Prediction Didn’t hold up
Singh: Pratilipi Comics will lead all Indian comic publishers by 2023
“In fact, I'm pretty sure, like, I will take, I will give good odds that in the next two years we'll be the largest comic player, like, that's it, like, online, offline, whatever. Both in terms of titles, in terms of revenue, in terms of users, everything.”
Insight
Singh: Consensus never works when pursuing power law-driven outcomes
“The thing is that in general, in life, some of the absolute best things, like this is only applicable to power law driven outcomes, that some of the absolute best things, like the best hires, the best companies the best experiments, the best features are almos…”
Insight
Singh: Non-subscription companies should not use the ARR metric
“I don't think except for subscription based businesses, most companies should talk about ARR. It means something else and people just use it everywhere.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singh: Pratilipi targets $20M annualized revenue by end of next 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.”
Insight
Singh: Monetizing a UGC platform before critical mass is bad strategy
“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”
Disclosure
Singh: Early friends funded Pratilipi via personal debt, rejecting equity
“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 …”
Disclosure
Singh: Pratilipi sets no individual performance targets or OKRs
“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.”
Disclosure
Pratilipi refused to give growth forecasts to investors before Series B
“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…”
Disclosure
Singh: Pratilipi avoids negotiating deal terms in fundraising and partnerships
“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.”
Insight
Singh: Traditional publishing costs and distribution friction block Indian storytelling
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pratilipi Literature reaches 24M MAUs and 345K writers
“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.”
Disclosure
Pratilipi grants all employees access to company financials and CEO calendar
“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…”
Opinion
Kunal Shah excels at CRED by getting out of employees' way
“Kunal basically knows how to get out of the way, and when you hire great people, that's like 90% of your job. If you are hiring great people, then at least in certain areas, they are always going to be better than you, and whenever you try to help them, whenev…”
Assertion Contradicted
Singh: Pratilipi Comics is India's largest online comic platform
“So Prathlipi Comics, I think, is now the largest online comic player in India.”
Insight
Singh: Media Platforms Must Focus on Stories Rather Than Formats
“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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Audio will become a dominant content format within ten years
“So audio, our understanding is, is going to be one of the largest formats over the next five, 10 years. It's just that our belief also is that right now there hasn't been, or at least when we launched Patlipi FM or when we acquired IBM, it seemed like the dema…”
Disclosure
Singh: Pratilipi gives final project authority to whoever is executing it
“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…”
Insight
Pratilipi: Happy authors sharing on social drove reader and writer acquisition
“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…”
Insight
Pratilipi CEO: Long-form text and improving vernacular search drove growth
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pratilipi Comics reaches 800,000 MAUs across five languages
“On the comics front, we have about 800,000 monthly active users. Comics is operational in five languages.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pratilipi FM has 200K-250K MAUs and 35K audio stories
“Kathleepi FM currently has about 202 150,000 monthly active users, and we have about 35,000 audio stories and audio books that are there in nine languages, I think.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
IVM Podcasts generates 1.7M to 2M monthly downloads
“IBM podcast has about 110 shows combined they will have about 7500 episodes, and we have about 2000001.7000000 monthly downloads of these episodes.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singh: IVM Podcasts generates 60 to 70 lakh rupees monthly
“I think roughly we should be doing about 6070 lakhs a month revenue from IBM right now.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singh: IVM revenue will surpass 1 crore monthly in 4-5 months
“We should be able to get to upwards of a crore a month revenue within the next four, five months.”
