EP15: Social commerce, an award winning digital agency, and launching 4 businesses {Vikas Chawla, Co-founder of Social Beat}

I speak with Vikas Chawla a friend of mine from my time at Loyola College Chennai , who founded digital agency called Social Beat. He along with his brother Suniel Chawla have built a sought after agency that has won numerous awards as a Premier Google Partner & as a recommended Facebook agency.

In the conversation we talk about the origin story, how an ecomm website became an agency and how an agency is looking at building products to scale beyond the services business.

A fun conversation into all things digital and chatting about the 4 businesses being built inside of the agency.

Vikas is found on LinkedIn and Twitter

— V

Timeline:

2:13 — Aiesec

3:16 — Getting work experience while at college

4:52 — Working at The Murugappa Group

5:57 —MV Subbiah, Padma Bhushan & ex-Chairman of the Murugappa Group

10:42 — Moving on from Murugappa group to entrepreneurship

13:10 — Exploring Social Commerce

17:10 — Influence and curation is influencing commerce

21:23 — Understanding Social Media filters

23:41 — Transitioning to Social Beat — India’s fastest growing Digital agency

26:43 — The client that put us on the map

30:13 — Multi lingual campaigns

32:21 — ROI driven agency

35:45 — UPI’s impact on transactions

37:52 — Launching brands products from the Agency

39:02 — influencer.in

41:30 — Ads Quotient

42:30 — 22languages

43:25 — DigiGrad

49:01 — Hiring & Managing COVID19