Crowdfire is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) social media management app founded in 2010 as “JustUnfollow” before being rebranded in 2015. Anirudh Khusape, Nischal Shetty, Sameer Mhatre, and Siddharth Menon invented Crowdfire, based in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Crowdfire helps people discover and schedule content and manage all their social media accounts from one place. Their mentions feature has helped people significantly increase their engagement rates. Their analytics are very detailed, and it’s one of the only affordable social media management tools on the market right now. Crowdfire has premium as well as freemium subscription plans. It is currently looking to introduce enterprise plans soon.
Fun Fact : While being bootstrapped for five years, the start-up racked up over ten million users.
Initially called JustUnfollow, they reimagined the brand in 2015 to become Crowdfire. JustUnfollow was a product built on Twitter that allowed users to know things like who unfollowed them, the spammers following them, and more such curiosity quenching features. But now – as Crowdfire – they offer a more comprehensive range of features such as an Instagram scheduler and photo suggester.
Fun Fact: Crowdfire is available in eight languages; Arabic, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish!
Crowdfire combines both a freemium business model as well as a subscription business model. A freemium model is when the customer has a certain level of access to the application or tool suite. However, certain essential features are withheld or limited, and to access those features, the client must pay for a subscription. As a subscription model, they require that the client or customer pay a recurring payment monthly (or another specified timeframe) for access to those services or products.
Crowdfire is a freemium software, which means it offers a free plan and three other premium plans : Plus, Premium, and VIP.
Crowdfire has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding over one round.
| Date | Stage | Amount | No. of Investors | Lead Investors |
| March 9, 2015 | Series A | $2.5M | 1 | Kalaari Capital |
Crowdfire’s revenue for the Calendar Year 2018 stood at $1.74M, down from $2.11M in 2017. Over ten million clients (big and small, entrepreneurs, indie artists, individuals) use Crowdfire, of which over 350,000 users are active daily and three million actives monthly.
The start-up has a reputation for sending droves of “spam” mail without an option to unsubscribe or opt-out. This sentiment seems to be the most widely accepted negative perspective of Crowdfire. As a result, the start-up might consider keeping a check on their practices.
Most people are slow to adopt Software as a Service in any industry in India, and the number of paying customers is dismal. The problem is the pricing, and there is a price war in progress for customer acquisition. So, no one makes money on their service, while the marketing costs are high.
Further, social media applications like Twitter have cut off API (application programming interfaces) access, causing certain features of Crowdfire and similar applications to cease functionality.
Essentially, Crowdfire finds inactive users, un-followers, and relevant users to unfollow or follow using their insightful “Copy Followers” feature. They keep track of how social media updates affect a person’s follower and un-follower stats, check the relationship between any two Twitter/Instagram accounts and do a whole lot more.
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