Innovation and Startups | TelecomDrive.com
As part of our special series around Innovation and Startups – Gautam Raj Anand, Founder & CEO, Hubhopper speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the way Hubhopper is creating unique proposition around content.
Please share your key priorities today?
Hubhopper is empowering the content creators and giving them the freedom to build their own niches. With our proprietary tools and analytics data they can now identify and reach out to their kind of audience like any large or medium sized media company does.
We are democratizing and proliferating content creation, where even an individual can aspire to be at par with the biggies. Therefore the potential is immense and the growth, exponential.
On the demand side we offering the consumer total control over the kind and intensity of content she wants to view. User experience has been one of the key priorities for us. In its short period of existence, Hubhopper has already had eight avatars. We believe in bettering ourselves. Recently we launched Hubhopper Channel, which promises every content creator who is on-board Hubhopper 5000 new subscribers every month. And Hubhopper has now become a Plug & Play app ' there is no need sign-up, enhanced User interface and unlimited interest categories can be chosen.
We are steadily working towards:
' Gradual, intelligent growth.
' Onboarding of 150 publishers this year
' Building on user experience through data collected.
' Onboarding Multilanguage channels and other features in time.
' Tying up with phone companies for a native imbed
How has been the journey for Hubhopper so far?
The journey of the cofounders Uday and Gautam began when they identified a gap in the bridge between users in search of content from diverse content and content publishers trying to reach their core segment while working as analysts at their corporate jobs.
And they set about solving this problem and this was the genesis of Hubhopper. The founders followed a holistic approach in understanding the core pain points ailing the segment while operating out of a bootstrapped office/apartment in Delhi.
During their various iterations and surveys in the creation of Hubhopper they managed to build an incredibly dedicated and strong team with expertise in each domain, this now stands at 30 members strong.
Initially while there were trepidations about such a data centric and gradual approach in team and product building, the founders are now confident that this long gestation period of data analysis is the reason for Hubhopper's recent successes and now urge all early stage startups to not rush the process of creation. Our team strength lies in its inherent love for product, technology, design and common alignment with the company's long-term goal.
Their model has found support amongst the industry biggies who advise the founders on various issues. Today the company can boast of a formidable board of advisors which comprises of some of the leading names in start-up and VC ecosystem.
What are your plans for the future?
Our goal is to becoming the virtual Playstore for publishers. Hubhopper opens its technology to all content publishers, who can run and own channels through it.
The major pain point for online publishers today is that all of them while being great at content creation, need prowess in a whole host of other skill sets to be successful online.
Hubhopper takes care of them in all these respects.
By running their channels on Hubhopper through our SAAS dashboard they get free access to — Delivery, Targeting, Analytics, User experience, click backs and optimizations all the way to being able to use the platform as a source of revenue for advertorial content.
Hubhopper currently has publishers like Gionee, Miss Malini, ANI, Universal, WION News and 30 other running channels who leverage off Hubhopper’s dissemination mechanism.
What is your business model? What is the profile of your users and customers?
Hubhopper saves all users whom have a multitude of interests the laborious time effort and search cost with consuming content from platforms on different domains with varied user experience. Content is the king. Hubhopper offers a platform for publication and consumption of all kinds of content – Visual, written, AV and multimedia.
A seamless bridge that pushes curated and relevant content to the consumer and whole array of tools to the content creator to reach out to his/her audience. The users are in complete control of the content they want to view.
Hubhopper also provides content creators of all sizes the ability to disseminate their content in a manner, which would have otherwise been near impossible to create internally.
What is the technology that powers your platform?
Hubhopper is a highly tech intensive platform with two major aspects to it:
' Hubhopper for users: The interface where the average user consumes a daily dose of their interests.
' Hubhopper for Publishers: A SAAS driven platform that gives publishers the ability to create content in much more palatable ways for their audiences along with empowering them with
Delivery, Targeting, Analytics, User experience, click backs and optimizations all the way to being able to use the platform as a source of revenue for advertorial content.
Content is surely king and content is perhaps the biggest driving force for telecoms and OTT players to explore monetisation. How can you help in this regard?
Hubhopper is platform that helps proliferate content creation and consumption of all kinds of content – Visual, written, AV and multimedia. A seamless bridge that pushes curated and relevant content to the consumer and whole array of tools to the content creator to reach out to his/her audience. The users are in complete control of the content they want to view.
Platforms like Hubhopper empower the content creators and give them freedom to build their own niches. They can now identify and reach out to their kind of audience like any large or medium sized media company does. We are democratizing and proliferating content creation, where even an individual can aspire to be at par with the biggies. Therefore, the potential is immense and the growth, exponential.
What is your biggest USP… How do you want to add value to existing content ecosystems today?
Unlike pre-existing content disseminating platforms, Hubhopper opens its technology to all content publishers who wish to leverage it and user experience to disseminate their content and in the process target and understand their users better, in real time.
Agnostic to size and type of content publishers Hubhopper gives everyone a space to reach their consumers and optimize on a platform which otherwise would have cost them huge time, money and effort to create internally. Hubhopper acts as a new revenue-generating platform for publishers earning through advertorial content.
Hubhopper takes real time micro engagement data from its users to continuously optimize their content consumption experience and in the process save time they would have otherwise spent wading through the Internet.
Packed with social features, Hubhopper allows users to collect and pin content they love on their profiles and gain internal traction through the following they generate. Users, in real time, can adjust the quantum and intensity of their interests in topics for a perfect content consumption experience.
