These Founders are Working with Sunny Leone!

Sunny was the most searched personality in India last year. Here's her take on working with Emojifi, the live emoticon makers:

Sunny Leone:

Reason for partnering with Emojifi

Emojifi has proven to be superior in creating, and executing a product better then what was already on the market. We tested many companies globally and the team at Emojifi was superior. When we launch anything with the brand, SUNNY LEONE we are careful and make sure that we are not 2nd best. It is important when dealing with such a large digital brand that you keep the consumers and fans happy.


Are emoticons really an effective way for brands and celebs to reach consumers?

Whenever you decide to launch any new technology to your brand’s fan base, you need to make sure you understand the brand consumer and what they will want and use. Sunny emoji’s took lots of time to create and approvals on many levels so that her fans would be pleased with the outcome since they are the end consumer/ user.

When you have something unique such as this technology, you want the fan base to share it with the non-fan base thereby helping grow the brand. So if the existing base is happy with the emojis then they will keep sharing repeatedly. We have seen this happen in a very short time and we believe this is due to the quality of Emojifi’s product. These emojis are different to any other on the market.

Manan Maheshwari, cofounder of Emojifi:


Why did you start Emojifi, what was that light bulb moment?

It goes back to a 17 year long friendship. The three of us, the Emojifi cofounders, Mahesh Gogineni, MS Varun and I were friends through BITS Pilani, through getting our masters in the US [shout out to Duke and Stanford University], and even through our fist startup called ZapLuk.


We built ZapLuk to be an on demand beauty and wellness platform and we are proud to say our bro code has only been reinforced for the entrepreneurial journey we have taken together – many people warned us our friendship won’t survive going into business.


ZapLuk was successful, we raised funding, and in 7 to 8 months we grew it by x20 – x25; gave good multiples back to the investors, and were acquired by Quikr. But we didn’t want to join Quikr, because the entrepreneurial bug had bitten us hard and we made too good a founder team to not startup all over again.


So for our second bout startingup, we wanted to do something we had never done before, we wanted to try our hand at a business we had never tried before. So we thought…stickers!


It’s the last thing you will expect from BITS Pilani, Stanford-Duke Masters holders. But stay with us. Line messenger earns 267 million dollars by disrupting the sticker economy. So we thought we will add to the experience and do the same for the Indian market (at least we will start here)


After 2 months beta testing we launched Emojifi in January 2017. It’s an app that predicts stickers, emoticons and GIFs to a user in a non-intrusive way. Having the Emojifi app will help a user communicate using a plethora of special pictorial representations.


Congrats on partnering with Sunny Leone, how did that come about?


It’s been a coup having Sunny join us. It only took a few days to convince her to have a line of Emojifi digital stickers. She designs her range of exclusive stickers with our in-house designers.

We want more and more brands and celebs to have their brand presence reinforced in a user’s mind using emoticons. For instance when you type the word ‘food’, a list of Swiggy stickers will be suggested to user.

Both tie ups with Swiggy and Sunny Leone are pilots. We hope to monetize these tie-ups in the coming months.

In a world dealing with fintech, healthtech and edtech, do you feel that Emojifi's proposition to sell stickers is perhaps too trivial?

Nope. We are solving a problem and we have a purpose.

The problem we are solving is that the online chatting user experience is disrupted when a user tries to use an emoji. Our technology makes using an emoticon a seamless experience.

Up to date there aren’t too many tech companies who have found a way to let brands engage with consumers online. Consumers spend about 5 to 7 hours of the day chatting online. That’s about half the total hours awake. So Emojifi is solving a problem that advertisers have as well as the consumer.

For each person the problem to solve and their purpose to fulfill is different. For some it may be curing cancer. For us it’s to disrupt the digital sticker economy.

There’s serious money to be made through this non-intrusive method of digital advertising. Kim Kardashian made a 100 million dollars on her sticker range.

And Line messenger (mentioned before) makes 267 million dollars a year selling stickers.

There definitely isn't anything trivial about the money to be made selling digital stickers.