Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about influencer marketing. What did you do?

Timur Khabirov: Influencer Marketing is a bit complicated. If you’re doing user acquisition, it’s a clear traffic. You understand your consumers. You understand the conversion rate. With influencer marketing, it’s not that easy to manage this.

Sramana Mitra: But it’s worthwhile in your opinion?

Timur Khabirov: Yes. How it works is worldwide. The United States is a separate market. It’s a different behavior. The more flexible market is Asia. They are more flexible and like to test something new. The next market is United States. The most conservative market is Europe.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of influencers did you go after to market your product?

Timur Khabirov: The bloggers but not the big bloggers. They can promote 20 things on the same day. A better idea would be to use small to medium-sized bloggers who have 100,000 followers. It’s much better.

Sramana Mitra: Were these influencers showcasing your product or were they showcasing videos edited in your product?

Timur Khabirov: Don’t sell the pan. Sell the situation or problem. I prefer not to advertise the product directly.

Sramana Mitra: These bloggers who were your customers were also marketing your product because they were showing features and functions. When people ask them, they say Prequel. You’re not really doing influencer marketing. Influencer marketing was happening automatically for you.

Timur Khabirov: There’s a lot of speculation in this segment. If you’re acquiring the traffic through official platforms, you have the tools and analytics. In this case, you can advertise for free or pay. I don’t like the results. For me, influencer marketing is not number one priority. Number one is user acquisition. Also you need to work on some features for the viral effect. We were the number one app in the US in the beginning of this year.

Sramana Mitra: When you look back on 2018 to 2020 as you were developing the business, were there any other strategic move that you made that gave you another inflection point?

Timur Khabirov: The killer features. We started to implement artificial intelligence. We started to work not only with face recognition but with body recognition as well. You need to add more tools for the consumers. If you add some tool that is already in the market, there is no reason for you to work on this feature.

Sramana Mitra: What is an example of implementing artificial intelligence in the product?

Timur Khabirov: Cartoon filters. The neural networks are drawing cartoons. That will require two hours for an artist. Our technology can do this in less than a second.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your strategy was mostly Facebook advertising for user acquisition and enhancing the product.

Timur Khabirov: It’s the beginning for every application in the mobile segment. You need to predict the revenue. I’m 40 years old. I can’t think all the time about the viral effect every day.

Sramana Mitra: What strategies worked for you in your particular business? Facebook was the beginning. Then you were enhancing features that were giving you more momentum. What other acquisition strategies did you follow?

Timur Khabirov: We focused on three main platforms – Facebook, Tiktok, and Snapchat. It doesn’t work on Twitter actually. If you’re going to acquire not only based on money, you need to make a lot of market research to understand your customers. Now we have good expertise to understand who they are, what they need, and how we can resolve some problems.