TrueFan - Win Quizzes & Connect with your Favorite Celebrity

Jeenal Jain

Apr 6, 2021 — 9 min read

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the TrueFan.

The celebrity-fan engagement industry in India is on a very nascent stage and the existent Connection between Fans and Celebrities is just unbelievable! With TrueFan platform, the team aims to fulfill the dreams of millions of fans in India and provide them with the most meaningful celebrity engagement experiences with their favorite celebrities.

Nimish Goelm, Nevaid Aggarwal and Devender Bindalack founded TrueFan, when they realized the lack of personal accessibility by fans to their favorite celebrities. In an urge to bridge this gap, TrueFan was born!

StartupTalky interviewed Nimish Goelm (Co-founder & CEO, TrueFan) to know the Success Story of TrueFan and also get a glance on TrueFan's business model, how it started, growth, founders, revenue model, funding & more...

TrueFan - Company Highlights

Startup Name	TrueFan
Founders	Nimish Goelm (CEO), Nevaid Aggarwal, Devender Bindal
Founding Year	2020
Headquarters	New Delhi
Sector	Media and Entertainment, Gaming
Total Funding	$4.3 Million (Seed)
Website	truefan.in

Lets go through the Journey of TrueFan -

TrueFan - About
TrueFan - Market/Industry Details
TrueFan - Founders and Team
TrueFan - Startup Idea
TrueFan - Product/Service and USP
TrueFan - Name and Logo
TrueFan - Business Model and Revenue Model
TrueFan - Startup Launch
TrueFan - Startup Challenges
TrueFan - Growth
TrueFan - Funding and Investors
TrueFan - Competitors
TrueFan - Future Plans
TrueFan - FAQs

TrueFan - About

TrueFan is a platform that aspires to connect fans to their favorite celebrities in the most personal and meaningful ways.

It caters to the everyday Indian audience who’ve grown up enacting dialogues from Bollywood movies, copied hairdos of their beloved ‘heroes’ & ‘heroines’ or turned into bathroom-singers with their favorite love songs. TrueFan allows these very ‘true fans’ to interact with their dream stars at a price that does not hit the pocket.

"What the platform aims is to celebrate the true spirit of Indian Fandom and provide fans access to A list celebrities like never before" Says TrueFan Team

TrueFan - Market/Industry Details

There are around 300 million Indians, who head to the cinemas to watch movies, coupled with a large audience base for tv shows and sports, especially cricket. Taking this into consideration, the market size is as large as it can be. While the country preaches its utmost devotion towards stars, the access to them is either via social media/ through interviews/paparazzi shoots. The celebrity-fan engagement industry in India is on a very nascent stage. With social media, the interaction fans have with celebrities is usually a one-way street and passive where a fan is probably dropping hundreds of comments but all of these mostly go unnoticed.

While COVID- 19 has posed restrictions, the demand for celebrity fan engagement platforms has increased. Fans want access to their beloved stars and these platforms cater to that need. The coming years will see exponential growth for this industry which is currently very nascent in India. While many other platforms exist, influential celebrity connect platforms try to provide a meaningful and personalized experience to the users

TrueFan - Founders and Team

Nevaid Aggarwal, Devender Bindal and Nimish Goelm (CEO) are the founders of TrueFan

TrueFan has a 40 member team in total and is growing across the two offices in India.

TrueFan founder and CEO — Nimish Goelm - founder & CEO, TrueFan

TrueFan - Startup Idea

India is a country that worships celebrities, the connection seems quite distant but in a way is very personal. The TrueFan founders realized that this issue of devotion towards the superstars and the lack of personal accessibility to them needed to be bridged. Here’s when TrueFan came into being.

With this platform, the team aims to fulfill the dreams of millions of fans in India and provide them with the most meaningful engagement experiences with their favorite celebrities.

"I have been a fanboy all my life. It was an almost surreal experience of gate-crashing a wedding to meet my idol, Virat Kohli that put me in the shoes of millions of Indian fans out there" Says Nimish Goelm (founder & CEO, TrueFan)

TrueFan - Product/Service and USP

The TrueFan platform is simple and easy to use. All that the user has to do is

Answer a series of fun questions around the life of their favorite celebrity/s
The winner, or in this case, the 'TrueFan’, stands a chance to win a personalized video message from his/her favorite star.
While all the other fans get assured cashbacks. Thus, the platform operates on an easy win-win module that has something for everyone.

TrueFan USP -

While there are many existing players in the market, TrueFan platform is completely different from them. It has focused on partnering with only leading celebrities (A listers exclusively). TrueFan's business is based on gamification and fun. Where it encourages fans to play simple quizzes to win video messages versus making them a one-off transactional purchase.

TrueFan - Name and Logo

"Our name is our philosophy. It’s simple and easy to understand. TrueFan. Pure, sharp appealing and yet quite broad" adds Nimish Goelm

TrueFan - Business Model and Revenue Model

Users are asked to pay a nominal fee to play quizzes on TrueFan platform. The winner gets a personalized video from the said celebrity, other players receive cashbacks on the basis of their rank in the game.

"We wanted to price our product in a manner that it can be accessed by a larger mass of the country. The true aspirational value we want to create is for the personalized videos, cashback is just a way to ensure that there is something in the bucket for everyone" Says Nimish, Founder, TrueFan

TrueFan - Startup Launch

Post-closing the first funding round in August 2020, the team launched the TrueFan platform in September 2020. TrueFan announced its exclusive partnership with the biggest names of Bollywood, Kareena Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff. While something like this was never seen before, it felt surreal to a lot of fans at first.

TrueFan team reached out to users to ensure smooth transaction and to make their experience with the celebrity more meaningful and personalized. This process helped it gain a lot of first hand feedback on the product and provided an eagle view from the consumer’s lens.

The fact that the product fulfilled deep desire of fans to get an interaction from their favorite celebrity, its amazing to find that some have played more than 100 paid quizzes. And “paid” is the most important word here. Since, TrueFan is a user- centric platform, it used social media and google ads to target the demographic extensively

TrueFan - Startup Challenges

TrueFan started during COVID. Although the pandemic did not pose many challenges, as it is a tech based product. But getting its name recognized in the market and building a unique identity for TrueFan was the challenging bit.

"Since our value proposition is like none of the existing players in the market, TrueFan is gradually building a user base of its own" adds Nimish

TrueFan - Milestones and Current Status

TrueFan is headquartered in New Delhi and operates at two locations, Mumbai and Delhi.

Two of the biggest milestones in TrueFan's journey so far have been the funding received and partnerships with some of the biggest household names of Bollywood.

Founders did a lot of research while giving shape to the product and then pitched it to leading talent and their management teams. TrueFan team was happy to have received a great response from them and that has led to successful partnerships

TrueFan - Funding and Investors

TrueFan raised a seed round of $4.3 million in August 2020. This funding round was led by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayfield India and Saama Capital

Date	Amount	Stage	Investors
August 2020	$4.3 Million	Seed	Ronnie Screwvala, Mayfield India and Saama Capital

TrueFan - Competitors

The celebrity- fan engagement space in India is still growing, there are quite a few players existing in the market, Gonuts, Unlu, Tring and Wysh. Cameo, which is platform of the similar kind is considered as the largest player internationally

TrueFan - Future Plans

TrueFan's short term goals lie in expanding its user base and celebrity portfolio. It wants to partner with A- listers from all walks of life (Music, Sports and more). While for the long run, TrueFan aims to build a 360 degree celebrity-fan engagement platform with a lot more features that enable fans to form communities and consume quality content that will be curated by platform.

TrueFan - FAQs

What is TrueFan?

TrueFan is a platform that aspires to connect fans to their favourite celebrities in the most personal and meaningful ways.

Who are the founders of TrueFan?

TrueFan was co-founded by Nevaid Aggarwal, Devender Bindal and Nimish Goelm in January 2020.

How much funding has TrueFan raised?