Mallika Chopra: The Power of Positive Intent

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>> Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. Well, and this is a hot topic in the media today, could it become an even hotter business model? Mallika Chopra, founder of Intent.com, accomplished author, mother, and daughter of Deepak Chopra is bringing like-minded people together in her online community, to share content, resources and connections to better their lives. Tell us about your new start-up, intent.com.

>> Yes. So we've just launched a new site, intent.com, focused on personal, social and global wellness. The goal is to bring together the best voices from around the planet speaking about things to help people improve their lives, thinking about who do we aspire to be as individuals of society and the planet and find connections with like-minded people.

>> So define wellness a little bit.

>> Yeah.

>> It's a big field.

>> Traditionally, wellness is though of, you know, as health, integrated health, yoga, meditation. We really take a definition of wellness which is personal, social and global. For us to individually find balance in our lives, health in our lives, but also for society, human right, social rights to have a healthy planet and a health society. So that's all part of our definition of wellness.

>> So how does one build a community?

>> We're really focused on building a community organically. I've grown up in this space. My father is a well-known doctor and author. So literally, I started meditating when I was 9 years old. I've been very fortunate to grow up with leaders from around the world, authors, thinkers, celebrities who are really focused on self improvement or finding meaning in their own life. The idea of intent really came about that I had this unique access to many people, and let's brings them altogether in a community.

>> Talk to us a little bit about how you take a community and then turn it into a business.

>> In terms of a business, we are focused on sponsorship and advertising going to mainstream Madison Avenue companies which we are looking at the space and again, many of them don't even know what the space is. So they're actually looking to us to help define that for them. Our focus has really been to create the branded content packets that with an advertiser and then distribute it across the different sites that are focused on wellness.

>> How does Intent, in building this community, find a way to help generate money back to these great thinkers? Do you sell premium content?

>> For many authors if they don't get on a morning show or they don't get on Oprah, you know, it's very difficult to publicize your books. So even and, you know, you're an author, I'm an author.

>> I know.

>> And so, we struggle to get any kind of publicity and publishing companies are no longer doing book tours for most authors. So we really said, "You know, let's create a space where we can support authors and kind of create that community for them to reach their audience."

>> There are many in our audience who blog, who have unique perspectives, passionate voices. Do you have some thoughts or some advice for people that have a strong voice and wanna share it with the world?

>> Sure. We strongly believe you should get out there as much as possible. So even in thinking about how we built intent.com, our model is a distributed model. So we really have focus on how do we work with the talent and help take them to wherever the audience may be. If I was giving an advice to an author, I would say, you know, do what you can but try to get exposure as many places as possible.

>> What type of answers could people who are struggling with the current business climate find on intent.com?

>> Well first of all, I think the current business climate is a time of thoughtfulness. It's a time of opportunity and it's a time of reality check. So I think even for us as a start up early on, you know, we are really assessing where do we spend our money? Do we cut our burn? Where are our focuses? In Hindu philosophy, there's a term called dharman, finding your purpose and I think times like this, you know, it's a time where a lot of people are reflecting about what have they been doing in their life, what do they need to do and you know, are there shifts that can be made in their lives to find maybe, you know, and maybe spending less and maybe earning less but finding that right balance in their own life and purpose.

>> So Mallika, this isn't your first start up. You created the business mypotential.com about 10 years ago, another community based business.

>> Yeah.

>> What did you learn from that experience?

>> We were pretty high profile company. We're actually -- had got a term heat to be acquired by a large media or company when the market crashed. I've learned a lot from the experience and I think I've been have brought a lot of lessons from the Mypotential days to today. When I started this company, of course, we didn't know that the market was going to turn the way it has again but we actually started from a very different place. We really are focused on building it organically. We haven't spent that much money. I have a very talented but inexpensive team. Also to date, you know, we haven't spent a lot on kind of making long term commitments. All of our commitments have been short. So fortunately, those lessons have manifested in some luck for us right now that when the market kind of is going down, we're in the midst of raising money, we actually are very flexible in terms of our burn rate and our ability to skill the business.

>> Mallika Chopra, founder and CEO of intent.com, thank you so much for being part of Dog and Pony.

>> Thank you. Thank you very much.

>> As always, if you have questions, comments or would like to read our blog, visit dogandpony.com. I'm Vnce Thompson. Thanks for watching.

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