Dreaming to democratise media, entertainment industry

The year 2020 wasn’t all negative as many would think. It has also been a year of courage, grit and determination to rise up to the challenges life threw at us. As we get ready to bid goodbye to the year, we bring you stories that lift our soul. Some positives in our lives…

Born in Mumbai with roots belonging to Bihar, SHASHANK SINGH did most of his schooling from a remote township, Vindhyanagar in Madhya Pradesh while he lived across the border in Uttar Pradesh in industrial Singraulli area. After completing his engineering from Gorakhpur, Singh moved to Bangalore to work for Infosys. After a couple of years, he flew to the United States to join a small boutique consulting firm and worked in top banks of Wall Street in New York. He then joined Goldman Sachs and during this period, pursued an MBA in entrepreneurship from NYU Stern School of Business. Thereafter, he worked for multiple technology start-ups and witnessed multiple acquisitions. Flyx was the
In an interview with SAURABH TANKHA, Singh talks about launching FLYX, a streaming social network in 2020 that helps users find recommended content to watch, on the back of a unique algorithm that aggregates reviews from friends, family and contacts across all major streaming platforms.

When and how did the idea of FLYX strike you and how did you go about it?
It all started in 2018 when I cut the cord (ie no more cable TV connections) and went on a streaming route completely. With Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, Sling, etc as streaming options, I suddenly had access to millions of content right on demand. Due to the content overload, I was stuck in a decision paralysis and ended up wasting more than 30 minutes on finding what to watch. I used to end up asking my friends. Since they know my taste and kind of shows I like, they would come back with their favourite shows. This was a highly inefficient process and led to the thought process of making a platform where friends, family and people you trust can come together to share their best movies and shows.

What prompted you to start this project during Covid-19?
We had bunch of beta testers who started using our app since beginning of this year, but when we all were confined to our homes due to Covid-19, they wanted to share our app with their friends and family. So, we had to prepone our launch so that app can be shared among them.

Challenges were definitely in raising venture funds since the market was uncertain. Everyone was on a holding pattern and were not too keen to invest money in a risky start up

Did people around warn you to not venture in the market during this phase?
Yes, while a majority of people were trying to hang on to their jobs in the uncertain times, I actually decided to call it quits and focus all my energy and effort on this venture. In the retrospective, I am so glad that I did this. First of all, there couldn’t have been a better time to launch FLYX. Second, since we were locked inside our homes so our cost of living was super low too. Third, all our employees and partners were working from home so we were not worried about a physical office space, saving significant costs. My team is distributed across the planet, from east coast to west coast of USA, from Mumbai to Delhi, Allahabad to Visakhapatnam.

What were the challenges you came across during this phase?
Challenges were definitely in raising venture funds since the market was uncertain. Everyone was on a holding pattern and were not too keen to invest money in a risky start up. We even had few people who committed to invest in our venture but ended up not doing so due to uncertain times.

What kind of research did you have to do before introducing it?
Initially, we did a small survey among our friend and family to see if the problem we are trying to solve really exists and if yes, how are they trying to solve it. We also looked into tonnes of market research and saw industry findings were very similar to our own research. To quantify the problem, people are spending more than 24 minutes to find something to watch, two-thirds of our video streaming habits are influenced by recommendations from friends and family, 80% of content released on a streaming platform goes unnoticed and only 20% of content released has recall value of 10% or more. It is a real mess out there and FLYX is trying to solve that problem for not only users but also content producers.

Our association with Filmfare is a perfect match. FLYX brings modern age technology to the legacy and was instrumental in getting more people involved in the process of the awards

Tell us more about your association with Filmfare.
Filmfare is such a great legacy for honoring the excellence in cinema. It is such a dream for every person involved in entertainment business to hold the black lady in their hand. FLYX stands for democratising the entertainment industry and is on a mission to make sure great content always wins and get noticed. For us this association is a such a perfect match, FLYX brings modern age technology to the legacy and was instrumental in getting more people involved in the whole process of the awards. For the first time people felt empowered and the kind of responses we have seen so far is amazing. Seeing Jaideep Ahlawat rom Pataal Lok winning a Filmfare, witnessing Amit Sadh getting his first ever Filmfare was such an amazing experience.

Future plans…
I believe with FLYX, we have just scratched the surface and there is tonnes to be done to realise our dream of democratising the media and entertainment industry. There is a very exciting feature which we are planning to launch in the end of January. I can’t reveal the details but it is something super exciting. On other updates, we would be releasing our TV apps soon. FLYX is in this for the long run and we have high level plans for the next five years.