Amit Patil, a Pune-based cybersecurity professional working for a multinational company, plans to increase his reach and number of followers on a professional networking platform, however, he is unsure how to start writing creative articles , or how to increase your reach on social media platforms. Although we have attended several webinars and read a lot of generic stuff, many of us, like Patil, don’t find the time to write engaging posts for our social media accounts and end up postponing our plans to become influencers. However, now you can easily create such “engaging” and “viral” posts in seconds without spending a lot of money on a social media marketing agency. Predis.ai (EZML Technologies Pvt. Ltd), a Pune-based startup founded by Tanmay Ratnaparkhe, Aakash Kerawat and Akshay Karangale, helps brands, marketers and content creators master social media and grow their activity and their scope. The company has built a do-it-yourself (DIY) software-as-a-service (SaaS) product based on artificial intelligence (AI) models that results in out-of-the-box posts publishable on social media platforms. In addition to static image posts, the founding trio are also launching ready-to-publish video content posts very soon.
At first…
Ratnaparkhe, founder of 2x, graduated BE in Computer Science from Sinhagad Institutes in 2009, who went on to launch his first company Torqus which was sold to Times Internet in November 2018. After the acquisition, he worked with the company for two years and decided to start again. During this period, he met Kerawat and Karangale, both 2017 B. Tech from IIT Roorkee. The duo were working with a Bengaluru-based company as data scientists trying to build AI for AI’s sake. The duo were also looking for entrepreneurial experience and decided to accept an offer from Ratnaparkhe to start Predis.ai.
According to Ratnaparkhe, “only 2% of all who claim to be AI-powered businesses have AI. When we started thinking in January 2021 about what product we can build, how to scale, etc. We were sure that our startup needed to be global and therefore SaaS-based. However, with large enterprises, the problem is twofold: the gestation period for closing deals and the availability of real data in a standard format. realized that instead of corporate data, one type of data available everywhere is social media.”
“Our first idea was to create a social media ‘grammar’ that could give users on-the-fly suggestions. We asked if there could be an AI to suggest users how to improve their performance. We received around 400 million Instagram posts to train our AI model and then launched a minimum viable product around that in April 2021. However, the feedback we received was surprising. Users said they needed such a product, but their problems started one step before – what to write or how to create viral and engaging content or post. Instead of tweaking content, we thought our AI model could start creating content,” Ratnaparkhe said.
Pivot – One step forward
A few decades ago, a sign on a store was a necessity to gain widespread visibility. A few years ago, the website became a necessity and now the “active” presence on social networks has become one. Every individual wants to post something on their social media profile and want their posts to go viral and get people talking about them. While almost all businesses have created social media accounts, very few are “active” and regularly post and leverage their social media reach.
Ratnaparkhe said, “The content creation process is very time consuming and difficult to always do it right, especially for small and medium businesses or solopreneurs. That’s why we found that people had enough awareness about posting content on social media, but very few understood content, technology, and other aspects of social media engagement. We have identified this problem to be solved. Our AI model results in Instagram-ready posts that can be published on other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
AI on AI
Explaining how Predis.ai’s artificial intelligence (AI) models work, Ratnaparkhe said, “GPT3 generates the base text and our AI uses GPT3 first to understand what we need to talk about. Next, the AI model searches for good royalty-free images from various sources like Unsplash. The first search gives us about 300 images. The AI model then selects “good” and “appropriate” images and generates captions. Another AI model searches for hashtags best suited to the content and selects them. The initial yield is reassessed based on various parameters. We call it intelligence on top of AI. We built this complicated pipeline which is a mixture of GPT3 and large public or open source models which are trained for optimization. We built an AI on the AI.
“While displaying the engagement score, our AI model analyzes 20 million Instagram posts and compares the user-created post with other posts for better reach and engagement. We help social media users save time to generate content. Social media marketing agencies can also save on the cost of their resources,” Ratnaparkhe added.
next moves
Sharing their next moves, Ratnaparkhe and his team said, “We are looking forward to India as our market. But for at least the next three to five years, our focus is on the US market. Interestingly, most demo requests come from India, but conversions are not happening quickly. Expanding in a market like India is difficult. Currently, we are an eight member team that will grow to 20-25 members at most, even as we increase our round.
“We are interested in mergers with e-commerce marketplaces. We have launched our own software for these marketplaces. For example, our software will be visible to merchants on platforms like Shopify, who are my target customers. Regarding the content category, we will focus more on health, education and e-commerce only because AI needs a huge amount of real data to work perfectly. For other categories like pure technology, very small datasets are available and it is difficult to train the AI models on them,” Ratnaparkhe said.
users say
Shikha Gupta, a nutritionist by profession, discovered Predis.ai through one of the webinars. “I used to check the best time to post from the Instagram app in the past, but this just shows when most of my audience is active. Also, the time from the app doesn’t translate to Higher engagement The post time suggested by Predis.ai is relevant and brings higher engagement to my posts The competitor analysis feature helps me define my strategy based on content that works for my competitors and what’s not. It’s great to have data-based validation for my assumptions,” says Gupta.