Talking over the mead one day, the three men agreed that people would want to buy their product, and they decided to take it from a simple hobby to multi-stage distribution. Interestingly enough, while he was acquiring energy assets for his company, his path took a detour to a South American wind farm. It was business as usual, but while Ramineni was down there he came across a grant program from Startup Chile. On a whim he filled it out, hastily, and he was ultimately accepted to the program. But here’s the catch: how do you communicate that story to your users? Sure, you can tell a group of people at once, but having to recreate that ardent passion to each user is difficult, and Ramineni couldn’t be everywhere at once. His solution was Tell Market, a platform that he and his cofounders created to solve a pain point in their own lives. They set up shop in San Diego to show small merchants how Tell Market could then help give an elegant account of who they are, where they came from, and what they do. To date Tell Market thrives around video as its medium of communication. In fact, the majority of the video stories are user generated content, more often than not recordings from smartphones. Tell Market, from a merchant side, is in effect a digital storefront that can be built in 15 minutes to showcase that story driven video content. According to Ramineni, it humanizes something that could otherwise be mistaken for ordinary. For consumers, the platform acts as a way to live chat with the founders, listen to their story, and view video content on their products. Ramineni and his crew also tested user engagement with different types of videos, focusing on viral videos and their power to connect with an audience despite low production values. So, for now and for the future the answer to the Tell Market team is simple: never abandon authenticity.
