The Ledger
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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.”
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.”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Kudva: 70% of early writers on storytelling platform Pratilipi were women
“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.”
Pratilipi operated with zero dedicated marketing staff until late 2019
“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.”
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.”
Pratilipi sustained approximately 50% quarter-on-quarter growth
“Coincidentally, we kept on going about 50% quarter on quarter.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Singh: Pratilipi's GCP to AWS migration took eight to nine months
“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.”
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.”