Crowdfire gets $2.5M from Kalaari to help users set their social media growth on fire

Social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are increasingly important marketing platforms for both individuals and companies. And in recent times, there’s a growing awareness that what matters on these platforms is not just the number of followers but the level of engagement. Apps that help in doing that are therefore becoming key marketing tools.

One such social media management app for Twitter and Instagram which has gained significant traction is Crowdfire. Mumbai-based startup Codigami, which owns Crowdfire, just announced a series A funding round of US$2.5 million from Kalaari Capital. The five-year-old app has over 10 million users, and recently rebranded itself as Crowdfire after it “outgrew” its earlier name – JustUnfollow.

It first became popular for helping people spot unfollowers and spammers on Twitter, but now offers a wider range of features such as an Instagram scheduler and photo suggester. “The app evolved from being just a tool for unfollowing to being a product that helps businesses and individuals grow on social media and reach their social media goals – be it brand recognition, individual popularity, more sales, clients, or fans. So, we do realize the risk involved with the name change, but a change in how people perceive the product was long overdue,” Urooj Kazi, one of the earliest members of the Codigami team, tells Tech in Asia.

Founder of Codigami Nischal Shetty, a software engineer, gives an example to illustrate how CrowdFire works:

Suppose you are an upcoming music artist. The more people know about you, the more your music will be popular. We have a feature called “Copy Followers” that helps you follow people who follow a particular account on Twitter. While this seems simple, we have an algorithm that removes bots and spammy as well as inactive accounts before showing the results. Following people who already follow a popular musician in the same genre as you is a good start to reach your target audience. This helps you spread your music on twitter in an effective way.

Shetty built and launched JustUnfollow in February 2010. Right after college, he worked with an IT firm for two years before moving on to a startup called Burrp.com, which helps people find and review restaurants, spas, and so on. During these stints, he also started a couple of blogs: TechTamasha.com, which focused on technology blogposts, and iSimplyBlog.com, which began with how-to articles and then moved on to celebrity bitching – “yeah, that works, search engines love such articles,” Shetty says. Around then, Twitter was growing bigger and bigger, and Shetty started another blog called Twi5 to review apps that were being developed for Twitter. He grew out of that as well.

“Around the time when I started losing interest in Twi5, Google launched its cloud offering, the Appengine for Java. My joy knew no bounds. In front of me was a highly scalable hosting solution for Java backed by a company I love and respect. I decided to build a small Twitter application so that I understand how the Google Appengine works. That’s when I built JustUnfollow,” Shetty recounts in his personal blog.

Soon afterwards, Sameer Mhatre, Siddharth Menon, and Anirudh Khusape joined Shetty as co-founders. JustUnfollow was part of the first batch at Startup Chile accelerator program.

There’s one key insight that Shetty has gleaned from his startup experience so far: “We first built a feature (unfollow), focused on getting traction for that, and then expanded to being a product. It’s better to go this way than building a complete product and then trying to gain traction.”

CrowdFire has a freemium model. It’s free to start with, but if you want make full use of all its features like manage multiple twitter accounts, add team members, and so on, then, you have to pay. Its plans start from US$9.99 to $199.99 per month. Currently, it has over 10,000 monthly paying users, Shetty tells us.