How This Chennai-based Startup is Connecting All Fans Worldwide With Their Social Networking App

Chennai based Start-up Launches Fansmark - A Social Networking App Especially For Connecting All The Fans Worldwide

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How This Chennai-based Startup is Connecting All Fans Worldwide With Their Social Networking App

Fansmark is a social networking mobile app that connects fans club members of cinema, leader & sports celebrities. This application has a pre-created unique profile for each celebrity (no chance of fake accounts), the celebrity fans can follow their celebrity profile to engage worldwide fans with the help of app features the way fans thinking. It boosts faster sharing the latest news on celebrities, trues behind rumors and real facts, social updates, song releases, first look posters, teaser and trailer releases, seasonal greetings and much faster than other networks.

We are publishing an interview with Mr. Gopinath V – CEO, Fansmark:

Q.: Please tell us about the founders
Ans:
Sure. There are three founders:

  • Gopinath Vairam – Founder & CEO
  • Tamilvanan G – Co-founder & CTO
  • Dhilipan Mohanraj – Co-founder & VP

The Founders, who are ardent fan of various celebrities and very crazy like queuing at wee hours of the morning to catch the first day first show to chanting names of their celebrities at the top of their voice in jam-packed stadiums or buying merchandise at insane prices — they do everything to demonstrate their loyalty towards their loveable celebrities. Once friends & neighbor’s asked what kind of behavior it is, “Gopi” answered this is so called FANSISM.

All the founders were settled in comfortable jobs in a reputed companies, one day suddenly “Gopi” had a thought to connect all the fans of his celebrity in a one place for movie celebration party, but it became very hectic and ended with very less headcount and he became mad and found that there is lagging in inter connectivity among the fans clubs and the fans, because they are divided into various common social networks. To interconnect all the fans “Gopi gathered strong communicative thoughts and shared his complete ideas towards the other two crazy people Dhilipan & Tamil who are hungry for new ideas. Later his thoughts turned as a common objective than “Tamil” created a sketch for an app and “Dhilipan” started analytical research and development and very soon they found that there is a huge opportunity in this sector, and then the endless efforts become a Product, now working towards the official launch. So finally, “YOU” are here to celebrate.

Q.: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Ans:
Celebrities Fan clubs are largely diverted into various social media apps. There is no central medium to operate their activities. 100 million fans are straggling to interconnect.

Celebrities are facing difficulty in managing their fans base in different social networks and unable to identify who are all the real fan of them, losing their online reputations since there is no control over their fans and there is unethical content of non-fans other celebrity fans bullying and planned to troll.

It is this void that Fansmark app is trying to the plugin. It is the target group that Fansmark is trying to penetrate, organize and make better with its fan-focused features.

fansmark logo

Q.: What is your USP?
Ans:
This app built with feature called FANSISM, it boosts the intra fans club connections and enable every fans clubs and their members to mingle with each other in a single screen to turn “fans clubs’ activities more meaningful.

Q.: Please tell us about the investors (if any)
Ans:
Self-funded by founders and helped by friends.

Q.: What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learnings that you have?
Ans:
The Online fan groups which exist in other common social media will migrate to fansmark App. Fanclubs will start believing it is a complete social media app for them to do their meaningful content creation and sharing that content towards other fan communities.

The celebrities will start feeling that the fansmark is the safest place and encourage their fans to interconnect and exchange the true contents of each other.

Q.: What has been your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what did you learn from it??
Ans:
Initially, we started developing all the features what we have learned from our complete research, however it leads more consumption of time and money, in fact we ended losing our own teammates, since it takes huge time to showcase the complete featured product, meanwhile they lost the motivation. Since we are in halfway, decided to outsource the project but the way of desired result is not at the expected level.

Later, we divided the modules and restricted the features, learned more from the failures and prepared for MVP- minimum viable product, reached to young talented minds to develop from scratch. Things started and developed the application in our own way at an optimum level, finally the product is ready and working towards the official launch.

Q.: How are you pricing the Product? What is the logic behind it? Explain your thought process.
Ans:
Fansmark is free for fan users. After passing a year, we are planning to release our SAAS module for celebrities, it gives access to control over their fans, it will be charged a monthly or yearly basis.

Q.: How did you get your first customer?
Ans:
We are partnered with 50+ offline fansclub and social networking fans group having a plan to pitch the app over here.

Q.: Is there any interesting success story? If yes, please write about it.?
Ans:
Fansmark – grabbed Enantra’s 2019 Best Innovative startup award. “Enantra” is an annual entrepreneurship fest organized by Anna University which draws participants from all walks of education and industry sector. The 2019 edition was conducted over 3 days on 7th to 10th Feb 2019 and there are 25 startups who participated in this event and this was a powerful event for knowledge gathering and showcasing the new products. The event was enriched with workshops, 5 signature events and 12 mini events along with a casual interview session with founders.

How This Chennai-based Startup is Connecting All Fans Worldwide With Their Social Networking App

Based on the student’s vote’s and opinions of experts from EDITN (Entrepreneurship Development Institute Tamilnadu) fansmark grabbed the “2019 Best Innovative startup award”. It is a remarkable day for fansmark team. Some of our memorable moments:

Q.: What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product leading to something bigger? If so, how?
Ans:
This product will reach the same extent to the level of IPL, the best example of successful fan product is IPL, since here in India, the Fans or Fansism is not just an entertainment, it is another religion for true fans.

Q.: Since inception, give us a sense of the value of business done by your venture? Please explain in detail.
Ans:
On the month of April the beta version of app grasped 250+ users. The app will officially launch to public in July 2019.

Q.: What is the insight that you have about this market, which no one else has? Uniqueness about your Startup.
Ans:
If one is to investigate the fan club statistics of India alone,

  1. It is found that there are 1 million and more registered fans clubs in India each club with an average of 100 members.
  2. 2 lakhs + Celebrities have maintaining fans clubs offline.
  3. The following category Cinema, sports, leaders which has 101 million fans in India.
  4. 5 Million+ celebrity fans groups exist in Facebook.
  5. In twitter there are 2 lakhs celebrities exist and which they hold average of 500+ fans.

It is the target group that Fansmark is trying to penetrate, organize and make better with its fan-focused features.

Q. : List all the names of the core Team Members, along with their Designated Roles.
Ans:
The fansmark team consist of 6 People, here they are:

  • Gopinath Vairam – Founder & CEO, MBA graduate, 10 Years of experience in the key areas like sales & marketing, Social media planning, customer relationship, advertisement, billing, invoicing, collection and disputes handling, credit processing, public relation, accounts payables/receivables.
  • Thamilvanan G – Co-founder & CTO, BE CS, 8 Years’ of experience in full life cycles of an app development. Analysis, Design, Development, Testing and deployment. Served in 15+ IT projects, Proficient in people and technology management within the cost, time and scope.
  • Dhilipan Mohanraj – Co-founder & VP – R&D and PR, MBA graduate, 7 Years’ of experience in worldwide client management, Leads generation, public relations & risk management, Quality control.
  • Bharath Kumar – Digital Marketing Expert, BE IT, 6 Years’ of experience in online advertisement management, SEO, SMO, SEM, Branding, Marketing strategy Implementation, Content creation, Market Research & Competitors Analysis, Google, Bing & campaign ads management etc.
  • Mohideen Abubucker – VP-Product Development, BE CS, 6 Years’ of experience in software development, a Full Stack Developer expertise in the following technologies Python, PHP, Mongo dB, MySQL, AngularJS, JavaScript, jQuery & HTML. Served in 11+ projects.
  • Praveen Kumar- Software Testing Expert: BE CS, 6 Years’ of experience in software testing, expertise in all categories of manual testing, automation testing in mobile and desktop. Proficient in Automation testing tools Appium, Selenium IDE, Selenium RC and Selenium Web driver using JAVA. Currently the following technologies are Learning in progress Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning role in Testing.

Q.: Who do You Perceive as Your Competition? How do you differentiate yourself with them?
Ans:
As far as our research in the industry of social media we supposed to compete with Boring Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp.

Q.: What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months?
Ans:
Aiming for 50k app users: We believe, it can be achieved by focusing majorly to drag the die-hard fans club members to fansmark and converting the other social media fan groups to fansmark app.

Q.: What message do you want to convey to fellow entrepreneurs?
Ans:
Sometimes customer don’t know what they want, so create it and showcase it. Action and time decide everything, carry them both but never forget to wear patience.

Q.: Any other information you would like to share?
Ans:
Currently looking for INR 3 million as seed fund to manage Operational expenses like managing server cost and to implement a revenue model that operate towards gaining a profit.

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Thanks Gopinath. Best wishes!