When was your company founded & where is it located?
It was founded in February, 2023
Bengaluru, India
What are past projects, failures, or successes you’ve had in your career?
All 3 founders of Rhym have extensive experience in building & scaling consumer tech products.
I am the CEO, founder at Rhym, have expertise in building both consumer & AI led products & have worked across multiple tech startups & MNCs
Projects
- We as a team have in-depth experience in gaming space, especially in hyper casual gaming. Previously we had a gaming platform, where users can play tournaments of various types of hyper-casual games. We had more than 200K users, (50% women). From that experience we gained a lot of rich insights into consumption of gamification & other rich interactive/html media & how it has even larger potential outside just entertainment, but also to engage & communicate. As we were in an intentsely competitive space, it nudged us to differentiate & that's when we realised a much bigger opportunity of building a product for creation of gamified marketing content
- Prior to Rhym, I led the product and AI division at one of India's fastest-growing fintech startups, Khatabook. There, I oversaw the core product's entire lifecycle, from strategy to execution, witnessing user growth surge from 100K to 8M monthly active users.
- Before that I had built AI led products for large multi-nationals like P&G, Unilever, AIG Insurance etc
What is your team size?
10 in Total
3 Founders
4 members in Tech team involved in development of Platform
2 in Design
1 in Marketing
Are you funded or bootstrapped?
Funded.
We have raised $650K & have a runway for next 2 years
What 3rd party tools is your product critically dependent on?
None
Where is your customer data stored?
Mumbai, India
What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?
3000
How many customers do you have today?
26
What’s the origin of the idea for your product?
👾 Gamification Journey
Before launching Rhym, our team extensively worked on developing hyper-casual games, giving us deep insights into game creation and user interaction.
That's when we saw the power of gamification. With 3B gamers, 80% of world population loving & engaging with gamified content, we saw how gaming now is much more than entertainment. We could see how powerful gamification is to communicate, engage & differentiate even in marketing.
👆🏼 Realised the Power of Interactivity
We could see that the strength of gamification lies in prompting users to interact actively, setting it apart from the passive consumption seen in traditional marketing. This active engagement generally drives a sense of discovery, compels clicks, captivates attention, and offers a sense of achievement or personalization, all of which boost conversions.
Recognizing the intrinsic value of active interactivity, we ventured into other interactive content forms besides gaming, such as quizzes, product finders, interactive banners, and catalogues. However, creating these experiences is often resource-heavy & requires coding expertise, particularly in HTML. This has limited interactive and gamified marketing to mainly big brands with tonnes of money & resources
Shift Among Major Platforms
Google and Meta in recent years have identified interactivity's effectiveness in the ads to drive engagement and sales. They now support & champion the use of interactive and gamified ads in various shapes & forms. And as a testament to their effectiveness, interactive & gamified ads have ranked as top-performing formats according to eMarketer.
What problem is your product solving and how?
We are helping marketers create highly engaging gamified & interactive content fast & easy , which otherwise is very difficult & expensive to create.
We stand above our competitors because of :-
1. Premium Interactive Experiences: With Rhym, you aren't restricted to the run-of-the-mill spin-wheel gamification. You'll access rich, sophisticated gamified & interactive formats that typically cost a fortune to develop. We are a one-stop platform for highly engaging games, interactive quiz, soon introducing interactive banners, catalogues, & many more rich form of html marketing content
2. Super easy to use editor:
With an interface as seamless as Canva, marketers can dive into content creation with virtually no learning curve. Super flexible, marketers can customise completely as per their brand aesthetics. Alternate platforms are highly cumbersome to use & offer limited customizations, ours stands distinct, prioritizing user-friendly interface and adaptability.
3. Publish across all key channels
We already provide capability to integrate on website as embed code or widge, use URL to run campaigns/ads on instagrams/SMS/WhatsApp. QR code
What’s the #1 thing you’re looking to gain from the AppSumo campaign?
Feedback & new use cases
What are your plans with the customers, cash, and learnings from the AppSumo campaign?
Our vision is to be the go-to platform for marketers and agencies seeking rich interactive (HTML) and gamified content. With many gamification & interactive concepts already in pipeline, feedback from Sumolings will guide us in prioritizing the most impactful ideas first.
We aim to make running interactive and gamified campaigns a seamless, compounding experience. We're integrating with all key advertising (Meta, Google, Tiktok), marketing channels, and CRM tools like Hubspot, Zapier, Webhooks, and Pabbly. This ensures that data and insights accumulated from user interactions over time drive precise & potent targeting and retargeting strategies.
Understanding the pressing time constraints of marketers, we're leveraging AI & technology to streamline the content creation process. Users will be able to simply describe their requirements, input their brand's aesthetics, and instantly receive multiple rich content options.
Any details to clarify about the deal?
We primarily charge on no. of clicks which is how many users are clicking & initiating the campaign or participating with the content. That way it's a win-win situation, we benefit when brands benefit & get more traction on the campaigns
We support all countries
Anything else you'd like to add?
Marketers must rapidly innovate to stay ahead of fierce competition, surging acquisition and retention expenses, and a cookie-less landscape that offers limited insights into user behavior. Interactive and playable formats, already standout performers, have become indispensable in a marketer's toolkit.
Just as brands can now craft detailed websites using simple drag-and-drop tools, our aim with Rhym is to democratize the production of high impact, rich interactive & gamified content without the hefty price tag.