Manasa Rajan, CEO, Jupiter Meta, on Building the Future of Business with Metaverse and Web3.0 Solutions

The Web3 industry is rapidly evolving, bringing new opportunities and challenges to businesses. The global market size of Web3 is expected to grow to $82.72 billion by 2030 from $3.3 billion in 2021. In India, the Web3 market is expected to grow from $0.0049 billion in 2022 to $1.1 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 57%.

With increasing growth opportunities, many companies are working to make a contribution to this industry. A Web3 company that has emerged recently is Jupiter Meta. Jupiter Meta is a Metaverse, XR, and Web3 company. The company helps businesses achieve their goals quickly and effectively with the use of tokenomics, blockchain, and XR applications.

Recently, we at StartupTalky had the opportunity to interview Manasa Rajan, CEO and Co-founder of Jupiter Meta. In this interview, she discussed and shared insights into the company's approach to the Web3 industry and its innovative solutions for businesses.

Now, let's take a closer look at Manasa's responses and see what we can learn from them.

StartupTalky: What does your company do? What was the motivation/vision with which you started?

Manasa: Jupiter Meta is a Metaverse XR and Web3.0 company. We create focussed solutions for businesses, across improving product experience, customer engagement, brand marketing, and L&D.

We are a team of people who feel passionate about the potential of the blockchain and metaverse tech - around creating value for creators, value for brands & their superfans, through adding a realm of experiential storytelling in marketing and making concepts easy to understand & learning fun!

Web3 is constantly evolving and the landscape is becoming niche to some extent. This means that there are not many who can offer an integrated solution that comes from the convergence of these technologies. That’s an opportunity we have realized and have moved towards, in the last 12 months, since our inception.

1. We created the World’s first NFT wall art project to impact social change! An NFT art collection by an Indian artist collective, based on Indian pop culture whilst capturing the ethos of the city - the ‘Icons of Chennai’ collection was a success for us on many fronts.
2. Launched the first music NFTs in India within a metaverse concert, with the singer-composer Karthik. The music NFTs were sold out in 3 days and created a new token-led revenue model for the artist and opened up commercial use cases for the NFT holders as a secondary market.
3. We are building token-led user-community mobilizing projects for brands to help them create more value for their loyal customers and new monetization opportunities.
4. We are building an ESG innovation-led marketplace for creating access and scalability for sustainable solutions across the board.
5. Building customer experience focussed AR solutions for the retail sector across categories. This is a large part of our portfolio today.
6. Launching functional metaverses for SMEs to impact better product storytelling and lead generation!

StartupTalky: What is/are the USP/s of your products/services?

Manasa: While being technology agnostic is a key driver for us, the core of our solutioning lies in the fact that we are better problem solvers, storytellers, and strategic thinkers. The Web3.0 industry is fragmented though in a very nascent stage. We are positioned to bring about adoption from across industry verticals and products/services by being cognizant of the fact that what this technology allows is to solve real-world business problems and bring about economic value and is not destined to be purely for speculative or entertainment value.

StartupTalky: How has the Web3 industry changed in recent years and how has your company adapted to these changes?

Manasa: Technology development has been faster than deployment. However, the industry has been hit specifically with the crypto winter and the loss of sentiment around NFTs to some extent. The challenges of the metaverse still continue.

But what has helped in this organized chaos is that we have focused on utility-based solutions and creating an impact for businesses that is measurable and goal focussed, thus enabling adoption.

StartupTalky: How do you stay up-to-date on the latest trends and developments in the Web3 industry?

Manasa: The industry is constantly learning and evolving. You will see a Web3.0 or blockchain conclave every week, pan India. There are tech forums that allow our resources to be updated on trends and innovations. We also practice a very collaborative approach, partnering with many tech entities and thought leaders to create ease in information sharing.

StartupTalky: What key metrics do you track to check the company's growth and performance?

Manasa: Our mission is to impact 10,000 businesses through our solutions. We have a start and are finding our way through to achieve that illustrious goal. This can come from being ahead of the curve in terms of understanding technological development and platforms, and market learnings from across the globe as some countries like the UAE are agile in adoption.

However, our goal is to positively impact our client's businesses and help them achieve predetermined, tangible success metrics in each and every project implementation. We actively track metrics like engagement, dwell time, views, revenue, etc across AR, metaverse, and token-led initiatives.

StartupTalky: What were the most significant challenges your company faced in the past year and how did you overcome them?

Manasa: Since the technology is at a very nascent stage one of the significant challenges we faced and continue to overcome is adoption. The cost of such adoption in relation to the ROI is not something we can refer back to as there are very few established use cases. However, we have taken a path of accelerating adoption by helping businesses adapt and leverage solutions that will make a huge impact. Our AR solutioning has found significant appeal and adoption because of that very fact. We believe this could trigger more interest and thereby help us achieve economies of scale.

StartupTalky: What are the different strategies you use for marketing? Tell us about any growth hack which you pulled off.

Manasa: A combination of communication and solutions-led approaches that include collaborations with tech partners, industry experts, and marketing/advertising agencies to drive awareness and the use of digital platforms to show the successes and possibilities through innovative solutions in this space has worked positively for us.

Our decision to partner with advertising agencies, we believe will yield a better impact. As brand custodians, agencies want to thrive on helping brands gain salience and by partnering with us they are able to take this new breed of technology solutions to brands. This makes the process faster, transparent, and mutually beneficial.

StartupTalky: What are the important tools and software you use to run your business smoothly?

Manasa: As a multi-city technology company we constantly explore and use tools and solutions to create greater efficiencies and better communication for the team.

StartupTalky: What opportunities do you see for future growth in the Web3 industry in India and the world? What kind of difference in market behavior have you seen within states in India?

Manasa: Web3.0 is here to stay. It will redefine economies as already evident. As more and more businesses look forward to engaging with customers and businesses (B2C and B2B) in more innovative and effective ways, the adoption of Web3 will trigger better opportunities for entities like ours. Web2 took more than a decade to fully mature and will continue to improve and will integrate with Web 3.0 offerings to create traction. Across industries from fashion to logistics, food to healthcare, aviation to technology services, what will drive opportunities whether in India or on a global scale is the solution architecture that can make a positive impact.

In India, many states have adopted Web3.0 and have set a benchmark already. A top-to-bottom approach will benefit not just from an adoption perspective but also build legitimacy through a regulatory framework. While states like Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Maharashtra are seen as leaders primarily because of opportunities for businesses, the other states will witness participation.

StartupTalky: How do you plan to expand the customer, product, and team base in the future?

Manasa: We have a targeted approach to focus on certain niche solutions for specific industries and going deep within that category. This helps us build leadership and reach within those categories and create adoption at scale. Retail, L&D, and Technology companies to name a few.

Our core team comes with a varied skill set and experience across industry, this gives us an edge and makes us relevant partners to businesses. We will continue to hire creative and tech resources to help us scale.

Partnerships with industry and technology experts help us scale and also helps strengthen our customer base and implementations.

StartupTalky: One tip that you would like to share with people reading this article who want to get into entrepreneurship?

Manasa: If you have a vision that you want to build towards, this path (of being an entrepreneur) can be meaningful and full of accelerated learning and growth! Never easy, but always interesting and not a dull moment. But, the larger vision must be the motivator!