Mumbai: The short video platform space has exploded and expanded in the last few years. It’s not the future. It’s the present. At present, most creators have embraced and explored in a way we haven’t seen before. It has also given life to many apps and platforms catering to the needs of budding creators. These are exciting times, and Tiki has been pivotal in this growth. Not just with the content but also by helping build a local creator community with the necessary tools.

According to a recent study, 59 per cent of gen-z use short-form video apps to discover things before exploring longer versions. The short video space has never been short of options, and there are many homegrown apps playing their trade too. The buggy UI, underwhelming experience, and lack of support for tier-II and tier-III city creators limit them to a small bunch of top-level influencers from metropolises. There has been a general lack of compassion on social media – a void Tiki aims to, and has somewhat, been able to fill quite successfully. Tiki offers an accessible platform for the creators to interact seamlessly online and help build on a community via offline meetups.

With these meetups, creators help each other understand the latest trends and techniques for creating quality short-form videos. The community brings them together and gives them a sense of belonging. It will help expand the creator community and give them opportunities to make a difference in society.

Through the meetups voluntarily organised by them, the creators feel:

A sense of belonging when they are familiar with other creators.

A sense of appreciation when they get recognised for their effort and achievement.

A sense of support when they know that they are growing as a creator and making an impact.

Tiki believes that a platform is only as good as its creators. These emotions help them find a home. Tiki is built on the collective power of its creators’ creative energy. To incentivize people to form and organise themselves into tribes, Tiki aims to tap into the intrinsic human desire to be recognized. The Tiki creator community allows the creators to represent the platform and be ambassadors for Tiki. In a span of six months, Tiki has gone from two meetups per month to over 700 by July 2022. All these meetups are organised through a structured process of event organisation, activity curation, and event documentation. Up until now, over 5,000 offline creator meetups in 22 states and 200+ cities all over the country have been organised. The idea of Tiki meetups was sown and germinated by the creators, and its positive results have been reaped by the creators. It’s an open, inclusive, and self-evolving community that also aims to give back to a larger community—our society. The Tiki community has made an impact in their real-life community and helped over 20,000 people in need.

These events are also an opportunity to identify leaders through the Tiki City Ambassador (TCA) program. Tiki provides financial and promotional support for elected leaders who promise to organise and bring people together. To date, 15 registered Tiki community ambassadors across the country are organising two grade-A events per month. Relationships are strengthened with every online and offline interaction, and the Tiki Family Guilds achieve an impressive 97 per cent day one retention rate and 90 per cent active participation rate. This is consistent even as the total Family G membership doubles in size every month.

This means that the community is achieving its objectives both in depth and breadth. Increasing creator stickiness while expanding its reach to cover new and aspiring creators.

The opportunities for creators exploring short video applications in India are endless. Tiki has created an atmosphere of inclusivity and uniqueness for the creator community that needs to be leveraged to achieve the larger goal of making India a hub of talent. Creators need to come forward and leverage new opportunities, as the future of Tiki will be led by the creator community.

The author of this article is Tiki CEO Ian Goh.