Interview With Jay Pullur On Social Twist & Its Business Model

We caught up with Jay Pullur the founder of Social Twist (promoted by Pratmati Technologies) which owns the tell a friend widget. We asked him several questions about the growth of the tell a friend widget, its business model and more.

1) When did you start social twist? What was the vision behind starting the tell-a-friend widget?

We started work on SocialTwist early 2008 with the vision of enhancing typical web 1.0 sites to 2.0 by addition of “Social Widgets”. The idea was that the websites themselves should not require redevelopment, but it should be a simple and quick incorporation of new social features. The first such social widget happened to be Tell-a-Friend. When we took the widget around to show people how products and product reviews on websites could be spread, it was an instant hit. First public launch of Tell-a-Friend was in mid September last year.

Our belief is that referral and social marketing will galvanize the way products of the future will spread. Studies have indicated strong influence of friends and family on that majority of purchase decisions made by people, particularly the younger generation. This is a big opportunity for us to bring effective tools that aid marketing in this new world.

2) What success have you seen since inception? What have been the challenges?

Well, I should say, Tell-a-Friend has met with great market reception; with over 35,000 publishers using it and over 550 million widget serves in 7 months. It has been popular with ecommerce sites and large media sites. Our customer list includes P&G, Bertelsmann, Intel, Sun, NDTV.com, etc.

There were two key challenges with this product.

First was to get rapid scaling of the service that is required when the product spreads and gains popularity. Thanks to Cloud computing and Pramati’s App server experience, we could get that right, without disappointing the swarm of customers. We designed scalable SAAS delivery system where we can simply provision additional servers into the cluster and cater to increasing load and only incur incremental costs. Then, of course all the optimizations to make the service inexpensive. Today, we serve the smallest widget in size (KB) compared to our competition.

The second challenge was to come up with a credible monetization strategy.   We spent many months working with our customers and developed a freemium pricing and revenue model.  What this means is that we have an introductory product offering that is free and our customers can add premium features like branded email or contextual email for greater marketing control and impact.   We are the first leading share service to graduate from a free to freemium model.

3) Tell us more about the new advertising model launched on TAF?

We just launched TAF4 ADs, the new product that enables banner ads with referral capability. Banner ads appeal to the viewers, but many a times it might be someone known to the user who may be the publishers valuable target. TAF4 ADs can add Tell-a-Friend on top of any current banner ad, helping ad viewers spread the ad to their social network. This brings the last mile advantage to online ads.

The reasons why someone may spread the ad are varied. It might be an offer that’s expiring soon, an event of interest or simply a product good interest. TAF4 ADs can be used with rewards for increased effectiveness (eg. Tell friends and get 10% discount).

While the content on a page might have its own Tell-a-Friend for spreading, an ad on the page is mostly about content behind that sponsored link, which needs Tell-a-Friend of its own.

4) How do advertisers pay you for these ads?

Well, we offer the TAF4 Ads widget as a service with premium white listed email delivery.  The publisher or Ad Network pays for this service by buying a TAF4 Ads widget license and a premium word of mouth email credits bundle.

5) What is the most popular way to share using SocialTwist (IM bookmark etc)?

Our data tells us that Email remains to be the most popular channel for referrals with 58% being email and 31% Instant Messengers (Chat). Thus, when it comes to sharing one-to-one messaging channels score significantly higher over one-to-many social bookmarking.

6) What has surprised you most this year?

Frankly, I have been surprised by the demand for TAF4 Rewards.  I knew that there was a demand for better word of mouth incentive, reward and loyalty solutions however I could never have expected the success that our customers are having with it.  Intel used TAF4 Rewards to successfully engage, incent and reward its users to help it launch a new product, KLM used it to successfully launch a new loyalty program and PurePlay used it to generate over 3m word of mouth referrals in just 2 months.  This one is a game changer.

7) How important has the Indian market been to SocialTwist’s success?

It has been very important.  SocialTwist could not have received the rapid and broad global market adoption it received this year without the early support from NDTV, Ixigo, ClearTrip, IndiaPlaza, Dhingana, Jet Airways, Quikr and Blog.co.in.  Equally important has been the support received from India’s many bloggers.   We simply could not have reached 35,000+ global customers in our first 6 months without this level of Indian support.

Are you funded? Looking for funding?

Pramati is profitable and has enough resources to fund SocialTwist. We are not looking for funding at this point.

9) What is the team like? Are you hiring?

SocialTwist operates as an independent business unit of Pramati. We recently hired Mark Schreiber a veteran in the ecommerce and online marketing space as General Manager for the unit. Mark was most recently the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup called Apprema that was into social gifting. Vivek Lakshman is VP Products, who has a very experienced development team in Hyderabad.  We are always looking for great people and happy to talk to passionate people.

10) What’s the scale in terms of revenue you see for SocialTwist in the next 3-5 years?

Well, Jupiter Research is forecasting that email marketing will be a $1.1 billion market by 2010 and I believe that within the next 3-5 years word of mouth email marketing will exceed $100m. A part of this sizable opportunity will be our target.