PayTunes Android app replaces a user’s ringtones with ad jingles and rewards user with points on each incoming call. These users work as broadcaster for PayTunes. So whenever a call comes on the phone, user gets to hear an ad jingle instead of his ringtone and then rewarded with points (multiple points based on the listening duration) at the end of the call. User can later redeem these points through participationg in Lucky draw or earn cash for mobile recharge.
For Advertisers, PayTunes works as a complete ad platform with in-built analytics. Advertisers can selectively choose the users they want to target based on geography, demography and other parameters and push their ad from our platform's backend dashboard through a single click.
More than 450K users have downloaded PayTunes app so far since its launch in October’ 15 and their response has been amazing towards the product. We are witnessing a growth rate of more than 10% per week in our subscriber base. We had reached 100k users within 3 months of launch in January this year and since then we have seen amazing growth in our user base in last 4 months. We are currently running 3 million ad impressions daily on our users with the overall reach of atleast 2 million users daily.
PayTunes provides an unmatched Digital Advertising platform to advertisers to reach directly to their target mobile users like never before. Now advertisers can push ad-jingles to reach millions of users daily with just one click. With ringtones, PayTunes also targets users with ad visuals and other details about the ad at the end of the call. Advertisers can also conduct surveys, launch contests on PayTunes app and pull users to their product.
PayTunes puts advertisers in control of their campaign. You decide your audience, You Decide your budget and monitor the ad-delivery. All at just one click of your mouse.
• Control your audience based on Age, Gender and Geography
• Decide total exposure per user
• Receive real time analytics of campaign
• Pay only for successful deliveries
Apart from this, PayTunes has just introduced time based ad delivery feature. Now advertisers can run ads at specific time. For ex, Kelloggs ad can be played during morning hours; Dominos-pizza hut can run their ads during lunch and dinner hours. TV Soaps can target users during their show timings. This type of ultra focussed
About the Co-Founders:
1. DivyaPratap (CEO)- IIT Delhi'10 Btech. He has worked as an Embedded Software Engineer at CSR Tech (Qualcomm) iOS developer for 3 years in IoT team working on sensors, Wi-fi and BLE. Then started an adventure sports based social networking prior to founding this.
2. Rakesh Sehgal- IIT Delhi'10 BTech. He has worked as a Management Consultant with PwC. He was also a Co-founder along with Gaurav in another startup Publify, a digital OOH Screens aggregator prior to this.
3. Gaurav Tiwari- MBA, Symbiosis Pune'04. He has worked as a Business Development Executive in Pidilite, Mars Chocolates and Wipro USA for 8 Yrs, prior to coming back to India and working with AAP for 2 years managing sizeable portfolios.
4. Amit Naredi- MBA (MSU – 1998), 18+ years experience in media industry; worked with HT, Amar Ujala group, Hit FM perviously. Was last working as ‘Deputy regional head’ for My FM in Mumbai. Has Joined PayTunes as Chief Sales officer.
1. How does your startup work? (detailed Description)
a. PayTunes is an Ad delivery and incentive platform for users. It delivers audio jingle based ads as ringtones on phones of users followed by engagement notifications on every call and incentivize users in return for free reward points. Using these points the users can participate in daily contests to win prizes or get free recharges. For Advertisers, it is a tool using which they can reach their target audience directly on their phones, even when the users aren't on internet. The advertisers can select their TGs Demography, geography, ad-frequency and Total exposure. The app also checks all the ad running parameters on each user's phone and advertiser is billed only for those impressions which run for a minimum duration of 7 sec (i.e ringtone duration >7s). Each PayTunes user works as a broadcaster for brand as a ringtone ad on a user’s mobile is heard by 4-5 different people around him in a day.
2. It is a novel idea which won PayTunes a 'Best App Award in prestigious GMASA'16 in entertainment category'. Presently we have a good user base in Delhi NCR, Gujarat, UP, MP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Pune and Mumbai. We are operating from Delhi and Mumbai currently.
3. How did the idea came to start?
a. Divya, Rakesh and Gaurav, who were working on different ideas under same roof were closing their previous startups around same time. During a discussion about advertising industry, in which Rakesh and Gaurav were operating earlier, when someone's phone rang and the idea clicked that what if ads could be delivered as ringtones. Just after that, when all dived into the idea, the team realised that this could be a big idea and can unlock an altogether new medium of advertisement and started working on this.
4. What are the special key features of your startup?
a. While people have started to spend less time on TV, Radio or Print, mobile advertising seems to be the way forward. However for some time, mobile advertisements had limited themselves to banner based or just visual ads. Youtube came out with AV ads, but the cost of data and its high consumption in AV lead to limited adoption of the same. In PayTunes, we are delivering AV ads at <500kB and the delivery doesn't even need internet all the time. It is a strong recall medium for brands. Also it gives the advertisers a direct control on their TG by selecting their demography ie. their Age, Gender and Location.
5. How are you different from the existing ones?
a. This is a new category so far. If we look at other related mediums in the domain, apps like Gaana and Saavn are also audio ad options on mobile. However they require the user to login on their app and spend data. There's a significant majority of Indian Masses which doesn't consume data this way. Right from beginning we've tried to be light on data consumption for users and that's why we developed this product keeping in mind this user behaviour. Our app doesn't require internet to work all the time. It downloads the audio ad whenever user is seen online along with all the play parameters. Then the ads keep playing without any need of internet on users' phone.
6. How much amount of funding your startup raised till now? If not, then what's your future plans of funding?
a. We have raised 2 rounds so far. The seed round ($100K) was raised from Mumbai Based CIO Angel Network, led by Sanjay Mehta and subsequent Pre Series A ($0.5M) was raised from Indian Angel Network, led by Vishal Khare and Rajeev Arora.
7. How do you monetising?
a. The revenue comes from Advertisers directly. The ad pricing is on the basis of per Delivered impressions. We give bonus impression for calls picked before 7 or missed calls. They are like free ad ons for advertisers. Part of this revenue goes to the user as the incentive. User is able to earn recharge cash of around 15-20 Rs per month plus some big prizes like mobiles, pen drives and big recharge coupons which user can win
8. What are the challenges your startup faced while setting up the business?
a. The basic challenge we've been facing is that of user base. Being a startup you have to start from 0, but in order to make it a viable medium to advertise there should be some critical mass on the platform. Also being a new category, it took a long effort to crack some initial orders. Now the product is listed with some big ad industry names such as Group M (Madhouse), Madison India, OMG media and others.
9. What is the market size and market opportunity?
a. Currently the ad industry market in India is >50k crore industry, majority held by TV. Digital is rising at a very fast pace and is holding 10% of this industry, however will be 20% by 2020. We lie in between the targeted digital mediums and AV mediums like TV/Radio. This unlocks a great market opportunity for us.
10. What are the traction details?
a. Currently the app has 4.7L downloads out of which around 3 L are active (~65%). The growth rate we are seeing is ~15-20% per month. With these 3 Lac Paytunes users, we have total listenership of 20 Lac people daily.
So far we have completed campaigns with around 10 advertisers including Nissan, Saavn.com, movie Dhanak and others.
Future plans: Aiming 1 Million+ download by this year end. On client side we aim to get empanelled with at least 1-2 big FMCG brands.
11. What advice you want to give the new entrants in this space?
a. Ad industry has a very high inertia. If you want to establish yourself in this domain, especially if you are creating a new category, you will need to have some patience before stones start turning.
12. Any interesting quote about your venture?
a. if it rings a bell, it will pay you well. :)
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
