In the age of Insta, can Uable's bet on private clubs for teenagers pay off?

It was akin to the 'who came first, chicken or the egg?' question for Diya Kaushik.

The 14-year-old with an avid interest in podcasting wanted to start her own show two years back.

“To start my own show, I needed experts who could join in as guest speakers. But for a guest to agree to come to my show, they first needed to know me.”

Kaushik also wanted to explore website design, coding, and graphic design, among other skills. To build upon those interests, she was looking to network with a community of people who had similar passions.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to find that on platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

She said, “When you go to Instagram or YouTube for some helpful content you instead end up scrolling mindlessly through reels or shorts, or get distracted by targeted ads.”

That is when she came across Uable, a social app, which only teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 can join.

Started by a former co-founder of edtech firm Vedantu and a Deutsche Bank employee, the app is designed around the aspirations of the digital-native Indians, who enjoy low-cost internet and affordable smartphones.

“Be original, be relevant, be respectful,” may not quite sound like a Gen Z anthem, but it is among Uable's guidelines for the rebellious generation.

The germ of the idea

Interestingly, Uable drafted these guidelines with the help of a team of teens who have been with the startup since its inception in 2020.

“Over 500 teenagers used to work with the product team on testing the product, giving feedback every day, and that is how we have iterated on what will work for them,” said Saurabh Saxena, co-founder, and chief executive officer of Uable in a virtual interaction with Moneycontrol.

Saxena, a former co-founder of Vedantu, launched Uable with Vasavi Kandula, who was working with Deutsche Bank.

Saurabh Saxena and Vasavi Kandula, co-founders, Uable

Saxena left Vedantu in 2018 with 13 years of experience in education working with the unicorn and its former avatar, Lakshya. After noticing a gap in the social networking space for a platform that caters to the unique requirements of adolescents today, he came up with the idea for Uable.

In March 2021, Uable secured $3.5 million in pre-series A round led by Japan Associated Finance Co (JAFCO) Asia, Chiratae Ventures and existing investor 3one4 Capital, which invested in the company in its seed round in July 2020.

Early journey

Saxena said Uable was kickstarted as a community on Discord, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and instant messaging social platform.

“We didn't have an app for six months, and on the discord community we conducted a lot of events, discussed our product with teenagers, tried several elements, and then launched the first version of the app,” said Saxena.

When Uable was in beta, it was one large community, but teenagers using the application suggested introducing private clubs.

“With the help of insights from teenagers in our team, we understood that a large community of one-two lakh people would not derive enough value for every member,” said Saxena.

A club, a skill

Saxena believes the value driven by private communities on the app is the unique selling point for Uable. “If a teenager signs up on our app and says they are passionate about crypto, entrepreneurship, design, or just wants to explore careers that can be good for them, we recommend certain private clubs to join,” said Saxena.

Other applications that are frequently used by teenagers are Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. However, according to Saxena, Uable mainly competes with platforms like Discord, which also has clubs.

Uable hosts these private clubs tailored for Gen Z's varying interests.

He added, “I host an entrepreneurship community for students, there's an experienced designer who hosts a design community for teenagers. There are teenagers who are running study groups for other teens.”

14-year-old Kaushik believes Uable has helped her build upon her interests as she now has separate portfolios of her works in graphic design, coding, and even content creation, a skill she picked up on the platform.

“Because of Uable, I got the chance to interview experts, designers, a director from Google, and even Saurabh Saxena himself and post this content on my YouTube channel, it was unbelievable for me,” she said.

Yagya Chopra, 16, who lives in Delhi/NCR was also looking for a community where people his age could have open dialogues about issues that mattered to their generation.

Chopra now hosts a community of young LGBTQ+ members and allies called the Desi Teen Queer Club on Uable.

Within the club, members interact using challenges, dialogues, and regular content. “Recently, we hosted a challenge on the topic, how to be an ally for the LGBTQ+? For this, members could make a presentation, a video, or an audio project about their best understanding of the topic,” said Chopra.

He added, “So the best ones get a prize, like letters of recommendation from experts, one on one mentorship sessions, or meetings with all the mentors in the club. Other kinds of prizes also include Ucoins, electronic devices, and so on.”

The 3C model

There comes the third C - Commerce, in Uable’s 3C (Content, Community, and Commerce) business model. Start-ups like Meesho, Helo, and Bulbul used the same model. Others like Trell and India Bulls’ Yaari also used the 3C model, but while the former faced a mass exodus of employees, the latter had to merge with another company.

In a move to drive social engagement, Uable has implemented gamification which allows users to earn virtual coins for creating relatable, informative, and relevant content on Uable.

“Simply put, you do good activities, you earn coins for that. If the community is liking your content, if you are winning challenges you earn coins,” said Saxena. These virtual coins on Uable are known as Ucoins.

The Ucoins can then be spent in different ways, one of those is shopping on ‘U-store’, an in-app store with over 200 products from brands such as Snackible, boAt, The Souled Store, and Streak, a teen fintech platform, among others.

Revenue sources for Uable

However, the Uable team has been ideating a pivot towards digital commerce from physical commerce, in a bid to explore pathways of monetisation.

The start-up is looking to launch a premium membership program to target ‘high-intent’ teenagers. “We are ideating the membership plan and have tested the beta version among a few teenagers. I feel this is the model that will help us monetise and also have a pathway to profitability.” Saxena and his team plan on launching the premium membership feature on the app in the next couple of months.

However, not to miss, Uable faces the challenge of targetting an age group with a negligible personal income as its primary revenue source. As of now, Uable, unlike many social networks, also does not have ads on the platform. While that seems to work well among its users who agree there are fewer distractions, the move deprives the start-up of a major revenue source.

In FY19-20, while the company generated Rs 4.9 crore in revenue, with expenses of almost double the amount, it suffered a loss of Rs 3.6 crore, according to its filing with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

According to Saxena, Uable is currently focusing on building engagement. The start-up plans to rely on the funds raised for the foreseeable future and is still far away from profitability.

In the current environment where funding seems scarce, Saxena plans to wait for six to nine months more before raising the next round.

Safe space for young minds

With teens as its sole audience, Uable's team faces another challenge of keeping the platform safe and secure for the age group.

Shashanka Kundu, who heads the product development team at Uable said the team uses multiple levels of checks to assure the platform is safe for adolescents. The initial moderation stages are guided by Artificial Intelligence-based automated tools on the app.

“In some cases, where the moderation tools cannot give a suggestion on whether this can be passed, then the content goes to our internal manual moderation team,” he added.

The team then checks if the content is appropriate and relevant to the club and the discussion it is being posted in.

“There are some cases where something gets out of hand and raisable content is passed even after these checks. For such cases, every club has a set of moderators,” said Kundu.

“As a club owner and moderator, I have the power to remove a member, add a member. And also whenever someone posts a dialogue, I first review it and make sure everything is okay,” added Yagya.

In addition, users on the app are given other features using which they can report a page, a discussion, fellow users, and so on, said Kundu.

The road ahead for Uable

Today, more than two lakh teenagers are using the app and on average, an active user spends about seven to eight minutes on it every day, according to Saxena. “Six months back our retention used to be a little jittery, but now a lot of users who are coming to the app are staying beyond 90 days.”

The application has over five lakh downloads on the Google play store and has received a rating of 4.1 with over 12 thousand reviews.