Rishabh Jain

Before OpenInApp, Rishabh Jain had already been punched in the mouth by distribution. With Shiftal, his peer to peer crypto exchange, he was resource constrained, so he made a high conviction bet on bringing a single influencer on board even when cash was tight, and watched that decision pull a 3000% growth spike for the platform. That burned into him a lesson that would later define OpenInApp: a targeted distribution unlock can matter more than incremental product polish.

He then moved into the creator and media space, eventually co founding OpenInApp as a smart link generation tool for creators and brands. Instead of building just another link shortener, he attacked a small but brutal problem creators felt every day, links opening in clunky in app browsers that killed conversions and wrecked analytics, and built a tool that forced those clicks straight into the native app with clean tracking on top. That wedge let him plug directly into the workflows of thousands of creators without asking them to change behavior.

OpenInApp sits in a category crowded with bio link pages and generic URL shorteners, yet it managed to pull in millions of users and serious investor attention. Public profiles describe it as a smart link platform that bypasses in app browsers, opens directly in native apps, and gives rich analytics, which is exactly the kind of behind the scenes infrastructure creators will quietly standardize on if it earns them even a small lift in click through and watch time. That quiet standardization is how you end up with millions of end users touching your product through other people's content rather than through your own brand.

The traction has been strong enough that coverage highlights significant growth and roughly $17 million of funding around OpenInApp, paired with Rishabh's selection in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in the Media, Marketing and Advertising category. Those external signals matter, but they mainly confirm what the underlying mechanics suggest: he found a repeatable way to turn influencer and creator adoption into compounding distribution. By the time Forbes wrote the blurb, the hard work of embedding OpenInApp into creator workflows and negotiating with distribution power users was already done.

1. Start from a sharp, high frequency pain that distribution power users already complain about. With Shiftal it was liquidity and trust, which he addressed through a bold influencer partnership, and with OpenInApp it was the friction of in app browsers that hurt conversion and data, which he solved in a way that felt almost invisible to end users while obvious to creators.

2. Use concentrated influencer style bets to manufacture the first spike of usage rather than waiting for organic SEO or app store discovery. At Shiftal, onboarding one right creator drove 3000% growth in a short window, and that muscle of selling one person who controls thousands or millions of eyeballs transferred directly into pitching OpenInApp as a behind the scenes upgrade that could immediately improve every link that influencer or brand shared.

3. Turn infrastructure level adoption into a story venture capital and media can understand, then leverage that story as a distribution asset. Once OpenInApp had millions of users and clear creator adoption, in part thanks to those influencer led loops, securing about $17 million in funding and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia slot created a credibility flywheel, which in turn made it far easier to win larger creators, agencies and brands who wanted tools that already looked de facto standard.