The Smartican-Uber tie up

As I was sitting at the Smartican office on a fine Saturday morning waiting for the other members of the Marketing Crew to trickle in, one of the new hires entered the room grinning from ear to ear. She told us that she had just taken a free ride in a fancy car from her house in West Delhi all the way to the office. On asking her we were told that Uber was giving discount promo codes to all first time Uber users. Excited much, we all downloaded the Uber app right there and then. Well who doesn’t like a freebie? During the next one week, the Smartican employees must have taken at least 20 Uber rides in total. We then realised that every Smartican user should also be the beneficiary of the privilege Uber was providing.

Smartican is a social media platform for content discovery and distribution with powerful search & filtering functionality. Since its inception, Smartican’s marketing efforts have been aimed at expanding its rapidly growing user-base as well as bringing in businesses and brands on to the portal. In the past few months, Smartican has partnered with companies like UrbanClap, eBay, Airbnb, and Instabounce, etc.

After contacting the concerned person handling Marketing & Partnerships for Uber at New Delhi through LinkedIn, we fixed up a meeting. Before we knew it, the deal was closed and we had received a common promo code for our existing user-base as well as 20,000 unique promo codes for our new users. For a user-base like ours, which is growing exponentially, these 20,000 codes finished within a month and our users were more than happy with this freebie. Through this agreement, Smartican used the Uber codes as an incentive to grow its user-base and Uber gained access to half a million new potential Uber riders across the country. Through Smartican, Uber is now leveraging the ever increasing social media user-base and targeting social media to spread its message.

In the coming few weeks and months, Smartican will be creating all types of video content for Uber. These videos will be focused on promoting women Uber drivers, promoting college students as Uber drivers, as well as promoting UberPool in India. Smartican will also be helping Uber expand into the tier - II cities of India, starting with Guwahati, as Smartican has a wide user-base as well as local reach in a lot of the rural cities in India.

We at Smartican have learnt the importance of partnering and being associated with other companies especially start-ups as these are the companies which will take India forward in the future. Riding solo isn’t the way to go, as together we can surmount all kinds of challenges which may have not been possible alone. Smartican is evolving the way people use social media and Uber is evolving the way the world moves. Together, Smartican and Uber hope to go a long way. Ride with Uber and share your Uber experience on Smartican!

How to Market Your Startup

There are people with a lot of money to spend and even more people with ideas that they believe, is worth that money.  For example, being able to discover and share content freely like one www.smartican.com or swipe left or right determining whether you want to be in a relationship with someone on www.trulymadly.com.

On paper, it's actually pretty easy! All one has to do is have a million dollar idea, and then they'll get a million dollars to implement that idea. To be successful one needs money and thanks to startup culture being very popular, one can get money.

To succeed, we need two things an idea worth investing in and an investor. There are many ways to go about doing that, corporate events, competitions and even LinkedIn. If the idea is good, it will get money. Once the money comes in, it's all about marketing the product and to spend as little as one can to attract each user or customer.

Gaining attention for anything new is difficult, the product needs to be outstanding. One method is to spend all the funds on advertising the product or you can start small. Starting small means you should run a few small marketing campaigns and try and get the brand to spread through word of mouth.

Hike messenger had TV ads and billboards and newspaper listingas but it never came close to beating out WhatsApp as the most popular instant messaging available to us. Facebook started with people telling other people, no ads and now it's one thing we can't live without in our lives.

It all sounds so easy, but times have changed and the needs of the people have changed and the value for money has gone down. There used to be a time that people would talk about their teams, then their new bands and now everyone wants to talk about their new apps.

Make sure yours is the one they remember.

Indian Start Ups

India’s economic potential has been well documented for decades, but it has never taken off to the point of the country becoming an economic powerhouse. However, India has also entered the start up bubble. The Indian economy is flooded with country specific apps and programs that provide its population with the opportunity to make their lives convenient. 

India is considered a developing nation, and not a powerhouse because of the gap between the rich and the poor. The rich are really rich and the poor are, well, really poor. This means for all the big MNCs and the conglomerates there are slum colonies and garbage piles that actually define the part of town they're in. 

What do these startups do? How are they different from the startups that exist worldwide? Well, a lot of them aren't but what they are is specific to the Indian audience. Apps like Practo (www.practo.com) and Grofers (www.grofers.com) have made often tedious but necessary activities, like booking doctors appointments and buying groceries, so convenient that they can be done with one push of a button. 

Smartican (www.smartican.com), for example, allows people to discover and share new content in such a way that any content shared on the website can be seen by all its users. Although Indian startups have the same base as other well settled companies, they cater to the Indian population. Apps like Truly Madly, a dating app that models itself on Tinder but has become specific to India is a perfect example.

Startups in India have realised their importance to each other and have now entered a new situation known as "Coopetition," which is teaming up with other startups whilst competing with each other. This helps propel both companies and popularise their respective products and services. 

India's battle to become a powerhouse will reach it's conclusion, one can say that India is a start up too. 

Content is King

When experts say that content is king, they mean it. If any content catches your eye, you will look at it. The catchy headlines, the pretty pictures and funny videos that you see on the internet everyday are examples of just that. The people generating this content want it to be seen, to be heard and the way to do that is to make sure the content is good.

The Smartican Show (www.smartican.com/thesmarticanshow) for example, finds out how much India knows about what is going on. Things like Independence Day trivia, how the law and order of the country could be better and some light hearted questions about their ideal significant other. It allows the people watching to see how much they know, and raise awareness on sensitive issues.

It is understood that content is good if it evokes responses from its viewers or readers or listeners. A written piece should make you want to read more at the end, an image should make you want to see it in real life and a video should make you think about the message it’s putting across.  Any successful website has content that users want to look at.

The idea is to bring the content to the people is how one starts and if it’s good enough people will come to the content. Sabki Shruti (www.smartican.com/shruti) started out by bringing Indian pop culture love out of us and has slowly become one of the biggest reasons that users come to our website. It is the perfect example of how good content can be the driving force of any website.

Just remember, good content makes the audience content.

Meet our Honey Almast, our CEO!

Honey Almast

"Honey! I'm home!" "I love you Honey!" "I want to be with my Honey," are just a few examples of things we hear at the office. The weird part is that everyone says it, not to each other but to the same person.

Affectionately called "boo-boo" by the Musician and she has an official title which is hard to come by in any startup. So meet, our CEO, Honey Almast! She is our oldest employee at 42 years old.

I was first introduced to Honey at the time of my interview where she spent twenty five minutes yelling at me when I entered but had calmed down while i was interviewing for the job. Ever since then she has always been at the door greeting every Smartican that enters.

Her day is simple, wake up, say hello to people, sleep, wake up and check that everyone is working and then sleep again when everyone has left. Honey is an asset to this company, and not a single day goes by where she isn't the biggest motivational force we have. Honey is our office dog and Chief Entertainment Officer.

Everyday, we paws and appreciate her. She may be a dog but without her here, life is ruff.

Reasons You Should Be a Brand Ambassador

Saying bye on Friday is a little bittersweet because it means two days off having worked but it also means not seeing the faces you’re accustomed to seeing every day. I walked into office excited to meet and talk to my work friends, but I was pleasantly surprised to see some new faces. Faces of Evangelists, well, Smartican Evangelists (www.smartican.com/evangelists). They were young, fresh faced, just got into university and were full of smiles for every Smartican they saw.

Smartican Evangelists are college students that are chosen to help promote the Smartican brand through their social and academic circles. Through this one month long virtual internship they gain a certificate, a letter of recommendation and the chance to be a permanent member of team Smartican after they graduate.

The group that greeted me in the morning were carefully selected through ‘Smartex,’ our initiative to help college students prepare for placement drives by understanding how to partake in a group discussion, give an interview and tips to having an impactful C.V. With the help of HR professionals, we shortlisted seven Evangelists that could potentially represent Smartican.

Just like we do, one by one they trickled into the room while we sat around the conference table and smiled again as we pointed in the direction of the room where the Adjustor was waiting. Out of the seven that were selected for the interview, only four them stood at the end as the new Smartican Evangelists.

As they left, the day returned to normal as we got ready to eat some rajma chaawal and listen to stories of the weekend gone by.

Welcome to Smartican!

Who are we? We are Smartican, an open social media and content sharing platform. India’s first and fastest growing open social media and content sharing platform to be exact. What makes us different is all the content on our website reaches all of our users. We are here to make your work popular, and have fun doing it. 

We are ridiculous. Yes, we do get work done but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have fun doing it. The office of Smartican has seen it all, it’s seen the brilliant and well….the not so brilliant. It ranges from ideas that were so ridiculous that we talked about them for days and a cameo made by the boss in which he….adjusted himself, in a Bollywood flopbuster.

The bosses are what make the job as fun as it is, we have Charak ‘the CEO’ Almast, Zorawer ‘the Adjuster’ Singh, Mani Dev ‘the Musician’ Gyawalli and Abhishek ‘Funny Man’ Puri. It’s a combination of these traits that make being part of Team Smartican an amazing experience.  

This blog is here to document everything from the clever marketing campaigns to inter office table tennis tournaments. 

So join in at www,smartican.comJ, and root for your favourites! Welcome to Smartican

The Adjuster