Bangalore Startups’ AMA with Abhash Kumar, Social Media Marketing Lead at YourStory
Website: http://yourstory.com/
Abhash is the Social Media Marketing lead at YourStory.com, India’s definitive digital media platform for stories of startups, entrepreneurs, innovators, and change makers. He is @aabhashk on twitter. He’s been with YS for almost 2 years now. He studied Electrical Engineering at MIT, Manipal and started a startup in his final year at college. He ran it for a year with batchmate Priyadeep (who continues to run it today http://gyanlab.com/ ) and then went on to work with Byju’s classes in a BD role for 9 months. He later quit and tried a few “odd jobs” for 10 months before joining YS.
Q: Is Digital marketing still relevant or useful even if we dont sell our product/service online? — Mithun Muddan
It certainly is.
Q: Is it true what was said on secret, that Sequoia invested in YS? Or was it just a regular business deal? — Kiran Jonnalagadda
No investments yet in YS. Completely bootstrapped. Sequoia has been a long time TechSparks sponsor.
Q. Can you please explain the process of getting one’s startup featured on YourStory.com? This would be helpful to beginners stepping into the ecosystem — Rahul Aswani
Best way is to reach out to one of us. Shoot a mail to editorial@yourstory.com If someone who’s already been covered recommends, you go up the list. Depends on the editorial pipeline as well.
Q: Yourstory.com is all about content. How important do you think content marketing is for startups. How can a lean team generate great content day after day? — Puneet
Very very important. Especially in the Buzzfeed age. There’s no excuse to not do content. Interesting, out of the box, creative stuff on Social Media. Also, if you’re an internet startup, get your coders/techies to write blogs about the inner workings. Works like a charm.
If you’re an internet startup, get your coders/techies to write blogs about the inner workings. Works like a charm.
Q: If a startup doesn’t have a IIT / IIM tag in their team, what other filters do you use to feature them? — Vignesh
I’ll be honest. IIT/IIM tag helps. We even researched it and almost 40% funded startups have an IIT/IIM tag. But if not, we look at the team more than anything else. Give me an experienced team and I’ll bet on it any day even if it’s a me-too product.
Q: Whatsapp is still not used as an effective marketing tool, any specific reason? — Omkar Kulkarni
We’re big on whatsapp, right now. Haven’t been able to use it effectively in the past. Some interesting integration in works. But for starters we just added a whatsapp share button on Mobile web at YS. Whatsapp is going to be an effective medium to reach out to the next set of users.
Q: Does online advertising pay all the bills, or do you need events to cover the gap? — Kiran Jonnalagadda
Advertising/Advertorials pay most of the bills. But we love doing events. Of course, we’ve cut down on it. Too resource-heavy. TechSparks is and will continue to be a mainstay. There is an interesting event announcement lined up as well!
Q: What’s your take on native advertising? — Kartik Luke Singh
As long as the reader is told on face, in the first sentence, that it is “Sponsor Content”, it is fine. We are very strict about that with advertisers. Even on social media, we use “Sponsored Content” to demarcate advertorials, native content.
Q: Is social media marketing better for B2C or B2B businesses? — Mithun Muddan
Important for both, but easier for B2C.
Q: What is the revenue share in % from ads, paid content, events etc for YS? — Harsha MV
No idea about the breakup. Sorry.
Q: What do have to say about all the blasting YS gets for running stories written by startups themselves? How do you recover from disasters like these in social media? — Saurabh Minni
I think you mean guest posts, right? If that, then we’ve a simple criteria: Does this content add value to our readers? Yes — it goes up. We don’t mind giving the startup a backlink at the end. No — it doesn’t go up, even if written by Zuck ;)
Q: Mobile vs Desktop. Any interesting insights based on data? — Abhinav Chhikara
Ours is slightly leaning towards Desktop as of today. Can be attributed to office folks who are our majority audience. But we expect it to be Mobile-heavy by October, 2015. It’s that close as of now.
Q: Substance vs. Shareability. What’s your take on this? — Bhuvanesh R
It’s a mix. You have to balance both. The content is never compromised on. But article headings are often looked at in terms of its shareability.
Q: How important is covering news like FlipKart/SnapDeal did this, did that.. are these all filler content for the blog? — Harsha MV
Going by traffic, people LOVE to read about FK, SD, Zomato etc. So, we try to cover, unless it is something like ‘XYZ launched in 5 more cities’. We’re curtailing it already and the numbers will only go down for such kind of content. Take for ex: “Mumbai Dabbawala — Flipkart” story we did. It is relevant and shareable (see the nos. here). So that goes up. But, ABC hired someone for VP, XYZ doesn’t go up.
Q: Which Tier 2 city do you see rising in India apart from the biggies? — Harsha MV
Pune is already there on the map. I’d say Indore for sure, also not Tier-2 but Kolkata is going to be big. Kochi — but there’s too much noise as well. So, that hampers.
Q: At what stage can we expect you to feature a product on your website? — Devansh Beriwala
Typically 4–6 months, with some traction. Definitely not in ideation stage or beta.
Q: Can you share some data / effectiveness of social media on the rural / urban reach? — Ra Mesha
I honestly don’t have an exact answer for it. It depends on what kind, B2B vs B2C, what sector etc. I don’t have that data. But something like FB/Twitter works better for urban, and whatsapp for rural.
Q: Native advertising, disguising ads as content, is it really a good progression towards in terms of advertising? — Bhuvanesh R
As I said, as long as readers are told at first go that it is sponsored content, it’s fine.
Q: Do VCs approach for early access to startups? How does that work? — Kartik Mandaville
Yes, they do. We work with them both offline (via events) and online (via our market intelligence).
Q: What’s your hiring process for content writers ? Do you do guest posts about general topics? — Keshav Meda
You can write to dipti@yourstory.com who’s our managing editor and she’ll take it forward. Guest posts, as long as they are relevant and useful to the end user. This can also be forwarded to the same email ID.
Q: What kind of KPIs do you set for each channel? Can you give some sample for Twitter? — Amrrs
KPIs would be reach and link clicks on facebook. We don’t care so much about likes. On twitter, it’s about increasing followers.. but most importantly engagement.
Q: Now when YS is one of the leading tech blogs. How are you setting your plan to spread it to a larger audience through social? — Ranit Sanyal
There is a big announcement in the works. Wait and watch!
Q: What kinda traffic do you guys experience — which day of the week do u get more? Where are you hosted and how many servers are running to hold YS intact? — Harsha MV
Traffic is almost similar on weekdays. The response for weekday content goes down on Saturdays typically. On weekends we try to cut ourselves some slack and do some lounge content as well.
Q: What’s the best breaking news you guys had exclusivity to in the past? Am sure its a proud moment to have those tip offs for a media company like YS!! — Harsha MV
Our focus is on stories. Not breaking news. :-)
Q: How stringent is the background check you guys do while writing a story on a upcoming startup or a funding story? With funding stories being ever so frequent, we have seen couple of stories with flaws in the stated facts — Hitanshu Bhalla
We publish funding news only if we receive an official announcement from the Co or if we speak directly with the founder/investor. You must have noticed we never write about speculations.
Q: can u share some successes where startups have benefitted by featuring on YS? — Ra Mesha
Too many. I can’t even begin to talk about the number of mails we get about this. Here’s a recent one:
Q: Where are you hosted and how many servers are running to hold YS intact? — Harsha MV
Amazon AWS. No. of servers — I don’t have any idea.
Q: I would like to knw more abt YS’s take on net neutrality.How it is helping campaign for NN? — Omkar Kulkarni
YS is completely for #NetNeutrality. Here’s a video we did today:
Our Internet Our Choice — This might become a reality if you don’t act soon
Q: Which Start up is getting featured in your next YS Fabulous startup tour ? — Mithun Muddan
Freshdesk.
Q: What’s the team size and their responsibilities? A brief would be fine. — Harsha Kulkarni
25 full-time and many more freelancers, contract-based.
Q: Any plans for podcasting or moving to more YouTube content? — Abhinav Chhikara
Yes, more video content going forward.
That brought our AMA with Abhash to a close!
Abhash’s final words: Thanks a lot guys. Hope this was helpful. If I didn’t answer a few Q’s, please take it up with me in a Private message or on social media. I am @aabhashk on twitter and on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abhash.kumar88
We are always always open to carrying resourceful guest posts. And we’re hiring freelancers. Just write to me abhash@yourstory.com or dipti@yourstory.com
We’ve set up a Twitter handle — @blr_startups. We’ll start tweeting updates and such out there in the future.
If you are interested in the startup ecosystem and would like to network with fellow tech founders join the Slack group if you haven’t already! Just fill out this form. If you have already filled the form, you would have received an invite. Contact @kar2905 or @harshamv if you have any issues. This AMA was summarized by @kartikluke and @karthik2502.
You can suggest other people for AMAs on the Slack group or you could reach out on Twitter.
