Vinay Singhal is the co-founder & CEO of WittyFeed. Hailing from Nunsar, a small village in Haryana, Vinay’s hunger for excellence made him the very first person from his family to pursue engineering. The entrepreneurial bug bit him early in 2010 while he was still pursuing his B.Tech, Computer Science from Chennai. A few failures and learning a lot from his mistakes, WittyFeed.com took shape in September 2014 under the aegis of Vatsana Technologies. WittyFeed.com is currently valued at $30 million.
In conversation with Dominic Rebello, Vinay says, he believes in effecting positive change in others and the community as a whole. He says, “My journey from 2010 to 2014 was nothing short of a rollercoaster ride. What kept me going was – My Team. It still is my propelling force.”
What is the idea behind WittyFeed?
We started our venture way back in 2010, with a Facebook page called Amazing Things in the World. We built this property in the early days, which had reached 4 million followers. We then realised that it was time for us to monetise this audience. That is when we developed WittyFeed and added Google’s tool AdSense to kick-started our journey.
Founded in 2014, WittyFeed started its journey with a hundred thousand users and now has a strong user base of a billion and garners close to 100+ million unique users every month. We at WittyFeed are very happy that we have achieved all these in just three years. But we still believe that the journey has started and we have to accomplish a lot more in coming years.
How are you different from others?
While we are the second largest content marketing company in the world, at our core we’re a technology company. Or, as we like to call “a bootstrap company”. Being a data-driven company, we have implemented Business Intelligence and bots to track our daily goals and our growth rate over the time. All the difference comes from the origin as to how we function and everyone at our firm makes use of machine learning to assess the audience and analyze which keywords to use in content (according to their usage and virality). All of this not only helps us in tracking our progress but also learn from the mistakes made clearly visible from our analytical tools.
‘Content Industry’ as a whole is delivering quality and relevant content and that is what we and the industry envision. WittyFeed has been working to deliver a solution that best focuses on where and how we market the desired content with measurable insights. Our native marketing trends like making stories, videos and quiz for a particular brand, indirectly, maybe what set us apart from other content brands. In just 3 years, WittyFeed has made a name that brands do not hesitate in relying upon as we monitor and analyze the performance of each strategy and tactic used for reaching the audience.
Any expansion plans?
Taking company expansion into consideration, apart from our HQ being in Indore, we already have Sales Offices in Delhi and Mumbai. We further are planning to have Sales Offices in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Talking abroad, we are present in the form of sales offices in Singapore and North-America while we aim at establishing one soon in Dubai, as well.
Your vision for the company?
Our vision is to change the way content is consumed and distributed around the globe.
Where do you see yourself five years down the road?
In the world of content, discovery, distribution, and demonstration of a topic holds utmost importance and plays a pivotal role in our long-term plan too. We want to take hold of distribution in the near future where our intent is to eliminate all the dependencies we have today on the social media platforms. With regular changes in the policies of social platforms, we often take a bad hit on our reach, hence, to be completely independent of any and all entities for distribution is the ambition we carry in our five-year plan.
When we started our journey from a Facebook page, no one has thought that that one page would lead us to become of the most influential and widespread content players in the world. With hard-work determination and moral we are spreading our wings faster than ever and we’d become universal in the coming years. So, five years from now, you can definitely expect to see us changing the world of Content Industry and make content creation and seeding much robust, simpler and dynamic.