Popularly referred to as the Video Pinterest for Bharat, the Made in India app Trell has become the go-to platform for users to share their experiences, recommendations, and reviews of products and services across various categories including health and fitness, beauty and skincare, travel, movie reviews, cooking, home-décor, and much more.
The lifestyle vlogging 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. Having crossed a 100-million downloads and a Monthly Active User (MAU ) base of 45 million plus, we speak to Pulkit Agrawal, Co- Founder and CEO, Trell, for a closer look:
Take us through the journey of Trell.
Like most college students, my co-founders and I spent a considerable amount of time searching for online content on personal care, grooming, travel, food, among others. While doing so, I soon identified that a majority of online content seemed alienated for most Indians as it was westernised and the availability was restricted only to English. Besides, there was massive content, but that was purely for entertainment and did not add any value to consumers’ lives.
Therefore, finding meaningful and relatable content in regional languages became a challenge for consumers.This is what prompted me and my co-founders to think of a way in which I could bring a variety of meaningful content in Indian cultural context and languages, under a single umbrella and thus, Trell was ideated. Initially, we started building community on the existing social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, etc., where our community group witnessed followers growing from almost zero to more than 100,000 on Instagram.
While we were building that community, we came across a number of people who were bloggers, foodies, photographers, fashionistas, and understood the purpose of talking about things that they are doing on the internet. We even met people who were following us and understood their needs. We eventually combined those learnings and launched Trell in 2017. Since its inception, the platform has grown exponentially while catering to a wide group of content creators and consumers.
What led Trell to pivot towards a video sharing platform to a social commerce platform?
We initially focused on building the Trell community on social media plat- forms. Within six months, our community group grew from 0 to 100,000 followers irrespective of any targeted marketing campaigns. Realising the massive demand for relevant and meaningful content in regional languages, we conducted extensive consumer studies to gain an in-depth understanding of consumer expectations and behavior, while concurrently enhancing Trell’s offerings.
The platform currently offers content in Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and English. Eventually, on Trell we witnessed that a lot of influencers and KOLs were exchanging recommendations and information about various products and services that they use in their daily routine. Some of the users were commenting on influencers’ posts and asking them from where they can buy those products. Our new addition of the ‘Shop’ section allows users to buy their preferred lifestyle products based on recommendations from trusted users and influencers on the platform. This has made the buying process seamless and more credibl e fo r our customers.
Which product categories see the most traction on Trell?
Trell is present across lifestyle categories including beauty and cosmetics, fashion and apparels, movies and TV reviews, wellness, health, food and travel amongst others, and all categories experience high traction with users sharing interesting content and thoughts on trending topics.
Where are the sellers based out? And which cities consume the most products?
Most of the sellers on the platform are D2C brands and Legacy brands that are looking to touchbase with the regional audience through the content of influencers on the platforms. Most of our transactions come from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Do you also provide logistics, last-mile delivery for the sellers?
We operate in a asset-lite model where the logistics and fulfillment are taken care of by the brands/sellers themselves.
What are the future plans for Trell?
We will continue to add exciting features to the platform like reaction video-maker, all new vlogging-camera that will help creators to make videos with ease, etc. and will add more regional languages on our platform to increase our outreach. In the next few years, we see ourselves emerging as the industryleader in the lifestyle community platform where passionate creators share their stories and experiences. Creators can share the content in the form of threeminute vertical videos and posts, in their own languages, with a like-minded community, across categories such as beauty, fashion, movies, TV reviews, recipes, travel, and gadgets.