Today we interview Stutrepreneur Akshay Maharaj: A fourth-year Queen’s Commerce student and co-founder of Avybe (avybe.com).
With the increase in social media users, many individuals are looking for new ways to interact with their favourite content creators. As such, Avybe was founded as a way to connect both these fans and celebrities to each other, through a one-of-a-kind monetization platform. Today we have Akshay, one of Avybe’s co-founders, to talk more about his background and experience creating the company!
Question: What is Avybe? & Why did you start this company?
Answer: “Avybe is a new monetization hub for social media influencers, allowing content creators and celebrities to interact with their fans. You basically link your Avybe account to social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok), earn points for watching your favourite creators on these platforms, and then spend these points on exclusive or personalized interactions with creators on Avybe.”
Since Akshay found success founding his first translation start-up company, he decided to stay within the social media industry. After speaking with a friend, Arya, who had the idea for Avybe, he then decided to jump on the founding team and get started.
Question: What is something that you learned about the industry that you are now working in?
Answer: “The deeper you go down the media industry rabbit hole, the more layers you start to uncover about how social media influencers work. This includes the complexities of their management teams, their PR, the finances behind it, why they’re posting the types of content they do, how they please their fans. To me, this deep, dark avenue of media is so fascinating.”
Question: Where is Avybe now in terms of traction, team, and size?
Answer: “We’re in the process of wrapping up a pre-seed round, we got Tim Draper’s VC fund to be one the key members on the cap table—valuing Avybe at $5 million, which was very exciting to hear! Our customer base is around 500 paid users on the subscription side, but we are also introducing 1-on-1 calls with content creators with a waitlist of 200 people. As for our team, we have 3 graphic designers, 1 SDR employee, 4 software engineers, 3 editors, 1 social media director, not including the 4 co-founders.”
Question: What does a typical day look like for you balancing school and work?
Answer: “I wake up at 7am, get up by 8-8:30am to start day—prepare a calendar and to-do list during this time; will usually go to class, but if not will get ready for schoolwork. During the late morning I’ll have networking calls with other entrepreneurs or people in the industry, and following this will eat lunch and finish up the schoolwork. In afternoon/evening I’ll work on Avybe, then will spend time scrolling through social media, relaxing, etc.”
Question: How do you manage your time effectively with so much going on?
Answer: “One thing I’ll try to do is make a good schedule and to-do list at the beginning of every day, using Trello for my backlog of daily items that need to be done. As long as I get 95% of the to-do list done, I’m quite content! But if I don’t achieve this, I’ll spend some extra time reflecting and completing those extra tasks later at night or the following day.”
Question: What is the biggest challenge you faced with your startup, and how did you overcome it?
Answer: “There are lots of challenges when starting a company, but finding Avybe’s first content creators was the biggest initial challenge—we also needed to figure out what Avybe’s appeal and value proposition would be to bringing these creators on board. It is also critical to appeal to the stakeholders behind these influencers, such as their managers, PR team, other people they’ve worked with, etc. This approach was super useful and led to much more success than simply cold emailing/DMing the influencers.”
Question: If you could give any advice to an aspiring student entrepreneur, what would it be?
Answer: “You have to be passionate about the industry and company you are working on. I’ve had many people approach me in the past about entrepreneurial ideas, but was never passionate about any of the spaces or industries that these companies operated in. If you’re just in it for monetary value, fame, or success, it’s going to be a very difficult path to go down; passion is the most important thing.”
Akshay also admits that not all of the work he does for his company he necessarily enjoys. However, he states that if one wants to be successful, they must dig deep and keep fighting to reach their goals.
Question: What is something you wish you could have known when starting your company?
Answer: “I wish I had known how much money YouTube creators truly make, and how much power comes with this. What I mean is that it took me a while to find out that some content creators/influencers only want money upfront, as opposed to the gain potential opportunity in working with a unique business or platform over the long run.”
Question: Where will we see you in 5 years?
Answer: “Hopefully graduated from Queen’s, but an Avybe acquisition would be nice—if it was for the right price and I was happy with my experiences gained, I’d definitely exit. Maybe I will also hopefully have enough capital to start my own VC fund focusing on funding smaller scale media startups and creators!”
Question: Any other last words for aspiring student entrepreneurs?
Answer: “It’s important to be selfish when making life decisions, pleasing too many people and never reflecting on what I actually wanted to do was a big issue that I (fortunately only) realized back in high school. Do not live to make anyone else happy but yourself!”
Key takeaways
It is super clear that Akshay faced a daunting task by co-founding Avybe while also being enrolled full-time in school. However, these are our key takeaways from the interview for those looking for some inspiration in endeavouring on their own entrepreneurial ventures:
Be truly interested in the industry/company that you are working on
Have a willingness to solve problems and dig deeper into content that may not be as appealing up-front
Set clear schedules/to-do lists every single day to hold yourself accountable, this will also keep you organized
Figure out what your company’s value proposition is for both its customers and all stakeholders
Think more about sending customized/personalized messages to connections, as opposed to cold emails when working on an important idea
Have a good sense of consciousness about how each of your startup’s departments operate (finance, strategy, HR, marketing, etc)
Stay in school and make sure to still put enough time into your schoolwork as there are lots of uncovered networking opportunities that can be found on campus too!
Make decisions based on what you want and not what others want, this is the one part of your life that you should be selfish about
While each of these points are not mutually exclusive, these should hopefully help align you in the right direction!
If you have any questions regarding this interview or are looking to speak with Akshay directly, feel free to fill out the contact form on our “Contact Us” page or email us at stutrepreneurs@gmail.com.
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