For an Advertiser with tight marketing budget, it is imperative to be creative and look for solutions that would generate a lot of buzz with minimum possible spend. Giveaways are a popular advertising model, whereby the Advertiser selects a publisher and asks them to host a challenge. Although it sounds simple, it is really lot of work to scout the Internet to find the best possible publisher for your product/service giveaway and come to an agreement. It would take tons of e-mails and the Advertiser always had the risk of last minute publisher dropouts. On the other hand, Publishers have tough time extracting payments out of the Advertisers, and timely delivery of giveaways to the loyal blog readers. The entire giveaways model is manual, and is broken.
Giveaway.ly, founded by the brother-duo Ram Papineni and Laxman Papineni is the world’s First and Only Advertising platform that helps Advertisers to promote their products / services through Giveaways on targeted blogs. For the Advertiser, the platform aims to automate process right from finding blogs to accepting multiple entries, validating entries, selecting winners and distributing prizes. It provides Advertisers with multiple entry types (FB, Twitter, Pinterest,etc) and provide detailed reports on the giveaways. Things get much simpler at the Publisher’s end. Once they accept an opportunity, all they need to do is copy paste simple Java script widget code that makes everything simple, right from making giveaway live to accepting entries, validating and announcing winners and distributing prizes. Earlier, there used to be enormous number of email communications and nightmares (when it comes to payment) between Advertisers and Bloggers to get the deal done. This is a practical pain point that Giveaway.ly is solving for all the Advertisers and Bloggers out there. They have been selected in the TLabs Fall 2013 batch.
For the moment, Giveaway.ly is not dealing with physical goods. Advertisers can offer coupon codes or licenses or free accounts as a reward to winner. For example, Advertiser holding physical goods can offer a coupon code to be used on his own store. They can also offer Amazon credit if an advertiser offering some 3rd party product to promote his business.
[pullquote]We learned that you should get the feedback first before you build the complete solid system. In other words you should sell power point presentation before you put in real effort.[/pullquote]Without any PR efforts, Giveaway.ly is featured in around 60 online sources and startup media sites so far. Speaking on challenges, “We initially thought it would take us just 2 months to get everything done, which isn’t the reality. We spent nearly 5 months to get our initial version out and collected feedback from both bloggers and advertisers. The feedback was pretty solid and straightforward that we will have to change things a bit, which took us 2 more months to get this stage.” says Laxman.
Talking about how they got into TLabs, “Being part of Tlabs Fall 2013 batch is one of the best decision we ever made. Nearly 3 months back that was a any other real busy day for me when my co-founder asked to create a angel.co profile for Giveaway.ly, which changed the game. Mr. Abhimanyu from TLabs reached out to me through angel.co just in next 3hrs of creating that. And then we exchanged couple of emails followed by couple of calls before we gave a final pitch. We received a call from them one fine day with the good news that we got selected to part of Fall 2013 batch. We are based out of TLabs workspace now enjoying the company of other 9 startups and the eco-system here”, says Laxman.
There are quite a lot new features lined up in next 2 months for Giveaway.ly. For the moment, they will be rolling out new entry types like Pinterest and Newsletter subscriptions supporting MailChimp, Constant Contact and Aweber. Also recently released was Google analytics verification for blogs, which helps Advertisers to select blogs depending on page views, demography, etc.
Here’s an inside tip for Bloggers from the Giveaway.ly team – For bloggers, having Google analytics verified and 100% profile filling would help a lot to attract advertisers to increase revenues. There are bloggers who earned not less than $500 through Giveaway.ly in September itself.
Laxman’s Growth Hack Tips to the Startup Community:
1. Build some unique and interesting solution addressing real word problem and then make your customers realize their problem. In our case giveaways market is all dependent on Emails prior to Giveaway.ly and for few advertisers they don’t even know that products can be promoted through Giveaways.
2. Spend your time and money on content marketing. Write awesome content addressing people problems to convince and convert them into your customers.
3. Always be alert and available to your existing customer and listen to them, rather than roaming around for new customers.
TTP’s take on Giveaway.ly
With bloggers increasing day on day, everyone wants to earn some money and satisfy their passion at the same time. Giveaway.ly helps publishers focus on the content creation and leave the entire giveaway mechanism automated. It is definitely a win for Advertisers, because they get to know the top rated & verified blogs and spend their advertising dollars wisely. This is a platform to stay and grow for sure.
