Trailblazer ‘Dala U Crew’ founder talks entrepreneurship and community advocacy
|Published
Sanjeev Singh (39), founder and creator of the popular video content creation media house “Dala U Crew” (Dala meaning do something) grew up in Trenance Park, Verulam.
The social media maverick studied journalism at the Durban University of Technology specialising in broadcast journalism. With creativity running through his blood, he created “Dala U Crew”, which focuses on creating relatable but informative videos for businesses and social media content creation.
Having been around for seven years, “Dala U Crew” also provides income, guidance and a platform for up-and-coming influencers that are part of our crew in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
They also cover events or concerns that are community related and are very closely woven into the fabric of their community.
“If something happens in our community we will be there to cover it and, hopefully, bring some awareness to it,” said Singh.
Singh shared more on the Dala U Crew and what they do.
What inspired you to create this concept?
I think it happened gradually, it was never my intention to create a company that got to this size, we just listened to the community and saw that there was a lack of representation at the grass roots level.
I mean KZN has so much in terms of weather, people, culture, beauty, communities and food. I grew up here and I saw a definite need for more videos covering everything good, sad and bad.
How has social media helped you grow your platform and business?
Social media is the back bone of our business from 0 in 2015 to 1.6 million followers now. If radio stations are based on radio we are kind of a social media station (page).
From the beginning our TikTok page, we were based on Blackberry mobile messenger supplying thousands of people job lists for free on a weekly basis, so even back then I could see that this would be the way forward and where ever social media took us, we would join and have a presence.
You guys do a lot of community work, can you please tell us about this.
I think it’s pointless for us to have such a huge platform and not help when our community needs us. Hence we try to assist wherever we can to bring some sort of awareness to situations or even help where we can.
We like being with the people of the community, it’s always a great experience to be with them and actually using our own hands to serve the community whether it’s food, hampers or just giving our time.
What are some challenges that you face as a business?
Even though we have an established name and reputation, some businesses need convincing that social media is a viable way to market their businesses, we are however, seeing a huge uptake due to the younger generation entering businesses and taking over, many of them know our platform and immediately want to give us an opportunity.
We started this platform with nothing and we haven’t really needed to invest a lot, the real sacrifices has come in learning editing, social media trends, software, having to quickly adapt to social media algorithms.
It’s a tough spot when you’re a social media content creation company, you can’t have a video that you’ve created that has low views, every video needs to be a hit each and every time. We don’t make excuses, we make it work.
We also need to refuse some businesses unfortunately, we actually refuse more businesses than we take on, due to our conflicts of interest, social media having issues with the product or a company that has a bad reputation within the community.
We have to be careful who we do business with as the community trusts us and unlike other forms of media, on social media, there’s a comment section and people can call us out publicly.
Any words of inspiration for young kids in the Indian community looking at your work.
You must be obsessed with what you do, it must be what you love doing, you must be willing to put in long hours and learn the craft.
To earn an income of social media is tough, to make that into a viable business is even more challenging, it’s not impossible but you need to be willing to learn and keep at it.
Lots of people want to be influencers or start their own social media companies, you’ve got to be everything, good at sales, understand your value, understand the market, know the algorithm, craft your content and have the right morals in place to say no when it comes to protecting your reputation and brand.
What can we expect in future from you guys?
I think we see the world moving into IRL (in real life) live videos, vlogging and creating more reality based content. We had our first international campaign this year as we toured Eswatini and we now travel regularly to Gauteng for our services.
We would love to possibly create a mini series or reality show based on everyday people.