Startup mantra: Economical branding solutions gaining traction
AdBanao platform offers ready-to-use social media branding templates for SMBs for business promotion
Hiring a graphic designer, video editor, content writer and social media manager to promote your brand online and offline can be an easier task for mid-size or large corporations, but small business owners end up doing the task which they find laborious. It may seem an easy thing to do, but the time consumed and lack of creative thoughts may not achieve the desired outcome. But if these creatives were readily available with simple “drag-drop” edits, one could make customised posts for branding and marketing their business.
Sensing this opportunity, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of the country, serial entrepreneur Sumeet Katariya and investor and social entrepreneur Narendra Firodia teamed up to create “AdBanao”, a social media branding solution that enables small business owners to generate and share the best social media creatives. With more than 1 million creatives in 10 languages, including English, Hindi and Marathi, the entrepreneur-duo is serving more than 2 million users across India and globally.
‘Nagar’ connection…
Sumeet and Narendra both hail from Ahmednagar city, around 125 kilometres from Pune. Although Sumeet comes from a business-family background, he was the first “engineer” in his family and faced economic hardships during his early days. Sumeet recalls selling carry bags to nearby stores while he was in Class 6, to support family and manage education expenses.
Pursuing his information technology (IT) engineering from DY Patil College of Engineering, Akurdi, Sumeet also started providing website development and mobile app development services to hospitals and individual customers. He developed mobile applications for local politicians as a part of his freelance projects. Post-engineering, he worked in a multinational company (MNC) for more than two years. His workplace helped hone leadership capabilities, a valuable trait for entrepreneur.
Sumeet said, “While at job, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was introduced in the country. I was building an IT product which could prove useful for small businesses for GST compliance. We launched our product immediately and sold more than 600 copies to small business owners. The popular product is still used by customers despite stiff competition. This success led to starting own company and I quit my MNC job. Initially, I had two persons in my team, and now we are 20 in just two years. Narendra inaugurated our office and Covid struck, and we had to operate remotely.”
Narendra, interestingly, was a user of Sumeet’s app designed for the mayor of Ahmednagar. Impressed with the user interface and experience of the app used for grievance management, Narendra approached Sumeet and they connected.
“He loved the way I had conceptualised the app and encouraged me to develop it,” Sumeet said.
Sumeet, having expertise in small and medium businesses (SMB) domain, has delivered more than 250 IT projects before the launch of AdBanao. Narendra has 20 plus years of business expertise in various domains
Business Badhao
AdBanao platform was designed to offer ready-to-use social media branding templates for SMBs for their business promotion.
Sumeet said, “The plan was very simple since beginning. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could not afford to hire resources due to insufficient marketing funds and we decided to revolutionise this industry. With a team of just eight persons, we started building the platform. The idea was to give best experience to personal as well as business branding. As an individual you showcase your face, not your logo. Considering these aspects, we offered options in the app. No matter which background or industry one comes on our app, we have made sure that they will find readymade content on the platform which can be downloaded on a single tap and used for promotions on other platforms. The app also allows to edit the content like changing fonts, colour, position of the content items and much more.”
“We are pioneer in this segment and even though other applications cater to this field, we are ahead of them in terms of technology and uniqueness, innovative and creative content,” Sumeet said.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AdBanao is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) enabled branding application. “We are using algorithms based on AI. These algorithms help users to get auto-colour suggestions and image background removal feature. The technology helps us offer services and products under unlimited plans to users in economical cost,” Sumeet said.
“We have maximum user base from north India. Initially, it was from Maharashtra, but as the team size increased to 100, more content was developed and designed, and users from Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh added up rapidly,” he said.
Explaining the low-cost solutions for small businesses, Sumeet said, “If one goes for an unlimited plan, we sell it on discount at ₹3,500. This means if one user does 10 creatives per day, it would cost them just ₹1 per creative. We have some users who are creating hundreds of creatives and posts every day using our unlimited plans.”
“We give equal weightage to all industries in terms of new content creation. We are adding new industries regularly with 97 major and each having multiple sub-segments. There are more than 2,000 sub-industries. For example, restaurant is a major industry and within it we have 37 sub-industries like café, momo outlets, wada pav stalls, etc. For all such industries, we provide regional content to users and that is what gives us advantage over competitors,” Sumeet added.
Innovative solutions
What differentiates AdBanao from other companies? According to Narendra, there are many features. “Our text-to-speech feature has computer generated voice algorithms in local languages. Users can put in a few lines of content and select a language they want the audio and video to be generated in. They have options of voice samples of male and female artists. Once they select the sample voice, users get a computer created audio. They can further add background music and download a polished audio jingle in minutes. All this does not require any recording setup or devices and is included in the unlimited plan.”
“Businesses can download branding images and videos along with personal birthday creatives, WhatsApp stickers, devotional creatives, motivational quotes etc. This is our USP (unique selling point) and our library is useful for variety of businesses across India,” he said.
Educating and scaling-up
AdBanao is registering around 3,000 new businesses every day, claims Sumeet. “Post registration, our app allows new users to test, use free trial of five credits and opt for premiums starting from ₹399 per month. Even if they don’t want to go for premium plans, users can use the app free for lifetime. In this case, users do not get readymade content and have to spend time on creatives using the editing features.
“For middle-aged people, those who wish to forward WhatsApp status messages, we have readymade ‘free for ever’ feature where they can download WhatsApp status videos, create a collage and post it,” Sumeet said.
“We are moving ahead with one more feature where we will educate SMB owners for branding, digital marketing, and other activities. Experts from AdBanao are recording and capturing videos and putting them in the app. Even if users have not opted for premium plans, they can learn how digital marketing works, what is the importance of social media and other topics to empower themselves.”
Next moves
“We are expanding services pan India and globally as well. We have users from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. We believe content availability in English language is helping us operate in different geographical locations. Our app is not limited to small businesses. It has a calendar for 365 days covering local and international events. Hence, creatives can be used across the world without any language barrier. For example, we have customers from Philippines using our app to generate creatives for their restaurants. They simply modify templates, designs as per their local food item names and photos. Also, we do not have differential pricing strategy for domestic and international users as of now.”