From a Two-Person Gaming Consultancy to Creating Two Groundbreaking Companies: How Atisfy Is Taking the Influencer Marketing Industry By a StormDigital Version

Atisfy started as a two-member gaming consultancy in 2018. Co-founded by Hersh Bhatt and Kyra Broadbent, The company, once known as only Game Marketing Genie®, desires to help modern businesses unleash their potential by empowering them to gain traction in a world where everyone is living online. “We have atisfy®, owner of both GMG® brands: Game Marketing Genie® and Growth Marketing Genie. We are on the verge of launching two synergistic products, one for influencers to monetize their promotions in real-time. The other enables businesses to buy influencer campaigns at lightspeed. Connecting these two systems is an AI-powered algorithm called atisfyreact.”

Today, the company is headquartered in Singapore, and has secured the necessary funding to develop a product that revolutionizes influencer marketing. They have also acquired the resources required to transition into a product company. “In late 2019, we acquired investment from Singapore to build out a new-to-world influencer marketing product and have continued to grow our agencies.”
But it did not happen overnight. CEO and co-founder, Hersh, says, “We quickly grew into a team of 6 picking up some enterprise clients as we scaled, but we ran into challenges from getting our success too quickly. We found the team we had built was unable to handle the big-ticket clients, and this led to many sleepless nights to power through the workload and also led to us being unable to grow our brand name, structures, and proper processes.“ As they say, good things take time. But sometimes they happen quite quickly, depending on the ideas and the vision.

Firsts are memorable for a unique reason. It helps you identify how and where you can tweak your ways to make it convenient for your clients and yourself. The experience wasn’t dramatically different for Atisfy, either. Recollecting their first project, Hersh says, “The lessons we learned during this project were priceless and the relationships we developed irreplaceable!” “Our first project was successful but barely so. We cannot name the client due to confidentiality agreements, but we were essentially working 18-hour days and realizing we had the wrong team for the wrong job. However, this project’s highly specific, time-bound, and influencer marketing-related requirements made us identify a major gap in the market. This learning gave birth to a lot of what Atisfy plans to do today.”

“We ended up working through thousands of influencer profiles to finally get together the right amount to get a launch plan in place for our client. Ultimately, the campaign succeeded with over 1 million mobile app downloads in week one, but we could have done it a lot better in hindsight.”
But the opportunities ( in terms of improvements) that follow make it worth the effort. The clarity it brings is just a cherry on top. Talking about their goals, Hersh says, “Our goals are clear. We plan to be a unicorn in the next two years.“

While you aim to scale and grow, there are some conscious decisions involved. From the ideal client to the culture, every decision counts in the long haul. Atisfy exemplifies this. “We made the conscious decision to avoid large enterprises for the next year and focused on helping SMBs go to market and took on digital transformation projects – creating Growth Marketing Genie in the process. We found that by 2019, we could return to working with enterprises and perform much better and more consistently as the team we had recreated from scratch had a much stronger core, and with better players in each position, our rise and growth were much more organic, felt deserved and was simply lacking the friction it used to have” The question that arises is revenue, the chief qualifying criteria to become a unicorn. Hersh disagrees. “This is not due to a motivation driven by monetary value – but rather the effect of our new product entering the ecosystem.”

“We believe it deserves to be in the hands of as many great marketers and influencers as possible, and this journey will lead to rapid growth.“ Painting a more vivid picture, Hersh adds, “We see ourselves with two highly successful global service companies and a product that features a massive market share of the influencer and marketing space. We see the ability to use data to empower our users and personalize their experience. We most certainly see us helping a lot of businesses across the world succeed in their quest to grow.”

Not everything is perfect. Hersh says that the Game Marketing Genie® logo is one of his regrets despite the incredible attention and love. When asked about it, here’s what the CEO had to say. “We chose the name first and hosted a logo design contest. For the term Game Marketing Genie, this logo was absolute perfection – there was no denying that.”

Acknowledging the downside of the logo, Hersh reports, “ I was less matured as a marketer back when I made this decision and so my feeling was that something positive and magical would work to benefit the brand. It is, technically speaking, an excellent logo from the perspective of memorability and recognizability. Of course, the issue I see now is that we will never fully control the term genie in the English lexicon. If one day, someone were to release a parody of Aladdin with the genie doing something not so nice, it may harm our brand. I would strongly suggest resisting the urge to pick a mascot that is an already existing character in the English lexicon to future marketers and founders.” The same mistake does not occur with the parent company of Game Marketing Genie®, atisfy®, a word that itself did not exist in the English lexicon.

Atisfy is all set to introduce their next launches due in late 2020 or early 2021. When asked to elaborate, Hersh adds, “ The first will be called atisfyre – a real-time influencer marketing web app that influencers can use to earn money from running promotions faster than it has ever been possible. The aforementioned is made possible by the second product: atisfyreach, which businesses can use to run influencer marketing campaigns at an unfathomable scale. Underlying all this is maximizing each dollar’s impact on influencer marketing through our atisfyreact algorithm developed by brilliant data scientists. “
“Meanwhile, Growth Marketing Genie is a full-service marketing company focused on inbound marketing, advertising, marketing automation, and strategy. The company aims to help B2B and B2C marketers effectively generate leads, automate lead management, develop an SEO advantage, and drive higher sales revenue. “

Hersh has a few exciting remarks about atisfyre and atisfyreach and how it aims to revolutionize influencer marketing campaigns. “Firstly, it is 100% new to the world, and nothing like it exists today. We have seen some approaches that seem closer to our concept than others, but our system is new and will change the influencer marketing game going forward.

Secondly, the product operates near real-time and will enable a massive amount of manual labor to be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The work will bring new marketing metrics to the table and help elevate influencer marketing into a channel that sits alongside the largest digitally measured media today.

Finally, we see incredible feedback from testers on both the business and the product’s influencer side. To pull it together, we have a brilliant team of technologists, marketers, product managers, and mathematicians that I am very confident will deliver something truly groundbreaking.”

When you take away the manual element from influencer marketing, you automate the amount of manual labor needed to stand out by integrating efficiency and lowering the chances of human errors that can cost a fortune. Creating a product requires an in-depth knowledge of the market. Talking about the changes in the digital advertising industry, Hersh had a few interesting comments, “There will be at least 500 times the number of marketing and advertising tech platforms as there are today, and that is being conservative.” We wholeheartedly agree with him. With a world that is continuously in connection via smartphones, the numbers are sure to rise.

“One thing that will remain the same is that good communicators and writers will always be heavily in demand. Messaging in a manner that cuts through the noise becomes key.” Communication is not enough; we need conversations. Those are the real skills excellent communicators possess.
Hersh has some golden advice for budding entrepreneurs. “My biggest advice to future entrepreneurs is to lose the fear of hiring those smarter than yourself. It is intimidating. It is a new territory. But how else are you going to create something beyond yourself? Be ready to shell out money to hire the best in the market and choose to hire one high-quality person over five mediocre people in the early days. It will save you an immense amount of time, effort, and HR headaches.”

The advice has its perks. “It is also important to never stop learning and growing. When you hire the smartest people around, they expect you to step up every time you face a challenge. If you stagnate, they will find someone else to follow. It is your job to understand how all the moving pieces fit together. Always know the conditions you need to achieve your company’s check-mate. Keep adjusting until you find a clear path towards this, but go all out and risk it once you do.”

If Hersh’s message has motivated you, here’s something else that he wants you to note. “It is important to note my path as a founder was unique. Most service companies do not get funded to double in headcount to release a disruptive product. Your path will be completely different from mine. Be ready for what entrepreneurship brings. It is the toughest yet most rewarding journey you will ever embark upon.”

While your entrepreneurial journey may look different, he has some more kind words of wisdom coming your way. “A healthy fear of success never hurt anyone. Always be mindful of what comes with success and build a business that can handle this.”

We cannot wait to see Atisfy’s range of products beyond the products themselves; we await it for the sheer thoughtfulness reflected in Hersh’s words.

About Atisfy

atisfy is a data-driven technology company that powers global brands to drive more sales on social media through industry-leading and advanced influencer marketing platforms atisfyreach™ and atisfyre™. Brands can use atisfyreach™ to discover and collaborate with influencers on atisfyre™ to create trusted content and insights for customer journey touchpoints at scale. atisfy is headquartered in Singapore and has offices in Australia and India.

Website: https://www.atisfy.com/
Headquarters: Singapore
Email: [email protected]
Mobile Number: +61431699429
Skip to content