Shitty Ideas Trending and its exciting affair with brands

When Chhavi Mittal and Mohit Hussein launched Shitty Ideas Trending in May 2015 after being tired of the TV industry’s exhausting life, the couple didn’t think that the platform will become immensely popular among the youth in India in no time. To the duo’s surprise, what started as a thing of passion and without an intention to monetise, their first video uploaded on the internet went viral.

The first video:

The platform creates content around daily relationship banters between couples and their various stages in life. SIT boasts of having more than 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube and five million followers on Facebook.

Mittal said, “We only knew that we wanted to make content. The reason we started SIT was that we were tired of what we had been doing for years. The television industry drains one completely as its extremely time-consuming. After having our first child, we realised that it’s not the way we want to lead our lives. We didn’t want to wake up in the morning, go to work and spend the day with other people, come back home, and the child is asleep. So, we decided to do something on our own, and content creation was the only thing that we knew.”

There was a time when the couple even thought of opening a restaurant or also settling down in Goa but realised that their passion was in creating content only. They took a break of six months from the world of TV and started creating videos. When SIT’s first video went viral, the duo thought that there must be something they are doing right as millions of people liked it. And that’s how SIT was launched and is now fetching more than 70% of the platform’s business from brands.

Mohit Hussein and Chhavi Mittal

To date, SIT has worked with several brands such as Jabong, OkCupid, Moms Co., Urban Company and others. The first brand that SIT worked with when they had only 10,000 subscribers was Flipkart.

Content piece for upGrad:

Content piece for ET Money:

Content for The Mom’s Co.:

“For Flipkart, we created a web series ‘Welcome to Mahabaleshwar’. The brand first started talking to us when we were only four videos old. By the time the talks materialised, we had gained 20-25 thousand subscribers on board,” added Hussein.

Hussein said SIT’s forte lies in the seamless integration of brand without making the content piece jarring and annoying for the consumers even when the piece is hugely branded; making the viewer share it at the end.

“We are not good at going out and marketing ourselves to brands. But when a brand comes, we know exactly how to integrate the brand into the content seamlessly. In fact, it is one of our strong points. Flipkart gave us a brief where they mentioned a few points of communication they wanted to put across different videos. We went with an idea of 2-3 web series, and they chose one. There wasn’t even too much of back and forth on the script also. Mohit is really good with his narrations. If you hear him narrate something, then there is no way you can say no. He can completely paint the picture of what’s going to happen,” Mittal said.

The platform prefers to put long-format videos on YouTube and short-form content on Facebook. This year, SIT also plans to explore content waters on Instagram. Last year, the duo launched two more platforms: Be Safe and Being Woman. Be Safe has 61.1K subscribers and deals in digital crime space while Being Safe is Mittal’s vlog with over 65.5K subscribers, where she talks about being a mom and womanhood.

Hussein said the secret ingredient of good quality engaging content for the platform is that they don’t work as a content factory. “We don’t create 3-4 videos in a week. We also don’t pre-write most of our content. We only have concepts in mind. We only build a story in detail when a brand comes to us and curate content for them. We don’t try to fit the brand in the existing story. Like this, brand integration becomes seamless and feels like a part of the content.”

Shitty Ideas Trending caters to the audience between the age group of 24-35 years. The platform has a bent more towards the female audience. Mittal said, “We have 70% retention on every video. Most of the time, people watch the whole video and the drop-off starts happening after the CTA (Call to action).”

An exciting and cute fact about the channel is that the whole family is involved in running SIT. Hussein writes and directs and Mittal acts. In fact, the couple’s 10-month-old Arham Hussein is also a part of the SIT team and a part of the stories created for the platform. During this unprecedented Covid-19 period, while the team is shooting at home, their seven-year-old daughter is also helping with producing content.

Mittal and Hussein’s daughter helping with the shoot

 

Baby Arham with parents during the shoot

Shitty Ideas Trending keeps the content revolving around couples’ relationships purposely since the inception. Mittal said, “When we started creating videos, we realised there is one kind of humour which is prevalent in any parties, relationship and gathering. People love to talk about relationship jokes. We realised that relationships are something everyone relates. On the first day only we came up with 10 ideas on relationships there and then. We were in splits while discussing these ideas. We continue to do that even today because relationship stories never end and something or the other keeps on happening.”

From a three-people team to a 30-40 people team, Hussein and Mittal are now hunting for someone to take care of the platform’s sales and marketing. Till now, whatever branded content SIT has done, it has come from the brands directly. To further grow the business, the couple is aggressively looking out for a sales and marketing expert.

Hussein said, “Our biggest challenge is that we don’t have a sales team in place. To pitch ourselves is the biggest challenge that we face. We are only able to convert what comes to us. Although we can turn at least 90% of the brand queries we get, once we start pitching to brands, it can help us grow a lot.”

Not keen at working through agencies as middle-men, Mittal said, “A lot of agencies come to us. We share concepts with them—the only brands which we are not able to convert come through agencies. We want to curate content depending on the brands’ requirements, but the agencies give us quite generic briefs. I don’t know what exactly goes wrong, but I think if the agencies would be pitching 10 things together to the brand, then somewhere the whole idea loses value.”

She went on saying, “The reason we can convert brands that directly come to us is that we are directly able to explain to them how things are going to happen. Maybe, the agencies are not able to convey our thoughts. It could also be that we are not able to put down our thoughts on paper the way it will be carried out. But we are constantly trying to figure out how to work with the agencies because that is a big market.”

SIT has three agendas to fulfil this year. Firstly, it intends to increase the frequency of the videos they put out to consume for the audience. Secondly, it wants to concentrate more on web series than just short-form content. And thirdly, the platform intends to explore other regional languages as well.

Hussein came up with the name of the platform, ‘Shitty Ideas Trending’. Mittal laughed and said that Hussein gets most of his original thoughts from the shit part and later they thought of adding trending to it.

Mittal added, “Honestly, then, we had zero idea of social media. We didn’t even know what a hashtag is. We had to call a friend and ask what hashtag means and how does it work. We realised people keep on talking about something that is trending. We found it cool. Hence, we added ‘Trending’ to ‘Shitty Ideas’ and when people would search for something trending, Shitty Ideas Trending will pop on the internet. It was a silly idea, but trending fits Shitty Ideas. On its own, Shitty Ideas was sounding incomplete.” 

Hussein and Mittal make it clear that SIT is not here to compete with TVF, Pocket Aces and other content platforms in India. Hussein said, “I don’t think there is any competition because it is a big industry where everyone has space to co-exist. When it comes to brands, it also depends on the ROI they get by collaborating with platforms for their content needs. We are not charging as much as these bigger platforms do.”

Shitty Ideas Trending’s content is also available on JioCinema. Shortly, one would be able to binge SIT’s content on Hotstar too.