Swapcard is the only end-to-end event & community platform for virtual and hybrid events powered by artificial intelligence.
Meet-a-Mojito
Hey! Tell us about yourself and a fun fact.
My name is Sohail Alavi. I am from Iran and have been living in Canada since 2006
I have been in and out of the country, started business in multiple regions, participated in an accelerator program in China, and sold a startup previously. Tribe is the fifth startup that I am working on.
One fun fact about me may let you know how troublesome I am. When I was 16 in high school, I created a website for our school. The school tends to buy our website. Not because it was an amazing technology, but they just want to get rid of the website.
They want to buy a domain name for the official purpose of the website. So we actually sold the domain name to them, and they just wanted to kill it. This is the first acquisition.
What motivated you to start your company?
Tribe is a community platform where you can build any social network application. This idea comes from when we are thinking about the next idea.
Every time we want to create a new YouTube channel, we actually have to start working with new components that already exist.
It is not yet obvious that most applications have some kind of social component. It is no longer a category of social networks.
Almost every application you will use has enabled things like, comment, reshare, or a lot of interactions with other tools you already have.
Take Virtual Mojito as an example. Now, it is one way communication. At this stage, I bet you actually want to be able to communicate with other people.
What if most of the applications have some kind of social aspect, for example, I want to create a website where people can share Chrome extensions that they're using?
I want to create a website where people can create the gears. We decided why not focus on building social components? So you don’t have to reconsider building feeds, reconsider building notifications, and reconsider building moderations. And these are hard problems.
Every time we want to bring an idea to life, we have to treat it as a business rather than a side project. Tribe allows you to create any type of social application on top of your business.
You will be able to create your own Tribe, create your own version of Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Imagine how many people want to create a new Instagram for interior designers, such as the twisted YouTube approach that only applies to gamers.
We have seen the emergence of many niche communities, and the current problem with social networks is that they are promoting over-saturation of content and connections.
Which is acceptable. That is the first version of the social network we have seen in these centralized communities.
But now we think that a lot of people that actually started becoming big on Reddit and Facebook groups now wanted to have their own way of connecting to their customers and customize their own social status as a tourist, and add more features to it.
Many people are actually starting to grow bigger on Reddit and Facebook groups now want to connect with people in their own way.
Therefore, we are creating a platform on which you can build and write.
How do you acquire users and grow your company?
At this stage, we don’t spend much on advertising. In fact, when you start a new startup, this is really important because you want to serve people in need.
Then, after starting the MVP and getting attention, you actually want to get the voice out. We are very heavy on creating different use cases and landing pages.
First, we have done a really good job in SEO. As far as everything is concerned, the keyword Tribe is the most generic keyword. I assume if you do a search, the result would be number two or three.
We don't really use techniques to do this. We started to gain authority in community building, such as community software and private social networks.
We researched the actual needs of people. Many people stay away from Facebook, Reddit, etc. They are trying to create their own social network version.
Second, we must become enterprise software at this stage. Many people actually find us through Capterra and other software research tools that people actually see there.
Therefore, I want to say that the two strategies are search, which is the first. The second is to go to software research and comparison sites, such as Capterra and Trustpilot.
What is your future goal?
We want to enable people to build their own communities. Looking at Notion's approach, you can basically create a website without creating an HTML page or using WordPress or similar tools.
You have an idea to build something. You just want to get it up and running quickly. We believe that many people will be able to create their own version of community in the future.
All these beautiful things can happen online in a website application, only for a few people in the world. Engineers, developers, designers, and even these people actually need to get together to build things.
If you want to create something, whether it's a company or a brand, or someone just wants to create something for themselves.
There is a lot to do. You have to basically establish a company, and you need to raise funds. You need to find someone. You need to test ideas and enter the market. So we see a way that will enable people to start building their own tribes and invite people to join the platform.
We are doing it with the social community so that anyone can get up and running in minutes. Think of it as events, apps, jobs, they can simply install them and have their own version of their own social.
Anything our readers should know?
One of the reasons why we are doing Tribe, and the name implies the concept of Tribe is that we are really starting the ancient times. How do we humans get together?
How do we start creating tribes and how do we start communicating? What does the language mean at that time? And we are starting this.
Then, we do believe that by starting what happens in the way people get together, we can also be transformed into digital products.
Without using these dark strategies to make people truly interact with your products, we will be able to influence the way brands, companies and creators connect with users.
There are better ways to do this, and the way is to research what makes you want to be a member of the tribe you want to join.
Regardless of the technical and engineering challenges, we are also working hard to study human behavior and translate it into digital experiences.
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More events: 25 Feb - Partnership Hunt 26 Feb - 8th International Data Science Summit by Data Science Foundation 03 Mar - Lunch & Learn with Innovate UK by Founders Factory Events 04 Mar - UXDX APAC 2021 09 Mar - Talent Days by Talent Garden Austria
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