Track industry-specific content with DrumUp app

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Previously a business consultant with Accenture,  IIT-Delhi and IIM-Lucknow alumnus Vishal Dutta, co-founder of DrumUp, left his cushy job to develop content discovery and social sharing app DrumUp, which allows small businesses, startups and individual professionals to discover relevant content for their audience and schedule the posts for Twitter and Facebook.

In an interview with CIOL, Dutta spoke about content discovery issues, as well as, how small businesses are struggling with content and social media.

Edited Excerpts

Why is content discovery a big problem?

There is a huge amount of content being generated online today and it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses and professionals to figure out what’s most relevant for them. This became evident to us was when we were developing content marketing and social media campaigns for our clients. Content discovery becomes even more important when the online presence depends on the content that you share with your followers on social media. Realizing this need gap, we started working on solving the problem. We analyze more than 50,000 stories every day for each user, and use a number of signals to understand which stories are most relevant to him or her. These are then pushed out using our mobile app and our website, where the user can read and quickly share these stories. You can look at DrumUp as an artificially intelligent assistant who skims through news every day and neatly presents the ones most interesting to you.

How professionals at different level are struggling with deluge of content being produced online and how DrumUp can help?

On the market side, a lot of people are in a habit of consuming whatever content is pushed out to them without using any discretion. This includes a lot of frivolous content, which neither serves any professional value nor is it entertaining. You just have to turn on the television to understand what I’m talking about. But today, with technology, a user can choose what to read and what to watch and shut out the rest. But that requires breaking a bad habit, which can be a challenge.

What DrumUp is about?

DrumUp is an intelligent content discovery app for professionals and small businesses to track their industry, get a daily digest of news and keep up their social presence. It allows users to keep track of the latest news flow based on themes of their choice. DrumUp was launched in January 2015, content discovery engine that recommends the most relevant and personalized content to a user.

Can you explain the technology behind DrumUp?

DrumUp uses sophisticated NLP and machine learning algorithms to scour through the web content, categorize and through a complex algorithm establish the relevance of a story for a user. The stories are then displayed and suggested on the app in the order of relevance to the user.

How do you stand out amongst similar offerings in the industry?

Our USP is our content discovery engine, which uses a number of techniques like machine learning and natural language processing to make sure that we surface content that’s most relevant to each unique user. As the user interacts with the system, we get better and better at understanding his or her references and make content recommendations accordingly.

What are the challenges?

The key challenge will be to expand to languages other than English as we expand geographically. We are making a major push on mobile. We think content consumption - both casual and professional - will continue moving to mobile. Our Android app was launched recently and an iOS version will be out soon.

What is the startup’s growth trajectory?

We are close to hitting 100,000 content shares per month through our platform, which is an important engagement metric for us. We are targeting growing our user base by 10x every 3-4 months over the next year.