From running communities to building for communities

My chat with Varun Mayya, Cofounder & CEO of Scenes

Jan 06, 2023

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The creator economy is no longer a hot meme; many have already moved on to other areas with more hype. A popular category amongst startups building for creators was community platform products.

Ceci Stallsmith, one of the prior Scatter Brain guests who worked on Slack’s developer platform, told me the following :

“I help companies grow developer communities, so I believe community is a real unlock for growing a business. I think the software being built here is good, but I have many questions about how it is differentiated from CRM. If I were building in this space, I’d pivot hard into becoming a modern CRM with community elements layered on effectively for different parts of the business to leverage. This space should have evolved more rapidly, given the dominance of Discord, Slack, etc. I also feel like this is similar to the “everyone wants to be a platform” dilemma - everyone wants to have a community, but individuals cannot spend all of their time in online communities - a lot of success is figuring out whether or not you’re the going to host the community or market into other pre-existing ones.”

Today’s chat is with Varun, Scenes’ CEO, who is building a white-labeled community platform for companies and individuals out of India. Varun is a content creator, so getting his perspective on community management tools was interesting.

Content landscape and becoming a creator

Varun said, “My creator career started accidentally because I saw a lot of business creators on YouTube, and they were all making scammy content. So I said, hey, who's going to teach people about cap tables? Who's going to teach people about liquidation preference? I'll make content around that.”

He said he realized the TAM for people who want to listen to cap tables content is super low within three months, so he had to go wider.

“Today, the content I create is a caricature of what I do for a living. I know how hard it is to build a business. I've done it for ten years and never had a job. I'm almost 30 and started very early,” he told me. “If you open YouTube in India in an incognito tab, you'll see that the kind of content people watch is absolute garbage. It's surface-level entertainment. If you want people to get to cap tables and liquidation preference, you need to start them with baby steps. We make it Bollywood style. We add the masala. We figured that formula out, and we are probably one of the fastest-growing early channels right now.”

Leveraging content life for Scenes

“When Scenes was a consumer play, my content fit right in. I would transfer my audience to Scenes. When we pivoted to B2B SaaS with the same product, we realized that my content didn’t fit smoothly, but it was still useful.”

That makes sense.

“People might not take a meeting with me, the entrepreneur, but they'll take a meeting with somebody that pulls half a million user videos, right?” he said.

While I’m nearly not as well known or followed as Varun, this resonated with me. Five years ago, people rarely took meetings with me when I had no online presence. Now, more often than not, I get a yes.

“My investors don't understand why I do YouTube. They don't know the plight of sitting in a WhatsApp group begging somebody to join you and work at your company,” Varun went on. “Five years ago, I'd go on all these founder groups and be like, hey, can I please have engineers? But today, having a large following, I can tweet, and high-quality engineers are available in five to ten seconds. It's beautiful. I would never go back to being an unknown.”

Creator tools startups versus social networks

The most common critique of the tools market is that social networks are best positioned to help people manage and monetize their communities.

The bullish perspective on creator tools startups is that the networks are not optimized for serving the depth of engagement and monetization options people need and are best thought of as a top-of-the-funnel mechanism for finding community members.

I was curious about Varun’s take because he had the vantage point of both being a creator and a founder servicing creators.

Varun started with content on Instagram. He shared the motivation behind what eventually became Scenes today :

“The biggest shock was when Instagram suddenly pivoted to Reels. I was doing long-form content on Instagram because they had launched IG TV. They said they're going after YouTube. IG TV is now forgotten. Nobody remembers it anymore. I bet my career on it. I was wrong. I realized the rug can always be pulled under you, right? And you need to build an asset for yourself, and your content is, unfortunately, not an asset. People will forget you eventually. The algorithm will stop being your friend. You need to find a way to retain your audience.”

Varun believes the one mistake many creator monetization tools make is they don't let the creator do what they want. They still make it about their business. “I understand you get growth when it says powered by X tool,” he said.

Scenes’ origin story

Varun has the classic story of trying to solve the problem he faced yourself. He ran an educational community and hacked together tools to manage and monetize it.

Origins: “Discord was a great template for what we wanted to do; we struggled with Discord because it wasn't ours. We were at 50,000 people; notifications weren't going to fly out. You must rely on announcements and can't keep tagging everyone for every post. We realized that we needed to own the notification channel. We wanted to build a tool for ourselves. We realized that other people wanted the same thing and that there was a bigger opportunity here.”

He doesn’t believe FB is dying but thinks FB Groups are. There’s a void left now.

Varun added, “Instagram's not going to have Instagram groups. Instagram will probably build an OnlyFans-like offering. That's not P2P community engagement. I used to think Discord would never add forums, channels, or audio rooms, but I was wrong. It didn’t take them much time to launch those features.”

Early changes: “I realized what we needed to be an antithesis of the DNA of Discord. Discord will never embed into your website or mobile app as a consumer social platform,” he said. “We need to be where people are doing what they do. Eventually, we realized customer demand for a SaaS-based white-label platform was so strong that there was no reason for making a consumer play.”

White-labeled offering

“Anybody can come to Scenes and create that community. Creators want to own it. They want it to be theirs. But people keep trying to make branded platforms.”

He believes creators want to own their audience and build an asset. As a creator himself, he thinks creators want the tools and want to be left alone.

“We are the Android of creator economy when everybody else is trying to become Apple.”

Trade-offs: “The strategic downside is you lose the viral effect in a white-label approach. But I also think this is what the customers want in this segment. With the community platform, you guarantee to a customer that, hey, you get an asset, you could sell it tomorrow to another business, and we're not going to do anything about it,” he explained. “The white-labeled approach allows us to do that. We're behind the scenes. You build on top of us.”

I asked him to argue against his approach.

Varun said, “I think the most bearish take on my approach is that a big platform might eventually win bigger. There will be an Amazon of the community space. Our thesis is Shopify.”

He doesn’t think the platform model will work in the near term for creators, at least the big creators, because they want to own their tools. That’s where the retention and money are.

“Platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans do something different. That’s 1:many relationships. It’s not P2P. Twitter recently launched Twitter communities. And how do you compete with Twitter? It’s very difficult.”

Product

He told me that people use two parts of the platform very often. One is the Calendar to schedule events. Second is the stage with the Zoom integration.

Varun explained, “Under the hood, we have a lot of other things. You can white-label emails and have webhooks in your app. We rely less on integrations because we've seen how hacky it can get. If something has a lot of use, we build it in-house. For example, suppose you use an application form and Zapier to combine that with Circle. In that case, we have an application form inside the platform because we know how hacky that workflow can get, and there are edge cases. When the zap fails, you're losing community members.”

Development: “We will outsource everything with a stable solution that is cheap enough for us. Video uploading is on Mux. The back end of live streaming is on Agora. White-labeled email is on Sendgrid. We try to make it as simple as possible for the users. If we think something needs to be done well and nobody's done that well, we do it ourselves. For example, for blogging, we use the tinymce.editor, which has done a great job of allowing people to format a post. But we had to extend it to allow people to copy content from Google Docs, format it a certain way, and paste that into Scenes. We tend to use open-source or existing tools in the market. We've got at least to meet the minimum expectations for our features.”

Customer persona

Scenes serves both individuals and creators.

They go after knowledge creators.

“If businesses use Scenes out of FOMO, we end up with low retention. We work with one of the largest banks, one of the largest stock brokers, and one of the largest insurance companies in India. These were all inbound; these were opportunistic. This was not our core persona. But I'm not going to say no to money. Knowledge creators are the main persona. Those people go to Google and search, “How do I run a cohort-based course? How do I run a community?”, he said.

An expensive mistake

“One of my biggest mistakes last year was trying to raise money,” he reflected. “We had enough money in the bank, but I went out and tried to raise money. And that is exactly when the market crashed in India.”

He spent three months trying to raise. He would rather work on being profitable and doesn’t think it is the right time to raise.

“The team was demoralized because they thought we were raising capital, which was not working out. But it wasn't just not working out for us; it wasn't working out for everybody. All the top businesses in India were laying off people. We were doing somewhat well, and our thesis was being proven, and we were like, why are we not able to raise money? I would never do that again. You should only raise money when you're 99% sure you'll get at least a single term sheet. So my bad for not reading the market. I shouldn’t have done that.”

I recently wrote about how I believe startup life will get worse and introspection on how we haven’t had too many frauds in an environment primed for shenanigans, and that’s a cause for optimism.

Here’s an issue with some highlights from chats with founders and executives back in August last year.

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