Celebfie fan experience and celebrity engagement platform
Please introduce yourself and the Startup Celebfie to our readers!
Celebfie is the World’s first and fastest growing fan experience and celebrity engagement platform, which targets to create Unforgettable Memories while bridging the gap between celebrities, their fans, and brands through meaningful experiences and by redefining celebrity-brand collaborations. Celebfie is fast becoming the go-to app for fans and users who want to directly connect with their favorite celebrities and create exclusive moments with celebs from various walks of life. While the Celebfie app is free to use but with a minimal subscription fee for celebrity micro-channels, fans can watch exclusive content created by the celebrities and even get direct access to share and receive responses from the celebs themselves.
Why did you decide to start a business?
I was trying to launch an ed-tech product in Dubai & my team was trying to onboard some celebrities to help us launch the product. While doing this, I experienced various difficulties with celebrity booking and engagement. It was a very hectic & tedious process. The industry was much unorganized, we saw huge gaps, and nothing was transparent. Having more than 20 years of experience in technology, I thought I could utilize new-age technology and make a seamless, transparent way to engage & connect with celebrities. This platform is for everyone starting from individual fans, brands, or small businesses who want to engage for purposeful causes. It solves a huge problem that the industry was experiencing earlier, now catering to the audience with transparent and fair dealings with celebrities.
What is the vision behind Celebfie?
As a part of the ever-dynamic and transformational digital entertainment space, Celebfie provides transparency to the fans-celebs and brands relation while making it a unique business model. Celebfie is positively establishing the future of fan engagement for celebrities across all walks of life including Bollywood, Television, Music, Sports and many more alike. Platform has been Developed in India, but Celebfie aims to improve and bring together fan community to connect with their choicest celebrities across the globe.
From the idea to the start what have been the biggest challenges so far and how did you finance yourself?
The whole concept of it gets me excited; especially the fact that I founded such a unique and different startup at the age of 48. Celebfie is poles apart from what I have been doing for most of my professional life. So, this shift is quite thrilling. Learning about new things, facing new challenges, and working with a team of bright young minds from whom I learn a lot, all of it get me excited. We started as a bootstrapped startup. I invested the initial capital myself to bring the startup to a level where we found funds flowing in from my close friends and family because the concept of Celebfie clicked with them. However, as of now, we have not had any institutional funding, but very soon, maybe in a couple of months, we are getting ready to raise our first series ‘A’ funding.
Who is the target group of Celebfie?
1. Celebrities who come from various genres like bollywood stars, TV personalities, musicians, authors, comedians, regional artists etc want to expand their global digital footprint for fans and brands to connect with them directly.
2. Fan communities that include national and global, both
3. Brands like SMEs, startups, event organizers & established businesses who want to collaborate with celebs.
How do Celebfie work? What are the advantages? What makes you different from other providers?
Celebfie is focused on creating unforgettable real life experiences for celebs, fans and brands alike. It’s way ahead of the present crop of celebrity centric platforms as they are just offering paid celebrity shout outs, whereas Celebfie provides an opportunity for the fans and brands to create memorable moments together with their favourite celebs. For brands, we try to create an impeccable aura around their products and services with our celeb driven macro & micro campaigns that match with the brand’s core value. There is no single comprehensive fan experience and celebrity engagement platform that actually bridges the gap between celebrities, fans and brands.
Celebfie took the idea of bridging the gap between celebs, fans and brands a step further by introducing fan experiential events which was initiated with the successful launch of our flagship event— ‘Cruise with the Stars’, a sea-cation which brought 30+ Bollywood Celebrities, 100+ Influencers and 1200+ fan guests together on a luxurious cruise ship. Celebfie also partnered with Bombay Times Fashion Week 2021, where we selected two young fashion fans and aspiring models and gave them the opportunity to walk the ramp for ace designer Narendra Kumar at his finale show.
How has your company changed with Corona?
During the socially distant year, Celebfie’s new-age platform featuring celebrity-created video content facilitated meaningful, virtual conversations between at-home celebrities and their similarly locked-in fans. For many fans, the personalised shout-outs and celebrity greetings proved a heart-warming source of family support during a challenging year. The pandemic also presented a unique challenge to brands, SMEs etc. People spending time at home greatly increased the volume of content consumed online, making the digital realm more desirable for reaching out to their target audiences.
As the Covid times had shown that digital marketing was more advantageous than conventional marketing— whether it’s online ads, social media, blogging, or all of the above – thus people were looking at new and more engaging ways of building interesting narratives across multiple media platforms. Celebfie helped them curate these narratives by connecting them with the right celebrity. We created a seamless process for our users to customize and create engaging content with their desired celebs, tailored to their budgets, in a transparent setting.
How did you adjust to it and what changes have you made?
Celebfie also offers the celebrities an opportunity to build a deeper connection with their fans and collaborate with exciting national and international brands for Social Media Campaigns, Product Promotions, TVCs, Events and Appearances and much more. Technology and entertainment came together to crystallize the concept Celebfie. However, Celebfie offers a lot more dynamism for the fan-celebrity interaction slice also, to improve the fan experience, and help fans cherish their fandom.
Where do you see the opportunity in the crisis?
Undoubtedly, the pandemic years were challenging and a time to despair. But, it was also a time to come up with relevant solutions to fight the challenges. As a startup, we understood the definition of the ‘new normal’ and we tried to bring viable and reliable solutions for our clients, ideas that could solve problems faced by the common masses with our technology enabled product. The pandemic made us develop a far-sighted view and identify the steps needed to create a platform that would help make celebrities more accessible to fans and brands.
The opportunity in the crisis, like you said, was in the form of creating better solutions to bridge the age-old gap between fans, brands and the celebs, making this process seamless and transparent, which almost seemed like a Herculean task earlier. It ultimately paved the way in spreading happiness and creating unforgettable moments in unprecedented times, and this was our true silver lining.
Celebfie, where does the road go? Where do you see yourself in five years?
We’re very confident that Celebfie is a unique concept and a disruptive solution which will further change the celebrity-fan ecosystem. We’re sure bringing a positive change in the celebrity-fan space will take a lot of continued team efforts. So, our 4-5 year road map is simply to expand Celebfie and make it the go-to app for the fan communities all over the globe and for the celebrities and brands to connect and collaborate.
This is the length of our upcoming plans, now coming to the breadth of it, we’ve launched new verticals like Celebfie Music, Celebfie Media etc. We’ve also stepped into production with 5 music videos already launched, the latest one being Galti which is nearly touching 5 Million Views with incredible response from viewers and listeners. We’re also planning for more exciting events and collaborations in the days to come which are intended to offer our fan users a truly unforgettable experience in terms of unique content, music, entertainment, etc. We’ve been developing various other fan-engagement features on our app too, that will give our users authentic and memorable experiences.
At the end: Which 3 tips would you give to future founders?
1. To seek out new things and not just replicate standard ones is a great mantra. You should always be eager to find new ways to conceptualize the best possibilities. You can’t be good at everything, but you can progress, try to make a positive difference, even if it’s only incremental.
2. Passion and perseverance should go hand in hand with priorities. You might have multiple ideas and motivations to start a company, but you should be sure they’re prioritised correctly. If making a lot of money is first on the list, there are probably better ways to fulfill that dream—because eventually, it will be outweighed by the challenges you face. I truly believe you’ve got to tap into a deeper passion.
3. Be sure to enjoy the steps you take towards achieving your goals. Becoming successful can have some challenges, but having fun while learning new things and meeting new people can motivate you and make the journey enjoyable. Learning what you are capable of can be exciting, so it is important to keep your goals light and fun in order to have an emotionally positive experience.
More information you will find here
Thank you Raminder Singh for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
