, we are an eight-member team which will grow a maximum of up to 20 to 25 members even if we raise our seed round.”
“We are interested in tie-ups with e-commerce marketplaces. We have launched our own software for such marketplaces. For example, our software will be visible to merchants on platforms like Shopify, who are my target customers. Content category wise we will be focussing more on health, education and e-commerce only because AI needs a huge amount of true data to work perfectly. For other categories like pure technology, very small data sets are available and it is difficult to train the AI models on them,” said Ratnaparkhe.
Users say
Shikha Gupta, a nutritionist by profession, discovered Predis.ai through one of the webinars. “Earlier I used to check the best time to post from the Instagram app, but it just shows when most of my audience is active. Moreover, the time from the app does not translate to a higher engagement. The posting time suggested by Predis.ai is on point and it brings higher engagement to my posts. The competitor analysis feature helps me chalk out my strategy based on what content is working for my competitors and what is not. It is great to have some data-driven validation for my assumptions,” Gupta says.
