Pratilipi

“We were very close to, and we would have loved to come into this company called Pratilipi, amazing founder, amazing company. But yeah, that is one of the big misses from that year.”

“So I think annualized revenue, let's say, I think we should end this year right now we should be at maybe about maybe about a million. We should end this year at maybe about three million. A plan is to end next year at twenty million annualized revenue.”

“So till about a year and a half back, for example, we had a marketing team size of zero. And it's not that we were not spending money on marketing. It's just that it was like five percent of my time and five percent of a bunch of other people's time.”

“Again, books are just another form of storytelling, right? Like, movies are just another form of storytelling. Like, it's not about text or literature, and this is something that I've been saying since we started building The Philippi, and at that time obvious…”

“I think roughly we should be doing about 6070 lakhs a month revenue from IBM right now.”

“What have we understood was that it's not that the stories are not being written. It's not that people don't want to read these stories. It's just that it's very, very hard to bridge them and figure out which stories to read at what point in time, especially b…”

“Now, for example, I just don't negotiate. Like these are the key terms. If we agree on these, let's handshake and move ahead. Otherwise that's fine. Like I'll just find a different part. It's not just what fundraise. It's about everything else.”

“I gave them actually three options. I gave them an option of just buying equity either at a fixed price or at a 50% discount or next round. Nobody took it. Then I offered people to kind of give debt to company and with a small equity upside, nobody again took …”

“For the literature product we have about 345,000 writers now, about 4.5 million stories published on the platform, and about twenty four million monthly active users.”

“Coincidentally, we kept on going about 50% quarter on quarter.”

“Long form text content is like the holy grail of what search generally wants. So I think organic search kind of helped us quite a bit and it kept on improving over a period of time because Google kept on getting better at organic search in Indian languages.”

“IBM podcast has about 110 shows combined they will have about 7500 episodes, and we have about 2000001.7000000 monthly downloads of these episodes.”

“So it doesn't matter if you're the CEO or if you're the intern. If you are doing something, the final call is always works. Like, even if you're an intern, you can basically say, Ranjit, get out of the room. This is what I want to do. I have already decided th…”

“I think till about our series B, we never ever gave forecasts. That, like, what are we going to do in the next six months or one year or whatever? People who basically said that they want to have forecasts or targets, we essentially said that we are probably n…”

“So Prathlibis culture has always been that like, there are no individual targets or OPRs or goals. People decide what they want to work on. People decide how they define if it is going to be successful or not.”

“Two of the biggest growth channels for us essentially were just keeping our authors happy because authors were going to share these stories on their own timelines, mostly on Facebook. And this not only helped us with readers, but it also helped us with writers…”

“I think what I did was I spoke to about 350 odd authors in trying to understand why this was a problem in the first place.”

“We migrated our infrastructure from GCP to AWS. We are expecting that it will take us about a month and a half or two months before things get back to normal. It took us more like eight, nine months before things were back to where they were.”

“So when we hire someone we are very picky in hiring, but once we hire someone, we give them insane amount of independence. They know almost everything about the company like literally from number of users to engagement details to revenue details to how much mo…”

“It's not just okay to defer monetization. It's actually a good strategy. Like for a UGC platform, if you're monetizing before you get to critical mass, that's actually a bad strategy”

“We should be able to get to upwards of a crore a month revenue within the next four, five months.”

“And initially, if I would be surprised if that is still not the case, 70% of the people who came to write on that platform were women.”