2014 was the year of the selfie, and the founders are certain that 2015 will be about Velfies!

#VelFie is the new social media and messaging rage, in the mobile space in India launched less than a fortnight ago by serial entrepreneurs Ankush Johar and Rammohan Sundaram. 

Ankush is a British National and runs the UK based JLloyds Group, with investments in B2B Mobile Research & Analytics serving over 500 mobile operators across 142 countries, and several other consumer properties with past successes of the short code 8888, which is now a Times Group property and Ram was last CEO for IbiboAds, before which he successfully exited two companies he had founded, PlatformPlay and NetworkPlay.

#VelFie is a mobile app that lets consumers create personalised video selfies to popular dialogues and sounds and use those for personal messaging and social media. The app is being deeply integrated into the messaging experience. It is available on the Android and iOS platforms. Microsoft’s Project Astoria will allow for the current apps to work on the Windows platform as well. 

#Velfie is seeing massive growth numbers despite being under 15 days old, with currently over 10,000 downloads daily, and is trending as the top 3 apps on Android. Velfie’s growth is driven by users uploading their own sounds (user generated content) and then spreading it virally through Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Hike, Line, Wechat, JioChat and others. #Velfie has seen massive adoption across India, Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Turkey and across over 150+ countries.

Currently, the team is aggressively working on the product functionality, user experience and retention metrics. 

Simultaneously, a parallel effort is in place to grow adoption using deep alliances with: 

1. Consumer Brands, where this social innovation can boost the ROI of their Social Media spends manifold, 
2. Movies, where #velfie can hugely elevate the velocity of reach and engage users with the content of the movie before and after the release,  
3. Handset makers, where the app is being pre-embedded to offer a rich personalisation experience for the user, straight out of the box, 
4. Messaging platforms, where the app is being natively embedded in the messaging keyboard, as audio and video emoticons, 
5. TV channels, where the app is being used to elevate the pitch of programming and deep engagement for the audience,Others, where the app is a ready fit with the consumer. 

Already in the last 2 weeks, #VelFie and the Akshay Kumar starrer, Gabbar is Back, came together to create the #GabbarVelfie contest, where users created their own #Velfies to the movie’s dialogues, creating a huge viral impact for the movie, and the winners met Akshay Kumar + won couple movie tickets and other merchandise. 

Over 12 more movie partnerships are lined up, to further amplify the growth of the platform. Akshay Kumar with over 14 million fans on FB, 8 million on Twitter posted twice to elevate the #GabbarVelfie contest. 

#VelFie also partnered with Datsun, where a song specially sung by Ayushmann Khurana was amplified, so much so that #KuchNayaShuru the hashtag was trending on Twitter as No. 2 on the days of the campaign. 

“In the long run as we evolve in the product development life cycle, our plans are to build a social video network and given the traction we are currently seeing it is headed towards the direction we had envisaged. For us consumers should be empowered in the video creation and as a platform we enable both sides of the coin, which is UGC and then subsequent sharing experiences.” said Ankush Johar, Co-Founder at MobiFirst Media. 

Ram, for whom this is the first consumer facing business endeavor having been largely in the advertising vertical for the last several years, it has been an eye opener of sorts. He says, “When we first looked at the opportunity, we knew we had a winner at hand however we kept working on the product innovation, which you would see if you use our app. Features like pause and record, sound share are just one of the few we have launched with this release however in the time to come you will see a lot of enhancements that will make the user look like a performer, whether be it looks or otherwise.”