The Pattern Everyone Noticed
If you've been watching Shark Tank India, you might have noticed something. Almost every time an influencer enters the tank, they don't get investment—they get insulted. "You earn one crore in one hour, what are you doing here with one crore?" "I won't even say good luck, I'm out." "Manoj, I'm out. Thank you so much, Manoj."
Sure, many influencer businesses actually deserve criticism. But they're not so bad that they should be publicly humiliated on national television. Watching this, it feels like the Sharks are just jealous of influencers. But the real reality is actually the opposite of this.
What Sharks Actually Want
These Sharks actually try their best to move away from creator-led businesses toward founder-led businesses. From their side, they're making the right decision. But actually, this decision is going to backfire on them.
"A2 Motivation channel sir, 14 million sir."
"Did you do marketing to get these subscribers or are they organic sir?"
"Organic sir."
Here they've asked whether 14 million subscribers came from marketing or are organic. And if you don't know, let me tell you—it can only be organic. You cannot get 14 million subscribers by running ads. No matter how big the company is, you cannot bring 14 million subscribers by running ads. Unless you've bought fake ones.
So technically, an investor is asking questions before investing that make no sense at all. This question is literally like someone saying "I'm a professional pilot" and the other person asking "Brother, do you fly planes or do you fly by waving your hands fast?"
The Knowledge Gap
Because Sharks don't have much knowledge about social media or algorithms, it doesn't mean we should disrespect them. I've been on social media for a long time. I know more about algorithms. These people have been in business for a long time. They know thousands of times more about business than me. The only difference is that we respect their skills, and they don't respect our skills as much.
The Real Reason Behind the Conflict
Whenever any creator goes to pitch to them, they get very curious seeing our channels. They feel "this is a new field, let me learn how much money they're making."
"I said A2 Motivation, that depends."
"But still tell me average, how much income happens from this influencing?"
"Sir approximately 5 lakhs."
"7 million, how much do you earn? How much do you earn?"
"Sir my wife will beat me."
If someone isn't comfortable telling, they should say "I didn't come to take investment for the channel, invest in my business brother." But they force them to tell, "No no, tell us what's going on."
And when creators tell their actual subscriber numbers, the Sharks are shocked. "How many followers? 1 million on Instagram. Yes sir. Above 9 million on YouTube. Above 3.7 million on Instagram. So we have a network of more than 30 lakh followers on Instagram and YouTube."
But for Sharks, numbers matter a lot, and understand the reason. This is Boat's Instagram page, and it has more than 1 million fake followers. I'm calling followers fake because their engagement rate is very low.
Assume an Instagram account has 10-11 lakh followers. If they post any product or anything, what engagement will come? 80,000 likes will come, 500 will come, 10,000 will come, 5,000 will come. Their average likes are between 300 to 400. They have 10-11 lakh followers and 400 likes are coming.
And this engagement rate is coming when they're spending a lot on production value. Whatever I've spent on my channel in 3 years, Boat people spend that much in one month. Still, their page can never grow organically.
And it's not just Aman Gupta's company. Look at Shaadi.com. They have around 2,20,000 followers. And the average likes on their videos are less than 100. Literally not even 100 likes on their video. They've hired proper creators. The people who make videos for their account—68 likes on that.
And this thing is one of the biggest disadvantages of their business. Because if you're working online, doing e-commerce, you give 30-40% to Meta ads. Companies like Boat spend at least 25% of their revenue in marketing, in which they're giving money to Google, Facebook, and also to creators like us.
And this is the part they want to skip. They want to build their own audience themselves and not have to pay creators, and keep showing videos to their audience themselves. But practically, these things don't happen. And why don't they happen? Because they feel the higher the production, the more subscribers or followers will come. But in reality, this doesn't work at all.
The Algorithm Truth
Because if I say "Boat is such a big company" and you go to their Instagram and don't find even 10,000 followers, you'll say "what big company is this Boat?" So they have to get followers in millions. Whether they have to do it by running ads, boosting, or buying fake ones. The agenda is that numbers should show.
The Follower Comparison
Now some of you will say that Sharks also have millions of followers. It's not that Sharks don't know about numbers, followers, and subscribers. But if you look technically, the number of views that come on Sharks, people don't follow them that much. And that too when Sharks have been making content and doing Shark Tank for the last 5 years.
And it's not that they're not doing any work. Content is also made on that. Still only 2 million followers. And a content creator starts from zero without backup and crosses 2 million in one year. And this thing founders have also realized—that their accounts have also gotten stuck at some level.
The Real Conflict
So whenever any creator-led brand goes to Shark Tank, they insult them and throw them out. Because they don't want creator-led brands. They want the creator. Those who didn't understand, I'll explain ahead.
What they did was—they had a social media account. On its strength, they built a new business, and went to get funding for that business. Then Sharks would get jealous that "this guy already has a backup. If tomorrow his business doesn't work, he'll shift back to his content creation journey. So why should we invest in someone who has nothing to lose, who hasn't invested 100% in that business?"
And second, how will creator-led brand benefit? If the creator's entire social media account isn't coming under the company. Dark Tongue came with a business that had 3 million followers. And seeing that, Sharks were very impressed that "you people do marketing from your social media."
And this is always Shark's priority—that if any creator-led brand is coming, we want their creator account too. And creators' priority is always that if we're taking creator-led brand, we'll keep the creative channel separate. And this clash between them creates the biggest controversy.
The Real Problem
And even if this controversy was being created, I wouldn't make this video. But actually, the problem is coming where? Because Sharks never generated numbers themselves, they don't actually know the value of numbers that much. In their eyes, numbers have very high value. But actually, they don't have that much value.
This year, a brand comes to Shark Tank called Imami. What does this brand do? This brand is itself a YouTube channel. And these people create content in animation, and only for kids. If I tell you their growth, in just 7 months they generated 1.5 million subscribers. Along with that, they also generated ₹70 lakh revenue.
But they were treating themselves as pre-revenue because they spent more than 70 lakhs in creating content and maintaining the company. Because animation costs a bit more compared to this setup. And their actual vision was not that they just want to remain a YouTube channel. They've made these three characters. And these people want to introduce more characters and build their own Disney World type world where their characters will be, their toys will be, their movies will be, and the whole thing will be monetized.
Now let's move to the problem part. They had 1.5 million subscribers. Till now they hadn't done anything extraordinary. They were operating only in loss, and they get valuation of ₹50 crore. Now why did they get 50 crore valuation? Let's decode this.
First point—because they had a very good vision. These people didn't want to just remain a YouTube channel. They wanted to expand. So if we see by this logic, my channel's value should also be 50 crore, and they get 10 million views. I get more than 20 million. My valuation should be 100 crore.
First, the content they're making is only targeting kids, and YouTube is very strict for kids' content. YouTube will block 50-70% of ads from coming on your channel, and whatever ads come, they won't be conversion ads. You people can't click and redirect to any link. Only branding ads will be there. Because of this, whatever money is given to channels becomes very less.
Second, from far it looks like they're getting 10 million views every month. But if you actually deep dive, only 1 million are coming on long video, and more than 9 million are coming on their short videos. And see how much money comes on 9 million in business category. And theirs is kids channel, on which even less money will be made.
If I catch any kids channel creator and say "brother do marketing for my product, I make kids' toys," they can only market that "it's available on Amazon, go buy." They can't give any link, because of which conversions will drop a lot.
The way they're running this business model, they can definitely make it profitable in the end. In future, they'll also start making profit in their channel. But I'm not sure how the 50 crore valuation will be justified.
And YouTube doesn't support this type of content much. And if you really want to build an IP, if you really want to make superstars, you need distribution. Content is not king, distribution is king. How many cartoons did you watch in childhood? How many did you see? Shinchan, Doraemon—where did you watch all these? On TV.
Today, kids are definitely shifting from TV to mobile. But when any content was watched on TV, there were only five or six options. And kids kept repeating on that only, and became fans of any particular cartoon. Then they bought geometry boxes, games, costumes, and margins were made there.
And behind that, there's proper unit economics. If today I make a small room in which all Shinchan toys are there, there's very high chance that fresh new kids will know Shinchan. Because even today it keeps running on TV, and most kids today don't watch mobile. They only watch TV.
But on the other hand, if I open the same thing for Imami, many kids won't know your characters yet. Assume you get 10 million constant views every month. How many active viewers will be there from that? 2 lakh, 3 lakh. Now those 3 lakh kids will be divided across entire India.
These things are very impractical today, and tomorrow you'll become very big. There are very rare chances for this too because it's an open market, cut-throat competition happens, and you don't have any distribution network. You're dependent on algorithm. Your entire business is dependent on one algorithm.
And now some of you will say that they can launch their own toys, if 2-3 lakh kids are watching them constantly every month. Before explaining this part, let me tell you. One is viewers, and second is fans. If 2-3 lakh people are watching you live, that doesn't mean they're your fans.
Literally 700 members. And from these same 700 people, people will also drop when your products launch. And I'm not making these things up. This thing has also happened. They launched their products on January 8 and took them back on January 28. This is a screenshot of one of their products on which only 3 people have reviewed. This is a screenshot of another product on which only 7 people have reviewed.
And today, Sharks must have gotten so crazy seeing channels that "this is a very good business. We'll put money in this." Creators who are already living that life know this thing isn't long-lasting. It's problematic. And Sharks sitting far away feel this thing is very crazy. Put money in it. Because of which they can suffer loss somewhere.