Trell is the go-to platform for users to share their experiences, recommendations, and reviews across various categories including health and fitness, beauty and skincare, travel, movie reviews, cooking, home-décor, and much more. The platform allows users to create 3-5-minute videos in their native languages along with a 'shop' feature that lets them purchase the products featured in the vlogs. Additionally, the platform also allows users to earn rewards, goodies and vacations through its interface. Trell has recently launched its platform in three new languages; Marathi, Kannada and Bengali, making the total count to 8 languages active so far (including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam).

SME WORLD in an email interaction with  Pulkit Agarwal, Co-Founder Trell.

Tell us about Trell and how did you come up with the idea?

Trell is a Lifestyle-Community-Commerce platform where users come together to share their stories and experiences around their passions in the form of 3-minute-vertical videos. Users can share content in over 20 categories such as Personal Care, Technology and Gadgets, Movies and TV reviews, Men's Grooming, Travel and the like. With a variety of lifestyle-related topics to choose from, our users can create content in 8 regional languages.

It all started in August 2017 when our Co-founders -- Arun Lodhi, Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Prashant Sachan and Pulkit Agrawal -- realised that there was a lack of culturally-relatable and meaningful content on the otherwise Westernised internet. This lack of relevant content for Indians by Indians prompted our Co-founders to start Trell as most content consumed these days is in the form of videos. We wanted to create a space where people could share their personal experiences around lifestyle-related topics in the form of videos as they have greater mass appeal and can be viewed and understood by more people as opposed to text-heavy blogs. This, coupled with shorter attention spans, made us realise that videos were the way forward.

How does your platform work?

At Trell, our users come together to share 3-minute vertical videos around their experiences and interests in categories like Recipes, Fashion, Personal Care, Technology & Gadgets, Movies & TV Reviews and the like. We help users who are interested in improving their lifestyles connect with other like-minded Individuals in their own native languages. As a business, we are into social commerce where our interest-based/passion-based community of content creators (KOL's) enables our users to make well-informed and suitable purchase decisions for better lifestyle choices.

What is your vision and mission for Trell?

Our vision is to empower people to enjoy a better lifestyle by bridging the information gap between experts and seekers. We are building a community of like-minded people who share similar interests and passions. In order to do this in the best way possible, we are building a state-of-the-art platform that can help address these needs of our consumers with the help of Machine-learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence, which will help us cater to the needs of our consumers by giving them personalized content. Through personalised content and recommendations, our users will be able to skillfully navigate and explore the content available on Trell. We are also in the process of adding more regional languages to the app, so that we can reach out to a majority of India's population who want to create and consume content in their native languages.

How do you stand out from your competitors? Describe your special characteristics and features.

Trell is a storytelling platform where people share their experiences, reviews, likes and dislikes in the form of 3-minute videos across various lifestyle categories. Other short-video apps engage their users with 15-second video clips of lip-syncing, dance, comedy, acting and the like. The diverse and real experiences of our content creators (KOLs) help our users make informed and suitable purchase decisions to enhance their lifestyle-choices. As we are on a journey of educating, informing, raising awareness while creating a community of like-minded individuals, we have received a lot of user-love in terms of engagement and product stability which is visible in our stellar PlayStore rating, currently at 4.6.

Your subscriber base has increased, domestic and international? Explain!

We have grown tremendously, 25X every month, since the Chinese Apps Ban in June. We have witnessed 10X growth and our current user base stands at over 30 million active users. With over 90 million downloads, we have surpassed the number of active users on platforms such as Twitter and Pinterest in India. Every passing day helps us add more creators and users to our growing community, which has expanded to over 18 millions creators.

At the moment, we are focused on catering to our Indian audience. We are present in 75% of the Indian cities. Once we establish ourselves all over the country, we will look towards expanding globally.

What kind of challenges you are facing?

The content on the internet has been westernised for a very long time and we need to prioritise the supply of native language and relevant contextual content that people across diverse regions in the country can relate to. However, doing this is not easy due to factors such as slow internet speeds in various parts of India. While consumers of the internet in India continue to go up by the day, slow internet speeds and patchy network services hamper overall user experience. Along with this, the cost for technology is not low when one is attempting to build state-of-the-art platforms that enable the creation of communities and commerce.

Trell is creating a community that is inclusive of culture and diversity in the country which in itself is a massive challenge. While there are some of these initial challenges, Trell's vision continues to dominate our quest for success.

What is your main source of funding?

Trell has raised a total of $16.95 million after a Series A infusion of $11.4 million from some very well known investors and industry experts like KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Lets Venture, WEH Ventures, Ankur Nagpal (CEO of Teachable), Gokul Rajaram (Board Member, Pinterest, Square and DoorDash), Vineet Buch (Ex-Head of Google Play Store Development), Rajan Anandan (MD, Sequoia Capital and Surge), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-founder of Vocal and TaxiForSure), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, LivSpace), Nitin Gupta (Co-founder, PayUMoney), Anupam Mittal (Founder, Shaadi.com), Amit Lakhotia (ek-Tokopedia, Paytm) and Shanti Mohan (CEO, LetsVenture).

The pandemic and apps ban has led to an upsurge in the organic users on the platform, which has effectively reduced our expenses and helped us grow exponentially. The recent addition of funds will help us expand our platform and business plans further.

What are your major focus areas your expansion plans?

We are highly focused on creating a community of individuals that can have meaningful connections and conversations with each other about all aspects of lifestyle in India. Our vision is to empower every Indian to make better lifestyle choices without any barriers or judgements and to share their stories, experiences, knowledge about diverse interests and passions in their native languages.

We are also actively working towards giving our users personalized content on the basis of their tastes and interests by diving deeper into advanced Machine Learning Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. Features like “Talk Show Hosting” are in the works and our latest feature “Reaction Maker” has been helping our creators engage more deeply with our growing community.

Trell is committed to becoming India's go-to lifestyle video app. We want to build for and give back to the Indian community and none of this is possible without the support of our users, creators and team members. We are in the process of hiring energetic, creative and experienced team members who understand the nuances of Indian audiences and will help us become bigger and better.

Tell us about your collaborations or share any interesting insights.

Recently, we collaborated with Chennai Super Kings during IPL 2020 to become their official digital partners. The CSK team shared exclusive access to a lot of engaging BTS footage and exclusive content on Trell itself.  The team also engaged in an interesting interview with Zakhir to share funny stories and insider tales of the team. The collaboration gained a lot of traction for the thriving cricket community online as cricket is like religion in India and fans showered their support for the team on the platform at a time they couldn't be in the stadiums to cheer for the men-in-yellow.

Trell is also the first Indian startup to release our own anthem called “Keh Jo Kehna Hai” in collaboration with the internationally acclaimed singer, Sukhwinder Singh. The anthem drove the community together and featured our own creators from across the country.

One of our most recent brand collaborations was also with Tinder, where our own content creators participated by making interesting videos and creating awareness about the brand. Through this campaign, we were able to take Tinder to smaller cities in India by making it accessible to a wider audience in regional languages.