Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Neel Grover: How Indi Is Helping People Earn Money For Their Knowledge
Our interview today is with serial entrepreneur Neel Grover, the CEO and founder of Indi (indi.com). Indi operates an app which lets people get paid for sharing their social content, making product recommendations, and more. Neel was most previously the Chairman and CEO of Bluefly.com, CEO and President of Buy.com and Rakuten North America and an Executive Officer of Rakuten Inc.
What is Indi?
Neel Grover: We spun Indo out of our prior business, last June. Indi is focused on powering individual commerce. In essence, we want to give every individual their own, e-commerce store. We wanted to do something different. Our team has a passion for e-commerce, and we also have athletes and others on our team. We run our day-to-day business with professional athletes and folks out of the e-commerce industry. The reason for this business, is folks are always going on social media to recommend products to their friends, but they're not making any money from it. If you're a big influencer, you might get paid by a brand, but every day, people are providing word-of-mouth advertising, posting about their favorite things. Every day, there are people out there with tremendous knowledge about things. What we want to to, is create a way to connect those people, and create a way for those people to monetize their passions. We want to help you monetize your knowledge, your skills, and your social media.
We have four different ways people can make money. One is Love It, and that's where they are paid for making a product recommendation. We have a couple of thousand retailers and a product catalog of 80 million products, and every day, people are posting their photos and videos to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter. They are texting their friends about the sunglasses they love, the shoes they love, the tennis racket they use. Retailers will pay them for those recommendations. We make it really easy for you to add tags before you post something to your own social platform, and before you send a quick reply to your friends on what you've bought. You just need to use our app, and you'll make money from all of those recommendations.
The second part of our app is Know It, which is a video on demand platform. Think of an example of a trainer, who was gainfully employed three months ago, but their gym has shut down. They still have all of these clients who want to learn from them, want to continue to train and work out, and instead of putting their content up for freeon a social platform, we can now let them upload different workouts and videos, and set a price for what they cost. They can then make money from that video-on-demand, and people can pay them to watch that content.
The next one we have is Shout It, which is how we let people ask somebody, anybody—whether a big athlete, celebrity, a great chef, or a teacher—for a video message, maybe to wish you good luck, happy birthday, or another video message, and they get paid for that.
The last one is Check It, where you get paid to review someone's private video. This might be for a fitness instructor, for example, a tennis pro might check out a video of my forehand and tell me what I could do better. I can review it and send them a quick video back, and you get paid for that. That's why we decided to get the app out now, because there are millions out there that are either part of the gig economy, or now unfortunately furloughed and employed, and looking for ways to make money to supplement their current employment or replace prior employment. We want to allow them to take control, and we want to give everyone the ability to control their own destiny and make money through knowledge sharing.
What have you been doing since Buy.com?
Neel Grover: I ran Buy.com for more than ten years, then we sold it to Rakuten. I then ran Rakuten North America for three and a half years, and really enjoyed that period. That's where I first started getting the idea to create what is now Indi. Indi stands for individual. The big new brand is the individual, which was the genesis of the name. In between that, I was formerly at the private equity firm Clearlake Capital, out of Santa Monica, which manages 8 billion in private equity investments. They were investors in Buy.com, and I became an operating partner for a few years for various companies. I ran one on an interim basis for 18 months, Bluefly, a fashion business out of New York, and we built a marketplace three, as well. I left after a few years to launch and run Indi. Indi is really about enabling everybody, no matter whether they're a big celebrity or a kid in high school, to monetize their recommendations, knowledge, and skills.
How does Indi work with a lot of e-commerce done through apps?
Neel Grover: We are integrating and making it very easy to share this with apps and various platforms. We're not checking people out inside our apps, we're providing product recommendations for retailers. this is not a marketplace, this is a referral marketplace. It's all set up to help users monetize the following they already have, and what they're spending their time on. Right now, we're helping people every day make money on their favorite social platforms.
How long has this been available?
Neel Grover: We launched this a week ago. We're really happy so far, and obviously, we're learning. We haven't turned on any marketing, just really good organic use and sharing. We're bringing people onto the app, sharing, and people are using it to make money.
Any particular lessons from Buy.com you are applying here?
Neel Grover: There are a lot. Across the board, we're using what we learned there. It's all about giving people a place for people to express their creativity and freedom. There was a lot we learned from our teams at Rakuten and Buy.com's marketplaces, and from Bluefly. The biggest thing is we learned that people love to buy things from people they trust. They love buying based on recommendations. That might be your best friend, to somebody you know, to someone you follow. Everyone is an influencer, because you have your own skills and knowledge, whether or not you've ever commercialized that before. We're really going after the people who haven't made money before from their recommendations. We're not trying to get your friends to pay more, because retailers are willing to pay for authentic recommendations. Retailers are trying to showcase authentic love and recommendations for products, and this service is really about helping someone else find the right product, connecting them with other people, and enabling them to monetize their skill set. Especially now, when there are so many people dependent on earning extra money. Right now, maybe you were an independent contractor, service provider, or you were working for someone else, with this pandemic your employer may or may not be open, we don't know how long this will go on, or how the workplace might have changed forever. One of the things we have learned, is that shopping is entertainment, too, and we're seeing that apps that make products more entertaining can also enable people to make money as well. We're focused a lot on the e-commerce site, because we're not a social network, and we're really a social commerce platform that connects into everyone's favorite social networks.
What drove your decision to launch earlier due to this pandemic?
Neel Grover: There were a couple of features I would have loved to have in the app, which will now come out in four to eight weeks, but we launched because we're a tool, and we knew so many people were hurting. A lot of people need the ability to make money now. We though if we could enable people to make some amount of money, commensurate to the effort they put into it, it was worth ramping up our developing, picking up new hires, and getting things ramped up as quickly as possible.
How has that ramping and hiring gone in this environment?
Neel Grover: Thankfully, it was already in process, and we're also very thankful for the team we've had. Because we have roots in the e-commerce industry, and frankly, we're not geographically focused on hires to build our team. Our core is in Orange County, though, and we are big fans of OC, and plan to build and run the business here, but we're also looking for the best talent possible, even if that's outside the area.
Thanks!