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The Prop-tech Pioneer | Dhruv Agarwala @ Housing.com and PropTiger
193 Plays3 years ago
From being embroiled in controversies to becoming one of the leading companies in the real estate sector, this is the story of a remarkable turnaround!
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Dhruv Agarwala, CEO, REA India Pte. Ltd., a company that has Housing.com, Proptiger.com and Makaan.com under its umbrella.
An alumnus of Harvard University, Dhruv started his entrepreneurial journey way back in 2006 with iTrust Financial Advisors which laid the foundation for his subsequent venture. In 2011, he started PropTiger.com, a one-stop real estate platform for homebuyers to search, shortlist and buy properties.
Since then, PropTiger has gone on to become a behemoth in the real estate sector by acquiring Housing.com, which today is the leading real-estate portal in India.
Tune in to this episode to hear Dhruv speak about his journey of simplifying the home buying experience in India.
What you must not miss!
- Proptiger’s initial marketing plans.
- How REA’s integration worked?
- Confronting REA’s market uncertainties.
- The acquisition story of Housing.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencastr and Guest
00:00:00
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Before we start today's episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Zencaster, which is a podcaster's best friend. Trust me when I tell you this, Zencaster is like a Shopify for podcasters. It's all you need to get up and running as a podcaster. And the best thing about Zencaster is that you get so much stuff for free. If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link, zen.ai slash founder thesis.
00:00:27
Speaker
That's zen.ai slash founder thesis. Hi, everyone.
Dhruv Agarwala's Background and Career Journey
00:00:33
Speaker
My name is Dhruv Agarwala. I'm currently the CEO for REA India Limited, which owns the brands Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makan.com.
00:00:54
Speaker
Have you heard the story of the 12 IIT graduates who co-founded a company way back in 2012? And then top VCs like SoftBank, Helion and Nexus invested more than $120 million in the company. Eventually, the company became a headline story due to founder issues and this is how many of us would remember housing.com.
00:01:15
Speaker
But a more interesting fact about housing.com is that it is now the leading real estate portal in India, having beaten competitors who would have been double its size just a couple of years ago. And this remarkable turnaround was bought about by one of the pioneering founders in the country who quit his job to build a startup way back in 2006 and was probably the first Indian founder to get funded by SoftBank.
00:01:39
Speaker
This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast features the journey of none other than Dhruv Agarwala, the man behind Prop Tiger, Housing.com and Macan.com. Dhruv came back to India after pursuing his higher education at Stanford and Harvard and here he is telling Akshay about the trigger that led him to quit a well-paying job at GE to become an entrepreneur.
00:02:02
Speaker
Did you have a business plan in mind? You just said, let's do something. We threw multiple darts at that point in time and were like, okay, this may work, that may
Inception of iTrust and Financial Planning Vision
00:02:15
Speaker
work. So there were lots of brainstorming which had happened, but we hadn't sort of narrowed or zoomed it on a particular business idea. So I think 30th of June is when was my last day at GE in India.
00:02:26
Speaker
And then, of course, we'd had some experiences after having moved back to India, opening our bank accounts, loads and loads of these relationship managers, hounding us for investing in Ulibs and investing in mutual funds, et cetera. And then even if we did, asking us to get out of one fund one day and put it in another fund the next day.
00:02:47
Speaker
All sorts of things happening in order to earn fees. And then we realized that what they are telling us is not really good. It's not the right thing. I'm like, why would I buy a U-Lift if you kind of strip? You must be familiar, right? The unit-linked investment plans, right? They were called, or unit-linked insurance plans. I can't remember exactly what it stood for. But essentially, an insurance product
00:03:08
Speaker
where whatever you put in, 30, 40% immediately went out as commission to the agent. And all you ended up doing was invest the remaining. So of course, as good analytical folks, we kind of tried to decipher what it was and realize the best product out there was actually selling term insurance on life and then selling a mutual fund and back to an index fund, which has very low entry loans and don't have any, don't have a very high expense ratio while they're operating. So that's the best product, right?
00:03:38
Speaker
But of course, the question was, how do we make money while doing that? So anyways, there were lots and lots of ideas, but this particular experience of ours that about dealing with financial institutions, especially on the investment insurance side, made us realize there was an opportunity there to create a business where we could provide financial advice to clients, do efficient asset allocation for them. And the back of that helped them buy products.
00:04:05
Speaker
So we kind of shortlisted that idea. Did you want to do it for H&Is or like a mass market product? No, for mass market. The whole idea was mass market because there were a few boutiques out there doing it for H&Is and we felt that we didn't want to become wealth advisors. We wanted to build a business for the mass market, which was tech enabled really.
00:04:25
Speaker
So we went to Europe a few times, met with these sort of advisory networks there, many of them. One was in Italy, one was actually Holland and many other such places to look at models abroad. And we felt this had legs. I guess the rails were not there.
00:04:43
Speaker
at that time to seamlessly collect, for that technology to work to seamlessly collect money from customer, put it into mutual fund, put it into insurance, all of it for a customer, the experience is just one click and everything else handled through API integration. It was not there. The rails were not there. So ultimately it became also, we didn't realize it. And look, one can argue we had the opportunity of creating the rails. Maybe we ran out of steam before that, but I think we did.
00:05:13
Speaker
We thought we built a very good business, which was founded on trust. A company was called iTrust and essentially our lead was a financial plan. You would create a financial plan, let's say for Akshay and his family, where we understand personal details about you. So we analyze and look, this is your income potential. This is your goal. These are your current investments. This is what you need to do on an annual basis, be able to achieve those goals.
00:05:43
Speaker
which automatically led to asset allocation. If your goal was near term next year, we wouldn't ask you to put money into equities because that needed to be funded by a fixed income product. But if today your kid was one year old, but he wanted to put money away for that child's or an education.
00:05:58
Speaker
then you could easily take equity risk because over 20 years, equity would have done better, which we've seen historically happen. We used to charge for a financial plan. We used to make commission. We used to be quite open about the commission we made. But then what happened was that rules changed, mutual funds and charge any entry loads or whatever little commission we got. We stopped getting, although we were doing the right thing for the consumer, but even the little commission that you are making also went away. Then people are not very willing to pay for a financial plan. They thought it should be free.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's for free. Yeah, the temptation for us is to then make money by selling the wrong product. But if you charge you for it, there is no reason why we won't be working for you. We are your advisor. We are on your side, not on the opposite side, which a lot of the people were at that point in time. But I think it was taking time. We had raised capital in 2007.
00:06:51
Speaker
From some blue chip investors, we had raised $6 million of seed money, which wasn't small. Even by today's standards, it's not small. So one of our investors, we had Algebrais as an investor, which was a leading financial services hedge fund in the UK. And then we also raised capital from SoftBank, China, India.
00:07:15
Speaker
So yeah, so, so market investors, we had classmates, I wouldn't say classmates, but our network, networks from the Harvard network professors, former alumni, we had become friends, all of them invested. So we had a grant and market names. So we had a bunch of great names in there. And we ran the business for about four and a half years. Then we came in a crossroads.
00:07:38
Speaker
This must have been a high-touch business. I don't think it was that easy to have a pure web application which does all this for people. This was a high-touch business. Although we had automated the entire financial plan, but you still needed to input a lot of information and then an output would come out, but still try to explain the financial plan to people, etc. It was a bit of a challenge. So we realized that it was two people intensive.
00:08:04
Speaker
And then we were at a crossroads. We could have raised more capital, which meant a lot of dilution because we had raised a large round already in our seed round. And then we took a step back and said that, okay, if we had to restart, would we do this again or not? And if the answer was we wouldn't, then why would we just continue the whole concept of sunk cost, right?
00:08:24
Speaker
that if you spent four and a half days doing something, if it's meaningful, then you do it. If you would not do it, that means you should not be doing it anyways. That was sort of the learning we applied or the sort of framework we applied to see whether we should go and raise the next round of capital or not. A lot of our investors were willing to back us, but it would come at a cost. There would be a lot of dilution. Then there was still a lot of unsolved problems, et cetera. And we felt that maybe it's not the right thing. What we were proud of was
00:08:53
Speaker
I go to a market channel. We did work site marketing, one of the first companies to do that. We enrolled in about 150 to 175 top large corporates, where we were HR's preferred partners to do financial planning seminar, filing tax returns for people, and lots and lots of other things. So first, anyone wanted help on anything financial, they were referred to us. That was a very nice acquisition agent for
Transition to Real Estate with PropTiger
00:09:17
Speaker
us. Plus, of course, the trust we had built at the market, the financial planning tool, etc.
00:09:22
Speaker
So we ultimately got acquired by Carvey because we explicitly thought that we want to exit. And we also realized that, look, if we were to do something, we could pick a piece of our business which was actually doing very well. That was the real estate piece. So we found that there was a huge demand we found in our portfolio.
00:09:43
Speaker
One was real estate and people wanted to buy a home. They were the first investment they wanted to make. Big one, right? They all wanted their own homes. And then something which went hand in hand with that were mortgages, right? Because typically Indian middle class family can't afford to put down the entire money for a home.
00:10:00
Speaker
So the idea was save up enough to put a down payment, take out a mortgage, then buy a property. So we realized that that piece of the business was doing very well because people wanted what we also realized and why they were coming to us would be the trust factor.
00:10:15
Speaker
They were a little concerned that there was a lot of misselling going on in real estate that time as well. A lot of five by nine operators who were developers and people just didn't know. People just didn't trust anyone. What were they coming to you for? Were you like helping them in the search process, like a typical real estate agent, or were you helping them? They decide on a property then helping with the loan.
00:10:40
Speaker
No, so one, we were, of course, whenever we asserted that there was a requirement for a property, then we obviously tied up with a few developers actually to do exactly what PropTiger does. Market the product for the developer, take the initiative from the developer, but the service is entirely free for the consumer.
00:11:00
Speaker
And it's a full handheld service, super nuts, all the way from a site visit to shortlisting, then paperwork, getting them a loan, and many even follow-ups post that. So we started doing that. And because we were a financial planning business, we almost felt that was an obligation to kind of provide this end-to-end service to a client. So we did that and clients loved it, right? In a market where there was a lot of mistrust.
00:11:25
Speaker
There were no professional agencies, so to say, who were really helping customers. There was no recourse. If something went wrong, look, there's still no recourse on brokers, because at the end of the day, even when today we had customers, I, when all the information is provided, now with the Red Hat coming in, it's even more transparent, then ultimately the choice is the consumer. But we still felt that the consumers, at least that time, were fairly naive.
00:11:52
Speaker
and needed that hand holding, needed that guidance. So we did that. And so just because of the very nature of the transaction, it becomes a very emotionally charged process. And we've studied that through market research. When you want to buy a home, you're very excited because you're like, you're just dreaming about moving into your own home. Then the process starts. That's when your excitement dips. And it sinks, right? Because
00:12:21
Speaker
You're kind of dealing with uncertainty, you're unable to make a choice, afraid of putting down a large chunk of money and going wrong. This isn't a decision which you cannot do. There's no sort of setback through Amazon. It's very different. So people are naturally very afraid. So we felt that we as partners could help.
00:12:39
Speaker
Flatten that emotional roller coaster into a straight path and say, hey, look, we are there for you. We've got your back. Don't worry. Trust us. And we were coming from the position of a startup backed by some marquee investors with brand names. We ourselves were very credible as with our personal backgrounds, which helped us.
00:12:57
Speaker
So, we realized that there was a business to be built around that. So, when we sold ITRAS to Carvey, post that is when PropTiger was born. Literally, for the first few years of PropTiger, we used to celebrate a foundation day. Of course, after we acquired Makan and then Housing, there was no sort of real foundation day, so we stopped doing it.
00:13:17
Speaker
But till then we used to celebrate, I think if I remember correctly, February 1st as a foundation day. But 31st Jan is when the ink on the transaction with Kavi, 31st Jan. So literally next morning, we just moved over from our office in Gurgaon to a new office in Noida to start Prop Tiger. So it was both again, my partner and I, my partner and I. And then we had a third co-founder join us.
00:13:39
Speaker
Somebody who used to work for 99 acres and then after that the venture info had just started called All Check Deals, which is very similar to what PropTiger was. So he joined us. We were three co-founders in PropTiger. Funded? Like, did you race like a seed round for that?
00:13:57
Speaker
It was very interesting, Akshay, that when we sold the business, I trust it was like a slum sale. So it was sold, part of the business was sold. So what does this term mean, slum sale? So you sell one piece of the business in its entirety, on its cost, on its revenue, everything sold as a business unit. There's an accounting significance to that.
00:14:21
Speaker
which means I think the taxation and something works differently because it is like a full business which is being sold, which is what we were selling. But we retained the entity and we agreed with them that the real estate piece would remain. And they had no interest in real estate. And they had no interest in real estate. It worked out really well. So whatever money which came into the business, it wasn't like a huge amount to be honest, but it was good enough for us to get started.
00:14:50
Speaker
The good part is all our earlier investors stayed at the business and we said, hey, look, you haven't got your exit. Maybe things didn't go pan out of the way. I really should have. But hey, look, this is a new venture. You're still on the cap table. Come along for the ride. And they were all happy about it. I bet we raised the fresh capital. Some of our existing guys came back.
00:15:09
Speaker
So some of our angels came back, SoftBank came back, and a couple of other new investors came in. Algebras left because they were very keen on doing only financial services and that's when Accel and SAFE also kicked. So pretty much our institutional round with SAFE and Accel had happened within a year of PropTiger being launched because we had the initial capital to not be raised.
00:15:35
Speaker
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00:15:56
Speaker
Why didn't you choose the name Prop Tiger? So this was decided by, or kind of picked. We all decided together. But I, the name, the person who came up with the name was my co-founder Karthik, Karthik Varma. So he came up with it and we just like to do, you know, almost like we'll hunt property for you. So like a tiger is very focused on finding what it wants to find. We just use that as a sort of metaphor for naming Prop Tiger, for naming our business.
00:16:26
Speaker
It was essentially a supply-laden business, right? The challenge for you was not...
00:16:32
Speaker
getting more customers, but getting more supply because the more supply you have, the more options you can offer to customers and customers would naturally gravitate to you.
00:17:02
Speaker
So, so in the beginning, you really got to, in order to get the flywheel, you've got to invest, whether it's in branding, whether it's in giving incentives for suppliers to come on board or customers to come on board, whatever it is. So in that sense, we're not, we're no different from a classical two-sided marketplace. So that's, that's sort of how sort of PropTiger started. It was basically an option of ITRAS got funded, but our goal was very clear, right? We said that, look, we want to provide a world-class experience.
00:17:32
Speaker
You know, to our consumers, we want them to feel completely at ease in one of the most important purchase decisions of the life, which is highly emotionally charged. Right. And try and figure out a way where we could actually do it free for them because we were getting paid from by the developer.
00:17:50
Speaker
Of course, there was one big conflict, quote-unquote, that, are you more loyal to the consumer or more loyal to the customer who pays you money? But we were very clear, that was sort of the ethos we carried forward from I-Trust. And whatever we do, consumer is central for us. That was what I-Trust was all about. That's what PropTiger is all about
Strategies for PropTiger's Growth and Success
00:18:10
Speaker
today. That's what Housing and Makan are all about. And we said that that's the most important thing.
00:18:15
Speaker
So we provided our high-tech service. We said it's going to be end-to-end. Everything a person needs to complete their home buying journey, we've got to do. Now, there were two aspects to it. There's of course, there was also the possibility of doing rentals. There's also the possibility of doing resale home, the second hand home. And we experimented with it and we realized that your transaction would fall through for like in a 50 lakh property of a 50,000 rupees.
00:18:42
Speaker
The seller would say, I'm not going to reduce my price. The buyer would, for whatever ego reasons or whatever, say, this is it. Or maybe genuinely, if every thousand bucks was large, then look, I maxed out everything. I just can't afford it. So we found that getting a bit of a challenge, trying to map the right supply with the right demand at the right time will be coming a challenge.
00:19:02
Speaker
So we said, you know what? The primary market is the easiest because the supply side is not that difficult. Because at the end, every developer you tie up with gives you maybe 100 or 1000. Exactly. Availability was easy. It was more transparent. You knew what was out there. The risk you were taking was that you had to, of course, do the delivery of the developer.
00:19:23
Speaker
Because all the developers were showing you was a piece of paper and a piece of land. So you had to kind of visualize what would happen there. So reputation became very important. And we did have a fair share of blow-ups as well, being honest that we made the wrong choices. But over a period of time, we become now very good at it. And those blow-ups don't happen any, maybe one, one, six, three years or four years, but...
00:19:43
Speaker
that the frequency was higher because you're all sort of learning. But for the goal was pick the right developer, have enough supply. So when you actually generate demand, you're able to fulfill that demand without, and it's in its transparent supply. You know that this is, this exists. This is the price. You tell that to the buyer upfront and all the thing happens. As opposed to pre-sale transaction where the owner might put out a set price.
00:20:07
Speaker
And then there may be a broker involved, not involved, but ultimately what happens is that that managed to happen, lots of stars need to align. That is only like a listing is what you could do there. You can't really drive transactions in that kind of a scenario, I guess.
00:20:26
Speaker
I mean, look, you can, there are people trying it. We are also trying it now, you know, it's more tech driven. And one is one can use sort of the right way of looking at this is to see, okay, let's look at the transaction end to end. What does it entail? And what can we do more digitally? And what is the last piece which we need to do physically, right? And if you can do 90% of the thing digitally,
00:20:49
Speaker
then it becomes easier to do it. So I definitely believe that this is doable. Today's context, it was a little bit difficult that time. And frankly, the way we had envisaged the business, sometimes the way you even design your business day one impacts how, what products you can get into, what categories you get into and what you can't get it. So the way we were structured for with Proptai doing primary market sales, I think secondary market was a bit of a challenge. We tried it and we sort of discontinued it because it knew it very well for us.
00:21:18
Speaker
So just to recap my understanding.
00:21:23
Speaker
Essentially, the PropTiger experience for a customer would be that he would get a list of properties from developers. Instead of going to 10 different developers, come to PropTiger and you will be able to look at properties. Plus, a PropTiger employee will handhold you, be it a site visit or be it paperwork or getting you a loan. That whole journey of buying the houses, you have a dedicated account manager
00:21:51
Speaker
That's right. So end-to-end, you're taken care of, you're given choices. And the role of tech in this was to have the whole workflows digitized so that things don't fall through the cracks. That's right. One big role of tech was building the marketplace where people would come and at least search for which property they wanted, short the list, et cetera. So that's sort of prop-tiger.all for you. People come and get property information.
00:22:17
Speaker
research, look at photographs, compare, shortlist, et cetera, and then copy you and say that, hey, look, this is what we want to buy. And there we gave them more choices than what we sold, but we were very clearly sort of calling on what we are selling, what we are not selling, right? So that people knew what you were not selling, then what would the customer do in that case? Like you directly pass on that lead to? No, no, we wouldn't. So we would tell them very clearly that, no, you are looking for this particular property in this area.
00:22:46
Speaker
We believe that this is a better property in this area, which is why this is where we come in. So we better serve by this property. And in certain neighborhoods, certain geographies where we didn't have a time for the developer who just declined and say, Hey, look, we are in a position to help. We think you could go to this developer directly and maybe they help you. So at least not.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah, not kill them in the sense that, you know, kill the transaction right there and there and he got dissatisfied. At least give them some lead and say that, look, here's sort of the place you could go to. So it became a point of research, like a customer could start the research there. In some cases, they would do the whole transaction. In some cases, they would not.
00:23:27
Speaker
Got it. And so let me just ask you about both the sides now, both the developer and the customer. So the developer DS, what were they structured like? Like, was it like that 1% commission you get? I think that is the traditional norm, right? So basically 1% of talk was about on the resale side, 1% of the buy side broker gets, 1% of the sell side broker gets, but for primary market transactions, typically a developer base you commission.
00:23:57
Speaker
which is anywhere between one and a half percent to about two and a half, three percent, depending on how many units you do. Sometimes you can get higher slabs if you are able to do more, but typically it ranges between one and a half to about three. And this was an exclusive tie up or their inventory is available, you could be selling it, someone else could also be selling it.
00:24:19
Speaker
It was non-exclusive. A lot of developers did not choose more than three or four channel partners, typically. It wasn't as if it was open to all. Today, we again, we do a few exclusive mandates, as we call them, in a few geographies, like Bangalore, Chennai, looking at doing it in Monet, Mumbai. But there are few and far between. We still primarily are non-exclusive partners. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay.
00:24:43
Speaker
And of course there are a few sort of institutions, but you know, they aren't like the startup clients who are trying to use technology, raising VC capital. It's more like sort of a promoter layer, lifestyle business, things like that. Not like what we are trying to build. Got it. And how did you acquire customers?
00:25:02
Speaker
So some customer acquisition, you mean consumers? Yeah, the buyers. We distinguish it because look, I think a lot of marketing obviously, obviously digital marketing was one of our key strengths that SEO as people are searching for property.
00:25:17
Speaker
Did you market as like find your next home or did you market as say Amrapali homes? It was using our own brand PropTiger and in many instances it was combined where it was like we're selling DLF property in a market by PropTiger kind of thing like that. So we would do that and then with this business one of the things Akshay is that FPS score is
00:25:44
Speaker
is very high in business, but it's north of 70. So there's a huge word of mouth for customer acquisition, right? Once you get through the process, you're satisfied, you make referrals. Of course, you also sort of incentivize consumers to give referrals, but because there's so much of happiness, automatically it happens. So here, I think once you've got a large enough customer pool,
00:26:06
Speaker
then here the acquisition flywheel also moves nicely. But you get a lot of referrals. Of course, I mean, you got to keep refreshing every few months. But at least there is a there is a great sort of pool of consumers we get from referral. Yeah, because it's a very high involvement decision. High size business. That's right. Okay. So like 2011, you started so what kind of numbers were you doing here on your like,
00:26:33
Speaker
I'll give you a sense of trajectory so you get a good sense. I think from 11 to 13 was green, right? We were just growing month on month at staggering rates, right? It was 2013, March, when I would say the bottom fell from the residential real estate sector.
00:26:55
Speaker
I think it was driven by a few things. There was just a general cyclical downturn, which was happening. The real estate cycles tend to be long cycles. From 2004, we saw a big boom in real estate. I think it took a breather during the financial crisis between 2008 and 10. Then from 10 onward, it again took off. So it was almost like, I would say, almost a nine-year cycle punctuated by the financial crisis. Otherwise, it was there. And it was due, I think. One was
00:27:25
Speaker
A lot of supply. End users left the market because the prices were going up so rapidly because speculators were just crowding out these end users. A lot of developers actually were not fulfilling their promises. They were launching a project, raising money.
00:27:40
Speaker
Rather than deploying it immediately there and they do the project and building it out, they were redeploying the money to buy more land. Not all, but I would say a few bad apples. And as we know, a few bad apples everywhere can sort of spoil the basket, as they say. And we weren't frankly expecting a downturn to last for beyond three years. But then of course, we had demonetization.
00:28:02
Speaker
which impacted the sector. Then there was RERA, which came in, which in the short term was a challenge because the developers had to adjust to the new norms. I think four years since RERA, I think it's been a big bone for the sector. We were always trying out for regulation and we still don't think it's regulated enough.
00:28:17
Speaker
But I think if it gets more regulated, then we see that with insurance, the sector then it takes time to adjust, but then it matures under regulatory oversight. There's more trust in the sector and ultimately where there's trust, business flourishes. So we think that there's not enough still, but anyways, whatever we have, I think helped a lot. But in the short term, that was one big sort of jolt again.
00:28:40
Speaker
very soon after demonetization, then the whole GST regime got announced. There again, there was lots of uncertainty in what the GST rates would be. Now they sort of settle down. Then that was one uncertainty that there was the NBFC crisis. In any case, it was hard for developers to borrow from banks. The other source of funding also kind of became a challenge. And then of course, COVID happened, right? So literally from 2030 to 2020,
00:29:02
Speaker
Every, that's one, one and a half year, two year interval, something or the other was happening. So every time we thought we were getting out of that downturn and getting into a cyclical upturn, I think things sort of didn't ban out. But now where we stand is actually, I think we are at the cusp of a long upcycle in real estate. I think what COVID has done is it has reinforced the importance of a hope for home buyers. People now recognize they look the only safe haven if something like this happens.
00:29:27
Speaker
is one's home. And it's been too long. I mean, it's been two years. This is not going to go away from public memory that quickly. So people will always be like, look, something like this could happen. We all start for life in that sense. I mean, not just that, but even the whole work from home trend will force people to look for bigger houses because bigger houses has been like both working at home, kids at home. So, you know, that that's right. And four years on, I think there are a lot of consumer
00:29:53
Speaker
sort of mistrust. I think the consumer confidence has come back because of Greta. And the other thing is we've seen historically low interest rates. Although interest rates are now looking, I think we'll go up. We can't avoid it because of inflation, but still they are as we speak at historical lows, mortgage rate side historical lows.
00:30:12
Speaker
Wage increases over the last four, five years have been significant. Prices have been pretty stable. I think literally, I mean, if you look at Kego for apartments in the top eight cities, right? We did 2% Kego in the last like six years or so for apartments. So that's even lower than inflation. So in real terms, property prices have actually come down.
00:30:30
Speaker
But give me an idea, like how many units do you sell in a year? Like how many units does Prop Tiger sell in a year? I mean, the thing is that we are definitely amongst the top three sort of institutional sales organizations for real estate in the country today. And we continue to be one of the most trusted one. It's not the most trusted. We've been around for a long time. We've built a company, an ethos of trust. That whole sort of, I trust mindset of we're going to do the best thing for our consumer stays. So we have a lot of trust, both from the developer side.
00:31:00
Speaker
who know that if PropTiger brings business to it, it's going to be good business. He's just not trying to stop the channel and hike up numbers. And the consumer also knows that if you're going to bring a builder to them, it's going to be a curated builder where you've done a diligence and research on. And that's very, very important for PropTiger. But going back to your question around why housing? Yeah, I want to understand that whole journey of the acquisitions.
00:31:29
Speaker
Right. In 2015, we realized that we were getting a lot of consumers from the PropTiger business who were sort of at the bottom of the funnel in that sense, meaning they'd already started their property search journey on some other platform because it's typically a six-month journey, right? When people came to PropTiger,
00:31:52
Speaker
They'd almost made up that decision, made up their minds. At many instances, we never bought all those customers. They're a large chunk. Many of them went to other places because if you were going to a, you know, traditional classified business and a broker was advertising there for the same property, they could have also bought it from there. I mean, there's nothing, you know, stopping you from buying that. So we thought that it was important to sort of have consumers come into a stable who were starting at the top of the journey.
00:32:20
Speaker
top of the funnel really, right? Or at the start of the journey, which is why they hadn't even made up their minds around whether they wanted to buy a property or rent a prop. So that that was sort of one, one, one thought process. And then realized one thing as we were wanting to build a business of scale, Newscorp came on as an investor with us in 2014.
00:32:39
Speaker
They own Realtor.com in the US. They own REA Group in Australia, at least a large stake. Realtor, they own fully along with REA. And in REA, which is a listed company, they own a substantial stake. So they came along with their classifieds businesses, advertising-led businesses or media businesses. We understand a lot about the dynamics of such businesses. And we realize that brokerage businesses tend to be more fragmented.
00:33:06
Speaker
The barriers to entry are lower, hard to create differentiation, you don't have pricing power. Because today, you cannot charge more than that 2-3%, whatever it is. That dynamic is not going to change. Suddenly it's not going to say, look, I'm a great broker, I'm going to charge you 10% or have a great product. It's not going to happen. But in the advertising business, there is a sort of a winner takes all dynamic to it.
00:33:27
Speaker
You can become a dominant player, then get a dominant share of profits, dominant share of traffic, everything else which comes along with their dominance. And look, India is a big market. You can be a winner in Bangalore, you may not be able to make a dent in Delhi or vice versa. So anyways, so I think my view was that ultimately you want to be in this business, but there is this winner takes all kinds of dynamic. There are huge barriers to entry, which you're erecting because once audience starts coming to your platform,
00:33:54
Speaker
they get very, very sticky. They don't leave your platform. While for a brokerage, there are many, many more choices. It's harder to kind of differentiate yourself and very few places in the world we saw where brokerages had started getting a disproportionate share of them all with a very fragmented business.
00:34:12
Speaker
So we felt that that was a natural sort of progression for us to move from being a brokerage-only business to a product-advertiser. What was the background of Makan and how did you end up acquiring it? That was the first acquisition.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'll be very honest with you. We wanted to get into the space. At that point in time, that was the asset which was available. And we said that we'll buy it and we'll learn. And the sooner we start, the better it is. So we bought the asset.
00:34:42
Speaker
Macad was like a people group property. So we bought it from them and we changed a lot of things. We changed the entire user experience. We invested a lot in ad sync technology, et cetera. I was beginning to hear results for us, but then all of a sudden housing became available because of their own internal challenges.
00:35:03
Speaker
And we felt that given the amount of money which housing expects on brand, their product was still top-notch. And it was just a lot of sort of recall for the brand. That I think was key.
Acquisition of Housing.com and Market Leadership
00:35:15
Speaker
And a great user interface. I mean, it wasn't an easy decision. There were enough investors on our cap table who said that through we are stepping into a sinking ship, you'll sink along with it. Honestly, I was nervous. I can't say that I was going in with full conviction that it would happen.
00:35:30
Speaker
We did our diligence very carefully and by the end of it, I realized there wasn't anything that bad. There was a lot of good and there wasn't anything that bad. Things happened sometimes, right? Did make it a bad risk, frankly. From the outside, that perception was there, which in a way is not bad because it helped us acquire the asset. Softbank was a common investor that would have
00:35:53
Speaker
Yes. Yes. You know, so it's funny that softback was actually on its way out from a cap table. Okay. Uh, because they are all there, but once they invested in the housing, I'm comfortable with them being on our cap table. Yeah. But then finally enough before they even went off it, they came back on, never really left the cabin.
00:36:08
Speaker
table of our business between 2006 and 2020 when we sold the entire business to REA. So anyways, going into the business, we realized a lot of things we had to do. It was a big acquisition. I mean, the size of the organization was very similar on both sides. Culturally, we were very different. There was obviously this lot of angst amongst the existing employee, what had happened. So it was not a trivial problem.
00:36:36
Speaker
to first merge the two businesses and then to grow the business. With a lot of experience on ours, what I had learned from my GE days was that when you're doing diligence on a business, at the same time, you have to craft an integration plan. So with the day the merger happens, day one, you know exactly what to do. You're not sort of sitting down the next morning and say, what did I just do?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, right. So, it happens. Believe me, it happens. It sounds like there are enough smart people in the world who wouldn't do it. But believe me, there are enough smart people who make that mistake. So, it was just a playbook we were using, which I'd learned at GE. Complete merger plan was devised. So, we knew exactly what to do on day one. I would like to say that whatever has happened since then, five years from then, is because when we started, we were like a number five player.
00:37:25
Speaker
or number six player you had like the classifieds advertising market you had 99 acres you had magic bricks you had India property you had quicker homes you had common floor yeah yeah all of that so barring barring the great UX and barring the brand recall
00:37:44
Speaker
I think from an audience perspective, which is bread and butter for a month, it's right behind. But I'm happy to say right now that you should go open up a similar web and compare our traffic to the players. And we've been consistently at number one for the last three months. So you talk of housing in Makan combined?
00:38:04
Speaker
Look, Macan since then has become a flanking brand to housing. There's very little investment which goes into the business. Wherever there is, wherever there is audience and lack of audience overlap and they leave leads. We use that to supplement leads, you know, which we generate for our agent developer customers from Macan. And that's it. We don't sell products in Macan separately.
00:38:24
Speaker
You could buy a combined package on Makam and housing, but we don't encourage that very much. I mean, housing has, from the time we acquired it to now, the traffic is up, I think eight times. And between even the start of COVID and now, because of the rapid digital adoption, we are almost like close to, you know, 3x plus, because market's also grown now, but we've grown faster than the market. And today, according to similar web, we've consistently been number ones the last three months.
00:38:50
Speaker
So I think I would say that we've come a long way. We've established one of the leading brands, even in terms of all the brand data, brand awareness data, this top of mind, whether it's in terms of total recall, everything else, we made significant inroads and amongst the top three and running neck and neck in terms of revenue ramp up. We've ramped up our revenue significantly.
00:39:12
Speaker
So what is the revenue model for the classified business like housing? So for housing, actually the model is very simple. We have people who list on the platform, right? So you have developers, you have brokers slash agents, and you also have homeowners who directly use on the platform and they pay us a listing fee. And in many times they also want visibility on the platform. So they pay us for that as well. But essentially the expectation is that they will get inquiries from consumers coming on the platform.
00:39:41
Speaker
That's one revenue, a source of revenue from owners, developers, and agents. And then we have a bunch of services under a sort of name, which we call Housing Edge on the platform, where Housing Edge essentially offers services such as online rent payment, online rent agreements, packers and movers, furniture rentals, multiple stuff, which basically are services which are required in the entire buying journey or the rental journey.
00:40:10
Speaker
The idea is to be a full-stack player where we can assist either the landlord and seller or the buyer through their dire home buying, selling, renting journey. So that's where we make a lot of fee income as well. When you pay rent, you make a fee, when it gets out of an online agreement to make a fee, so they get curated listings. Okay.
00:40:31
Speaker
connect them directly. It's like a concierge service in a way. It's like a concierge service. That's right. That's right. But we see at the end of the day, we've been running this concierge service in PropTiger for years. We have an expert and we never charge the consumer for it.
00:40:47
Speaker
because it was always free. So we're trying to sort of build the same sort of concierge service now to supplement the agent business as well as the developer business. We don't think that the agents are going to disappear anytime soon. We don't believe that the developers will, developers can't go disappear, but at the end of the day, developers also advertise through agents, not all of them advertise directly. So there's a mix. So we believe that there are going to be three important pillars of our business.
00:41:14
Speaker
from a customer when i say customer meaning the customer who sort of pays us is going to be developers brokers and and and no sort of order of importance i think they're all three equally important stakeholders each of them which play a very important role you know in the ecosystem and if i look at real estate markets globally right this is the kind of ecosystem which exists
00:41:36
Speaker
And we believe that this is the ecosystem we want to blame. We are catering to different needs. There will be, you might be a DIY guy, right? You want to kind of, you're okay to do all site visits yourself as a, as a, as a home seller or a homeowner. Are you happy to negotiate yourself, et cetera. Maybe your friend is somebody who says, Hey, look, I don't want to deal with a headache. I want to, I want to find a broker. The broker does everything for me.
00:42:01
Speaker
I'll take a call and say yes or no. So as I say horses for courses, right? I mean, you can't debate the whole world with one brush, right? There are different people with different requirements and needs, right? So we believe that there are all three important segments and we cater to all three segments.
00:42:17
Speaker
So the consumer side, obviously there are some consumers who want direct owner listing. There are some consumers who are happy working with brokers, as in the buyers and the tenants. Some will want to go to developers directly. So again, I think there's a batch, there's a natural gravitation for
00:42:32
Speaker
the type of buyer who goes to a type of seller. So that's what we do. But I believe that this is one market, Akshay, where we haven't seen a leader emerge, right? Clear leader in the last 15 years. I think some of the incumbents started back in 2004, 5 or 6. And they've traditionally been leaders. We've just gone ahead in terms of audience. But of course, a lot of work still remains to be done. But I believe that the next five years,
00:42:58
Speaker
Just given a few things, as I mentioned to you earlier, just the entire sort of upturn in the real estate cycle, you know, driven by sort of very idiosyncratic factors to the real estate industry. That's one big tailwind. Second thing I think is this whole digital adoption, right?
00:43:18
Speaker
I think the digital adoption is one thing, which this is only something we could have dreamt of. I mean, Covid has been something, you know, which has taken a huge human toll, right? But in a perverse way, a lot of digital businesses have benefited, right? Because the world has been forced to go more digitally. We are one such beneficiary, where I would say overall audience of digital real estate platforms in the last two years has doubled. If you look at the entire sector, pretty much. So,
00:43:44
Speaker
So we expect this digital acceleration which has happened to benefit the sector, I think clearly. These are two very important things which I feel will ultimately end up creating big businesses in this space. I think PropTech has been one sector which has suffered a bit. I think it's been because of the softness of the underlying sector, which is real estate.
00:44:07
Speaker
But now that sort of looking more positive, I think you're going to see some big businesses being built in this space over the next three to four years.
REA Group's Acquisition and Future Outlook
00:44:15
Speaker
Okay. And so tell me about the acquisition by RDA, how did that come about?
00:44:22
Speaker
The News Corp is a strategic player in digital real estate. They basically own 100% of the entire business along with REA. And REA and real estate operates in the US. And I think it's amongst the top two companies in the US market for digital real estate. REA, which they own, I think, is a significant stake.
00:44:46
Speaker
I think this will be order of 60% plus. REA is a listed company on the ESX in Australia. Plus, at one point in time, and then today, REA owns a significant minority stake in property guru in Singapore, which is headquartered in Singapore, but has assets across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, pretty much across Southeast Asia. They're the leading player in Southeast Asia.
00:45:12
Speaker
So clearly News Corp slash REF have a strategic interest in digital real estate. So when News Corp invested in us in 2014, they realized that India was going to be a big market for real estate. One of the biggest markets or the biggest market outside of China, right? And China, a lot of local players, which had already become very big. So for them to be able to make inroads in China would have been very difficult or next to impossible.
00:45:38
Speaker
So India was a market which was there for the taking. As I mentioned, there was no sort of breakout leader in this space at all. So the opportunity to create a breakout leader, that's why they invested in us. And then subsequently when we acquired housing, REA came on board as an investor.
00:45:53
Speaker
And the ultimate goal for them was to own the business. So that's how it ultimately happened. I think we were growing nicely. There was a line of sight to becoming leaders in terms of audience, in terms of brand, but ultimately in terms of revenue. And we all felt it was the right time for this to happen. It's been a year since that's happened a little bit over a year and the business has only grown from strength to strength.
00:46:18
Speaker
How did you personally feel about, as an entrepreneur, to sell your baby in a way? I'm a bit of a dispassionate guy about those things. Ariya told me you're going to continue running it, which I am, and you can continue doing what you're doing. We love what you're doing, and there's no reason why things should happen differently. If anything, you'll enjoy it more because now you have a multi-million dollar balance sheet behind you.
00:46:43
Speaker
So all your waking up in the morning, worrying about the next round of fundraising is all gone. You can focus on building the business, growing the business, etc. So in that sense, I'm doing what I was doing. They've given us a lot of runway and leeway to do what we do. We still behave like a startup, still act like a startup and feel like a startup. So that's the most important.
00:47:08
Speaker
I mean, nothing has changed. And look, kudos to them for the way they've handled this acquisition. They've got just the right amount of oversight, which is necessary for them, obviously, being owners of the business. But at the same time, they've given us so much of flexibility to run fast, right? And that's just adding the way the integration has been handled. One of the problems off the table, like they've taken the funding problem off the table for you.
00:47:32
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And so the focus is more building the business and we've come a long way. I said, look, back in 2019, October, I think we used to be like about half of 99 acres at Magic Princess Traffic today, we're leaders. So that's a big, I would say, progress we've made. How did you make housing succeed so widely to, I mean, to, I mean, actually overtake competitors who were double a few?
00:47:59
Speaker
I think it was focus and determination and the will to win. I mean, we really wanted to win this badly. And if that hunger is not there to win, I think sometimes you want, right? And that is at the curse of the Cupboard because you're already your leaders. So actually, it's harder to fight when you're a leader. It's always easier to fight when you're a challenger.
00:48:25
Speaker
But tell me some of those tactical decisions you took which helped, like as lessons to challengers. All I can say, Akshay is when we said we want to become leaders in audience first, right? The focus was leadership in audience.
00:48:42
Speaker
We didn't say we want to become leaders in audience and brand and traffic and everything has at the same time. Because it's hard to optimize across all. So our goal was very clear. Be number one in audience. You're saying like traffic. Traffic. And then ensure that we have brand recall because ultimately they both feed into each other. So ensure that we try and match the recall of the market leaders or the incumbents. And then we said ultimately revenue will follow.
00:49:07
Speaker
And we are beginning to see that. And we've been growing at a much faster clip than competition. So we are taking market share. The market's also growing and we're also taking share. Yeah. I mean, revenue follows audience. So if you're growing in audience sense. Yeah. So we were very, very, very... Again, coming back to how you grew audience. Like, I mean, there are many ways. You could have a content led way. You could have a performance marketing.
00:49:29
Speaker
led way to grow audience. All I can say is the focus was organic audience. Performance marketing, you have to throw money into the problem. And that's like a leaky bucket. You got to keep throwing in money every year and it goes, right? Then the next year come and you got to spend it again. So ours was more organic audience. How do you engage the consumer more? How do you provide better information? Obviously SEO is one important cornerstone of that and many other things, which we did to drive this out.
00:49:56
Speaker
But as I said, it's a single-minded focus and we said it's okay for now to not worry too much about revenue growth. Let's focus on this first sort of leading metric. That grows. Everything else will follow over time. Got it. Okay. Okay. So tell me, like, what are some lessons on how to make acquisitions succeed? Like lessons for founders who may be looking at doing acquisitions?
00:50:24
Speaker
Look, you know, I think from an acquisition's perspective, I think it starts from the reason to acquire. Sometimes we do acquisition out of hubris, right? We just become bigger. We would have covered up a competitor. We'd be the consolidator. So I would say there's going to be a very good reason for acquisition, right? Either genuinely, very
00:50:47
Speaker
Big fight between number one and two, number three, four, five have sort of fallen behind, but you're constantly burning cash because the competition is intense. Then I think it's better for both one and two to actually merge, right? So sometimes that's a driver of an acquisition. Sometimes you're not strong in a particular geography.
00:51:04
Speaker
So you buy a player or you merge with a player who's stronger at their geography, which is natural. It could be a certain product segment. It could be actually hires where you bring on certain talent, which has become even more important with this talent branch world today. So there are various reasons. So you must have a very sound reason to do an acquisition. It should not be hubris. That's the first starting point. The second important point for me is the fact that
00:51:32
Speaker
You have to be very, very clear about your integration plan, which I mentioned earlier as well at this conversation. And you need to know what the integration plan looks like day one. We all know that acquisitions result in redundancy sometime, right? There are more than two people there for the same job. You've got to be clear in terms of how you're going to handle that, right? Either move one person onto a different role while the business also grows to try and find that roles elsewhere in the company.
00:51:59
Speaker
So you have to be very clear on who's going to be in key leadership positions, talk to the people who are going to be in positions. You need to know what to do, which offices are going to come together, which teams are going to come together, who's going to run this particular function. Because there are people on both sides, as I mentioned. So clear integration plan, which should be there during diligence. And even if you decide not to do the deal,
00:52:23
Speaker
It's okay. That's extra work. But that extra work will pay back multiples if the deal actually happens. That's the second thing. The third piece is...
00:52:36
Speaker
that everything is about culture, right? Everything is about culture because whatever we say that each organization takes on a cultural life of its own. In the early days, it's driven by the founders and then it sort of, that culture keeps getting perpetuated and you just become an organization, you know, and there's a certain ethos, which is this intangible thing floating in the ether, which is hard to pinpoint.
00:52:59
Speaker
But it is there and they are very strong and very hard to change. There have been reams and reams written on driving cultural change, etc, etc. It's like something which, you know, a lot of people take very seriously as an academic subject as well. So really understanding that a successful integration, emerging integration is all about mapping the cultures or marrying the cultures. See, ultimately one culture might dominate the other.
00:53:25
Speaker
But how you do that, how generally you do that, and how much time you take to do that on all important factors. So one can't overemphasize the importance one must pay to this cultural integration. You have to understand what the culture is of an organization. And you can get a sense of it when you meet people during the diligence process. You have to understand how it maps to your culture. And they have to figure out ways to bridge it. In our case, what we did was
00:53:54
Speaker
We, within a month of the merger or two months of the merger, we had this whole values workshop, right? Where we rewrote the vision, rewrote the mission, rewrote the values of the organization and people on both sides of the organization, housing, as well as Macan slash prop tiger were present involved in that. So, so that sort of really created the sense of ownership amongst both sides.
00:54:17
Speaker
Otherwise, one would have felt if we had continued with the values of the crop type or with housing, we would have alienated somebody. So managing all of that becomes super critical. So I would say that pick the right reasons, have an integration plan in place, and be very mindful of ensuring that there's a cultural assimilation which happens. That will lead to a successful acquisition.
00:54:40
Speaker
So I want to understand about the secondary market. Like you said, PropTiger is more on the primary market. And there are now these startups in the US who, like, buy buying startups who, do you think that is the way to go for secondary market? Is that something PropTiger would get into? Like, what's your take on that?
00:54:59
Speaker
See, I think the jury is still out on iBuying. There are a lot of startups doing that in the, in the US and now no longer startups, they're like publicly listed, for example, and doing well revenues are ramped up. But one example is Zillow, which started the iBuying, the shutdown iBuying. Did it work out too well today?
00:55:14
Speaker
The thing is, and look at the end of the day, it's capital intensive. It's a low margin business. You are at the mercy of the market cycle. You could easily end up buying very high and getting stuck with inventory and liquidating at a lower price. So you just lose money. Second thing is that it's a very interesting thing that in a market where there are lots and lots of customers, it's really a seller's market.
00:55:38
Speaker
The question is, do I really need an iBuyer? There'll be five buyers at my doorstep anyways, willing to drive up prices. An iBuyer is a great proposition in a buyer's market, where the seller is not finding people to sell to and the property sitting on the market for long before it gets sold.
00:55:57
Speaker
and iBuyer comes and says, hey, look, I take this off your back in 24 hours, even if you want to take a slight haircut, I think it solves your problem. So I think that's another nuance of the iBuyer market, which I think applies to all markets. And then there's sort of the whole India angle to it, where there are transaction costs. If you buy and sell, you pay stamp duty twice. OK. In the US, that's not there, that whole stamp duty transaction. Yeah, that stamp duty thing, I don't quite understand it very well then. It works, but I think that's not an issue there.
00:56:27
Speaker
Yeah, that is massive. That's a problem. Then also price discovery, right? I mean, at the end of the day, right, even for the iBuyer, you have to build very, very strong pricing models to be able to bid, right?
00:56:45
Speaker
So the amount of secondary primary data available in the US, people have made some very, very good valuation models to be able to price the property. So imagine, forget whether the market is going up or down. You simply misprice the property. Then guess what? You lose your shirt. So data is always a challenge in India. So price discovery for the iron buyer is also a bit of a challenge, which needs to be fixed. So look, I might be sounding like a skeptic.
00:57:13
Speaker
I'm not a skeptic of the iBuyer model. I think it does solve an important problem. I think one problem is solved for the seller. Of course, as I said, more in a buyer's market, but still it solves the problem for a seller because they're truly selling to an institution. Documentation is standard. Money is paid quickly. You don't have bids which suddenly fall through. So lots of the uncertainties get removed.
00:57:34
Speaker
I think it's good for the seller, for the buyers, then ultimately, you're also buying from an institution, right? It's more reliable. The person who owned back off for 50,000 rupees, because he gets emotional about that, all suddenly changes his or her mind, which we've seen happen in secondary deals. That creates a more efficient market, if you ask me, and price discovery is better because someone's pretty funny where their mouth is. So I think I like it for that reason.
00:58:02
Speaker
I think over time, models will evolve. And even in India, and I think you will find an eye buyer of scale ultimately emerging in India as well. Will it be a prop tiger? Like, would you be interested to... To be honest, we've not looked at that model. And there are no sort of imminent plans to get into that. But we've seen a lot of startups who are trying to do that, spoken to a few.
00:58:26
Speaker
They sort my advice as well. And look, I either said I'm a believer, but I think a few things they need to sort themselves out before they become victim. So what is on your roadmap then, like initiatives, stuff that you want to do over the next couple of years? Look, for us right now, big focus is relentless focus, as I said, on audience, on brand, consumer experience. Like right now, housing is like your rising star, so to say, like that's what you want to invest and grow.
00:58:57
Speaker
So look, we're investing in all our businesses, housing and PropTiger. As I said, that housing has a certain dynamic to it, driven by the industry itself, which has the characteristics of a winner takes all platforms, stickiness, et cetera, et cetera. Audiences come from across the country for both buying, selling, PG, commercial, everything. So that business tend to get sticky PropTiger at the end of the day.
00:59:24
Speaker
is a primary residential market broker. So it's being a limited market, right? So the ability for us to spend money on the brand is limited because at the end of the day, it tends to be more of a local business. It's more word of mouth, as I mentioned to you earlier. So both businesses will continue to grow. We continue to invest, but clearly the trajectory of these two businesses fundamentally will be different, driven by the nature of the industry they are in.
00:59:54
Speaker
So, brokerages tend to be linear businesses. These businesses tend to see non-linear growth. And your sort of incremental return on investment keeps significantly ramping up, while brokerage businesses tend to have lower operating leverage unfortunately. Got it. Okay.
01:00:10
Speaker
If you like the Foundathesums podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books, and drama. Visit the podium.in, that is, T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N.I-N for a complete list of power shows.
01:00:30
Speaker
Before we end the episode, I want to share a bit about my journey as a podcaster. I started podcasting in 2020 and in the last two years, I've had the opportunity to interview more than 250 founders who are shaping India's future across sectors.
01:00:46
Speaker
If you also want to speak to the best minds in your field and build an enviable network, then you must consider becoming a podcaster. And the first step to becoming a podcaster starts with Zencaster, which takes care of all the nuts and bolts of podcasting, from remote recording to editing to distribution and finally monetization.
01:01:07
Speaker
If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link zen.ai founder thesis. That's zen.ai founder thesis.