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Giving a voice to Bharat | Mayank Bidawatka @ Koo & Vokal
127 Plays4 years ago
We have all been lost at some point in our lives, uncertain of things and trying to figure it all out at the same time.
Growing up in Mumbai and coming from a business family, today’s guest on Founder Thesis is someone who has a passion for creating stuff and building products. Someone fascinated by the possibilities of the Internet, Mayank Bidawatka, always thought of new things and ideas that can be shaped into reality through the digital medium.
He joined a residential MBA program at Asina Institute of Management based in the Philippines. Curious and experimental by nature, Mayank has always worked upon breaking out of his comfort zone. He speaks about his diversified, life-changing experience of living and studying abroad.
However, he always wanted to come back to his own country, pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions and establish work in India. Being the co-founder of Koo India, he is giving voice to a billion Indians via the micro-blogging platform. On the other hand, Mayank is providing solutions through the Q&A based knowledge-sharing platform Vokal India, catering to the Indian language user.
In this episode, he talks about his early working experiences, media and advertising days, redBus, lessons and takeaways, dreaming big, scaling up, and building tremendous value.
Tune in to the full conversation.
Key takeaways from the episode:
- Working in the Startup Culture.
- Making it easy for businesses to interact with users.
- Breaking the language barrier and creating multilingual solutions via Vokal.
- Creating tools that bridge the language gap for the Indian Content Creator.
- The three main things to focus on as an Angel Investor.
For more such inspiring & intriguing leadership stories visit our website at www.thepodium.in
We are also on Instagram at @thepodium.in and have a Whats app community of fellow entrepreneurs & startup enthusiasts at www.podm.in/growwithpodium
Join us there to stay updated on the latest from The Podium.in
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Transcript
Introduction to the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay Hi, this is Arab and you are listening to the founder thesis podcast We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country and we want to learn how to build a unicorn
00:00:24
Speaker
My name is Mayank Bidawatka.
Vernacular Internet Products: Vocal and Koo
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm one of the co-founders of a vernacular startup. We run two products called Vocal and Coop.
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm sure a lot of us relate to this, having parents who are first-time users of the internet, though their first language is not English. Until now, the only mode of convenient communication for such people was WhatsApp and YouTube videos. But they both have their limits, right?
00:00:56
Speaker
Akshay Dutt is speaking to Mayank Bidavatka, the founder of Koo and Vocal.
Journey from Banking to Startups
00:01:01
Speaker
He is someone who saw this deep problem of the next billion users who come on the internet and are not comfortable with English and created amazing products like Koo and Vocal, which are social media platforms for vernacular communicators. Here's Mayank talking about his journey of joining a tiny online startup after working in an established corporate like ICICI bank.
00:01:26
Speaker
Actually, you know, I think the internet always fascinated me right from the time I think in 98 when I saw Yahoo! and created an email. I was fascinated when a guy sitting behind me on a desk sent me an email and I got it in a few seconds on my desktop. And, you know, I would keep thinking of ideas that you could put out on the internet, you know, how do you create a website and things like that.
00:01:56
Speaker
For quite a while, I was always thinking of new things that would be done on the internet because I knew it would be a new channel of distribution. Even when I was at ICICI, I ran quite a few campaigns that were digital in nature. Post my MBA, I definitely wanted to start something of my own.
00:02:20
Speaker
It's genetic. I'm not wired to work at larger companies. I'm wired to build things from scratch and run my own shows. I think that showed up at some point.
The Redbus Experience and Startup Culture
00:02:32
Speaker
So I was thinking of ideas and my roommate from AIM was funny senior. So funny is one of the founders of Redbus. He's funny senior from Pittsburgh.
00:02:46
Speaker
And we had discussed Redbus even during the EIM days. I don't know if you have mentioned that a friend is starting something like this. And we'll be looking at building a team. We'll discuss pros and cons of the business, et cetera. So I always had a feeling that the internet would be a big thing back in 2007.
00:03:07
Speaker
And I knew that a lot of transactions were happening on IRCTC. I used to book my train tickets there. So the internet being the future was very clear in my head. I was very keen to start something and I was thinking of ideas when, you know, Niranjan, my roommate spoke about funny and all of that. And then he connected us and then funny and I spoke.
00:03:33
Speaker
over the phone. We had a great conversation. We were basically completing each other's sentences. And then I thought I'll just meet in person. So he said, just fly down to Bangalore. We can meet here. I was working at ICIC at that time. So ICIC is one of those landmark buildings in BKC.
00:03:59
Speaker
It's a beautiful office. You have everything at your disposal. There's no resource crunch. So that was my context. And then I met Pani in Bangalore. And it was like this really small villa in Bangalore. There were a few people working out of it. So for me, it was, I can't tell you the shift
00:04:26
Speaker
in context that was. And it hit me saying, this is what startups are all about. You work out of a small space. There's a resource crunch in every form that you can imagine. There's a people resource crunch. There's a funding resource crunch. There's a time resource crunch. And that really excited me. As a personality, I love experimenting with being out of my comfort zone.
00:04:55
Speaker
I'm a very, very heavy risk taker in all formats and all dimensions of life. So for me, this was that. And I got along really well with honey and met up with the poor, had great conversations. And I just left Bangalore taking a flight back to Bombay saying, let's make this happen.
00:05:20
Speaker
So I was quite committed to the cause in what seemed like a great thing to be doing. And somehow, I don't think of the downside. If it happens, it happens, but it doesn't really matter. So I was basically ready to leave my life as it was for my first 25 years back in Bombay and say, I'm going to Bangalore and work with guys I've never met before and make this happen.
00:05:46
Speaker
So, yeah, it was quite a celebrated thing. Okay. So did you have to take a pay cut also or like were they able to match your salary? I mean, considering startup constraints? No, that was a massive pay cut, 60-70%. So you like really believed in funny or believed in the idea? Like, you know, what caused you to have so much conviction to give up so much and join Redbus?
00:06:17
Speaker
So I really like funny. We had a great equation. I believed in the internet. I believed that a bunch of unknown guys could get together and make things happen. A lot of these things fade out of memory. But at that point of time, I was just thinking, saying, I've got insurance in my MBA.
00:06:44
Speaker
I can always go back and do whatever I want. Since childhood, I don't think I ever cared about money as much as I cared about my freedom to be able to do stuff. So money is as good as the freedom it buys me. And hence I didn't care about the pay cut. I found a house which was a two minutes walk from office. Bangalore rentals are nowhere close to Bombay.
00:07:10
Speaker
So I could sort of make ends meet with even 70% pay cut. And yeah, so I think I believed in funny. I believed in the internet. I believe that if train tickets can happen online, bus tickets can happen online. I love the challenge. I like the fact that we were all 25 years old, like all of us doing this. And I wanted to prove.
00:07:39
Speaker
to others and to myself that, you know, we can make this happen. And if we make it happen, it'll be a massive thing. So Fanny was like the solo founder or were there other co-founders with him? There were three of them. There was Fanny, Charan and Sudhakar. So there was another colleague of mine, Abhi, who had joined them just one month before I did.
00:08:03
Speaker
So, we were sort of the foundation team members, five of us that were basically running that company. Charan and Sudhakar were more on the engineering side of things. And for me, Abhi and me were handling more the business side of things.
00:08:18
Speaker
Okay. So when you joined, like, you know, how, how much had they established themselves at that time?
Media Ant: Democratizing Media Information
00:08:26
Speaker
Like, was it like single city bus booking? Okay. And there is funding also? Uh, just about. And, you know, uh, just a couple of tickets a day. So, you know, the website was sort of on the maintenance, you know, even while I was migrating out of, uh, my ICIC and I put my papers.
00:08:47
Speaker
I had started working and contributing and seeing various things through. So yeah, but basically extremely nascent because mainly an idea with some very small POC. Okay. And then they raised funding, like how soon after you joined and like, you know, what was the trajectory that you saw at Redbus? So, you know, if you
00:09:16
Speaker
You know, this is back in the day, okay? This is when startups were unknown. This is where families would really dissuade you to do something stupid like that. And this was like pre-flipkart also. Yeah, Flipkart came in 2008 and Redbus was more end of 2006 kind of story. So we were pre-flipkart. And so yeah, these were those times when, you know, doing a startup was considered extremely stupid.
00:09:44
Speaker
The funding amounts were very, very small compared to what you see today. The funding that we had received was also small. So, we went through quite a few interesting things back then. We were also one of the first few startups to have gone through the 2008 recession.
00:10:10
Speaker
And I remember what that did to us. We had just a few more months of runway. We were running bills on our credit cards, all of this on our personal cards. We would rotate money. We did all kinds of things to stay afloat. And it was so tough to raise funds back in 2008. So we've really gone through many
00:10:40
Speaker
interesting near-death experiences back then. And it taught us how to be smart about me, how to be frugal, how to be extremely desperate, and stay afloat no matter what. So I think it was also quite a great team, a team that never gave up. I've never worked with a team like that in my life.
00:11:09
Speaker
So it was a bunch of really, really strong. And what kind of margin was Redbus earning? On every ticket that got booked, how much would you pay to the operator? And what was the unit economics like and stuff like that? Yeah, so Redbus made 10% commission on the ticket amount.
00:11:38
Speaker
Okay. And did you have competitors for Redbus? Yeah, lots of them. So I think there were lots of local guys, there were some national guys. A lot of them sprouted up at the time when they found out that Redbus has raised funding, you know, IBM was trying to go after the same supply. So a whole bunch of them, if you did a Google search query for bus tickets, you know, you had a lot of people popping up, you know, bus operator that sort of
00:12:08
Speaker
started you know floating with the idea of going online and having a phone number on their site you know things like that or some some mix of online and offline booking so all of that was happening back then
00:12:24
Speaker
So what are like the key levers of building a platform? You know, like Redbus is essentially a platform. So like, you know, how do you build a platform so that it gets into a dominant position? Right. I think there are so there's a small difference in being an aggregator and a platform. Redbus was more an aggregator.
00:12:53
Speaker
And, you know, so what's an example of a platform just so that I understand the difference. A platform is something like Twitter. A platform is something like LinkedIn, where you provide tools to a user and then they figure the rest out themselves. So on LinkedIn, I have given you the ability to create
Scaling TaxiForSure and Entering Local Commerce
00:13:19
Speaker
your resume and list it and everyone can use it now.
00:13:23
Speaker
if I have created the road for example, right. Now, whether you are a car or a truck or a bike or whatever it is, you can drive on that road. So, it is a platform, I have created it and you can now use it anywhere you like. An aggregator is a guy who sort of gets into the middle of the transaction and takes control of it, right. So, imagine if LinkedIn had
00:13:48
Speaker
the ability to upload your resume, but there's a guy who's sorting it out, making it better, all of that, and, you know, acting as a middleman, then that sort of changes from being a pure platform. So, platforms just basically create the stage and give you the tools and then you figure it out. Redbus was more a managed, a manual aggregator where we were basically reaching out to supply and trying to digitize their inventory.
00:14:18
Speaker
trying to make it as real time as possible and then list that on our website making it easy for the user to book a bus seat online instead of going to 100 different travel agents. So our problem statement was how do I give the user the ability to see all the buses that are going to fly between a particular route so that he doesn't have to go to multiple travel agents and you know figure all this out on his own.
00:14:46
Speaker
So, you know, back in the day, the inventory was not digitized. So, we will do this in an offline way where we will reach out to a bus operator and say, give me 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 seats, whatever you can. And I'll put it up online. If I'm unable to sell it till a couple of hours, you know, we will give it back to you. And so that's how the operation ran. So, it was fairly manual in the beginning and very painful now that I look back at it.
00:15:18
Speaker
So you had like a big operations team of people who would be always calling up these operators and booking tickets and releasing them. Yes. Yeah. If there's a bus cancellation, you have to call every customer and say, do you want a refund? Should I put in another bus? These are the options. So yeah, very manual and painful process.
00:15:41
Speaker
So how did that evolve into more of like an automated kind of a process? Right. So Redbus actually worked with a couple of visionary bus operators who understood that the future was online and started creating APIs of their inventory and, you know, basically digitizing their inventory and making it real time so that everyone who was booking a ticket would use that
00:16:11
Speaker
online booking system. So, we worked with a couple of these guys and started integrating a real time full bus inventory, which means all the 40, 50 seats show up online and the user can go and choose a seat and that gets blocked everywhere. You know, pre this particular process, it was about calling the central guy, all the agents would call the central guy and check if a particular seat was available and then assign it to a customer.
00:16:41
Speaker
So, just going online really helped operations for red bars, for the user, for the pass operator. So, we worked with a couple of these guys who had started digitizing the inventory. We also built some very basic systems so that we could help some of the pass operators online as well.
00:17:02
Speaker
Okay. You built like a ERP kind of a, like a simple basic ERP for a bus operator where he could manage his inventory and accept bookings from your, okay.
00:17:18
Speaker
So coming back to my question, so what are the levers? At that time, whatever competitors Redbus had, I don't think any of them are around today. So what made Redbus succeed? What do you need to get right if you're an aggregator? Is it the demand side? Is it the supply side? Is it technology? I think that it's a couple of things.
00:17:46
Speaker
In the first phase, it's about getting the supply right. Having deep relationships and very clear positioning on the supply side is important.
Co-founding Vocal and Koo for Linguistic Diversity
00:18:05
Speaker
Supply will care if you sell stuff. They care about sales.
00:18:09
Speaker
So you also have to be good on the demand side at the same time to be selling everything that the supply is giving to you. You need to have tech capabilities, which helps you embed yourself into various systems, whether it's for the user, whether it's for the supply side. And to make all these things happen, you need a great team.
00:18:36
Speaker
These are the ways in which you are able to create a network. If any of these legs go missing, which means you've got the user side, but you don't have supply. We have the supply side, but you're unable to crack the demand side of things. Or you're able to crack both, but you're manual and not being able to scale tech. Somewhere you will fall down. So I think all of these things align very well at Redbus. And a lot of the guys who came
00:19:07
Speaker
But trying to run some opportunistic, sort of fly-by-night kind of operation, which we knew from day one would not scale. So we would always think about scale, saying one day we'll do 500 tickets, okay, one day we'll do 1,000, maybe 10,000, maybe 1 lakh. So we were always dreaming big and saying, you know, how do we make our system stable to handle that kind of load.
00:19:32
Speaker
So after about a five year stint, you moved on from Redbus and this was like pre acquisition. Did you like know that it's going to get acquired and you thought it's time to move on and do something or like, you know, what made you want to make that switch? Well, you know, I think Redbus had reached a stage
00:19:59
Speaker
where it wasn't an infant anymore. My passion really lies in building stuff and seeing it through a stage beyond infancy, where it becomes stable. So, I think Redbus had reached that stage. So, even when I had decided to move on, it was to pursue other entrepreneurial
00:20:29
Speaker
I ensured that it was left in capable hands. We got a good guy in to handle some of the stuff I was managing. And yeah, I thought it was the right time. I didn't know that it would get acquired. I knew we had built a tremendous value in the system that we had built in the brand we had built, the product that it was, we had
00:20:55
Speaker
pretty much crushed every competitor, irrespective of size. And I knew it was a good place to be in. What was the scale like when you left? Like what kind of top line or GMV or like, you know, what was it like? I think we were at about 600 floors. This is like the top line.
00:21:24
Speaker
Uh, this is the top line. Yes. Okay. And 10% of this is what you would have been earning. That's right. Okay. Got it. Okay. Okay. So did you also, uh, have like equity and got,
Investing in Entrepreneurs: Focus and Strategy
00:21:39
Speaker
uh, like got to see something when that acquisition happened? Yes, of course. I was, uh, like I said, one of the foundation team members, which means that, you know, we were basically.
00:21:50
Speaker
considered as far as founders and the company that's how we fight towards Redbus. We never considered ourselves as folks who've been employed or any such thing. So that was the emotion with which we were running Redbus. I still feel very passionate about the brand. If I spot errors anywhere, I do send it to the folks still running it.
00:22:20
Speaker
And yes, all of us had equity. We had skin in the game. We had an upside to look forward to, yes. That was never the incentive. Like I said, it's back in the day, right? Lagos was one of the first few exits to happen in the startup ecosystem. So we didn't have anything else to go by.
00:22:48
Speaker
We never dreamt, you know, when we had started it, we used to say, you know, if this becomes 50 crores, imagine what will happen. Imagine if our company is worth 100 crores, what a big deal that would be. Today, you have kids raising 10, 15 million dollars in CDC, right? So, it's a very different world, you know, when we were running this, we didn't know that the startup system evolved into doing the way it is today.
00:23:14
Speaker
And Redbus is sort of to thank for, to make that aspiration happen among the acts of guys who want to do their startup today. They look at Redbus as an inspiration that this is possible. That if you are young and out of college and don't have experience in the field, it's possible to run something like that. I've heard a lot of founders say,
00:23:44
Speaker
You guys are the reason why we started. And that includes founders of Swiggy. Because they were also from this philosophy. So Funny was also a poster child of the startup ecosystem back then. We had a lot of people, media especially, writing about us, talking about what we're doing, the fact that it's a very young team, doing something innovative on the internet. So we really enjoyed the love and the trust that the media placed in us.
00:24:13
Speaker
You know, overnight Redbus was a poster child for the startup ecosystem. So, yeah. Okay. So you had like started the media and so tell me about that journey. While I was running Redbus and we were trying to evaluate certain offline media, I reached out to a couple of agencies asking them if I could spend 5, 10 lakhs and what are the options I have.
00:24:40
Speaker
And most of them said that we cannot share any information with you because you know unless you spend 50 lakhs it does not make sense for us. We make you know anywhere between 1 to 2 percent of the amount that you spend. So, you know the time that I spend in sharing information with you will not justify the money that I make. So, unless you want to spend 50 lakhs or so, you know, sorry I cannot tell you.
00:25:09
Speaker
So I realized how painful it was for me because I wanted to do a radio campaign and I had to reach out to multiple radio stations one by one and I caused everyone to negotiate for them individually. And I realized that that was quite a pain. I knew that there are lots of SMEs out there that would sort of face similar problems. I always loved
00:25:35
Speaker
democratizing things and making stuff transparent, available at the clip of a button. So, I thought what if, you know, all these media options that are available, what if all these could be put online, because clearly the supply side, which is a media owners would love more leads. The demand side is looking for information, but media agencies don't share it. So, it seemed like a broken system to me.
00:26:02
Speaker
I always thought that the way to fix it is just to democratize this information, make it available online. And whether it is media and handling the queries or the supply handling it directly. But all this information would help millions of SMEs who wanted to try out these options. So with that in mind, we started off with non-traditional media putting together some media options on a website using a blog.
00:26:32
Speaker
None of us co-founders were actually engineers. So we just found a blogger template and we started acquiring supply of non-traditional media like advertising, of course, advertising the babas in Bombay, all of that. So we started aggregating that and putting it up online and realized that supply was more than happy to tie up with it.
00:26:56
Speaker
clients would find it very interesting to go through all these media options and reach out and say, I'm interested in trying this out, etc. So, it was very clear that this is a problem being faced by a lot and a very different model could be built. So, advertising and media agencies has been built around the model of a small number of really large clients.
00:27:26
Speaker
right, we wanted to create the model that could cater to a large number of small plants. And the only way to make that happen is to not have the fixed overheads that agencies have which is expensive planners,
00:27:47
Speaker
folks who share information and all of that and hence we democratize that on a website. Yeah, this is correct. And don't be intensities. You can cater to every request sitting out of Bangalore. So this was the change in the model and we executed that and realized that it works. So that's the story of media.
00:28:12
Speaker
But like you had a shortest stint there, like is it still running or did you like decide to wind it up or what happened? So Media Ant is a going concern. It's very, very healthy. It does 10, $15 million a year. It's my co-founders run it. So Media Ant was actually my first B2B
00:28:45
Speaker
And I was there from the beginning till about two years and I had certain realizations while running. I think that I clearly realized that I don't enjoy B2B as much as I enjoy B2C. Media was again in a stable position.
00:29:09
Speaker
I was running it as CEO. I knew I have very good capable co-founders who were interested in running it and taking it forward. I wanted to do something on the B2C front. They understood that that's my area of interest and it was stable enough to run on the road. And hence I thought it's a good time to think of gigs in the B2C space.
00:29:39
Speaker
So that's when I thought that I could move out of media end because it was in capable hands. How did you find the co-founders there? How did you all get together? So Samir, who's the current CEO and co-founder, worked with me for a short while. I tried bus.
00:30:08
Speaker
And we thought along really well. He had also joined in marketing for some time. And my other co-founder, Mukesh, is a friend of a friend. And we would hang all the time. He was looking to do something.
00:30:33
Speaker
you know, took him through the idea, told him about the problem statement, etcetera, you know, something that he could identify with. In fact, you know, the way there's a very interesting story and you'll understand the role of serendipity and inclusion and all of that. So, you know, when I had left Red Boss and I was thinking deeply about this particular problem,
00:31:02
Speaker
You know, I was thinking of the right guy who would understand this problem statement and, you know, someone I could partner with, I had a great comfort and, you know, could turn this with me. So I thought of Sami because we had, we had a great working relationship. And so I slept in my thinking, okay, I'll reach out to him tomorrow.
00:31:30
Speaker
and have a word with him and tell him about this. You know, I woke up at I think about 7 o'clock or so and went to my balcony and I saw that Samir has come home and has parked in his bike. And you know, he walks up to the house and he says,
00:32:03
Speaker
I was like, you know, if I tell you that I was thinking of an idea and thinking I'll call you today, you probably think I'm lying. But I would have called him, you know, in the evening that day because he would have, you know, been out of office and he worked at Britannia, which is not very far from where I live. So finally trying to go.
00:32:26
Speaker
And he said, you know, my wife is owning, I am good. Let us give it a try. Let us try to do something. And then I told him the idea. And he said, yeah, you are right. You know, even when I want to spend some money with Tanya and I do not want to go to the agency, it is not easy to find this information. It sounds good. Let us make it happen. I said, talk to your wife, get it out. He said, yes, what is happening? So, that is
00:32:57
Speaker
That's how this came together. And it was a disbelief for me, that this entire thing played out like that. And then we said, OK, I'll handle product. I'll handle tech. You can handle servicing. We need someone who'll handle supply and elevate media. And I said, I know the right guy for it. Mukesh is amazing with people. I haven't seen someone with the people skills that he has.
00:33:27
Speaker
Anyone who meets Mokesh will say he's my best friend. So, I thought he'd be the perfect person to be leading all supply efforts. Obviously, he runs a lot more than just that today, but that's how it started off. And he's very easy to get along with, extremely happy guy, hardworking guy, and I knew he and Sami would get along. So, I got these guys together and Evian got along like a house of fire also.
00:33:55
Speaker
So yeah, that's the media and founding story. So when you moved out, was it like, did you like sell off your equity to the other two or like, like, how did that happen? No, there's an understanding always between founders about investing. And, you know, we played that out. Yeah.
00:34:18
Speaker
We always had documents on things like that. So we never went by, okay, you know, this is friendship, but let's figure it out. At least I was always clear about, you know, documenting all these things and having us, everyone legally protected. Okay. Got it. Okay. So, and this is where you meet a Premier who's your current co-founder. So tell me about that. Like once you moved on from media and.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah, so after media and I was thinking of various p2c games and you know, I had a list of ideas I wanted to course you. So I was in the middle of looking for an engineer deciding which idea to go by. And some consultant had reached out to me and said that these guys are taxi for sure anyone and I kept saying no.
00:35:11
Speaker
And that guy, then he shot me again saying, you know, the founder is a really nice guy, you should definitely talk to him just for my sake, if you don't mind this, take off half an hour and meet up with him. So because the guy was saying that much, I said, okay, you know, I'm happy to meet and I didn't want to meet purely because I knew that I would not be able to engage with anyone when I'm trying to do something new, right.
00:35:40
Speaker
Your Redbus experience was what made you attractive to them? Yeah, I guess everyone sort of looked at Redbus as the brand to sort of emulate. Redbus had built quite a persona around it saying, you know, this is a hot start-up. We had quite a few interesting things happening, right? One, it was a very edgy brand. It had quite a personality to it.
00:36:08
Speaker
the highest number of transactions, very heavy margins, a decent market size. It was clearly a market leader with nobody else in view. So very, very low cost of acquisition, low to zero cost of acquisition. So that was built on a shoestring budget. So all of these things made it fairly attractive. There was a lot of talk about it.
00:36:34
Speaker
So, yeah, Apra may have reached out because of all of that and he met up with a bunch of other guys from Red Bus and realized that they weren't really the guys who built it. And he reached out to the consultant saying, these guys could not answer my questions. I'm pretty sure they aren't the guys who built it from the beginning because he was going through the initial journey of taxi first of all over two years in it.
00:37:02
Speaker
He said, there's someone else who's built it and I'd like to meet those folks. So the guy reached out to me and, you know, I met up with him. We got, you know, us getting along would be an understatement because again, we were completing each other's sentences. We were pretty much banged on.
00:37:29
Speaker
and in sync with each other's thought processes. He's a very, so he's an introvert and I get along really, really well with introverts. And I understand that energy, that personality very well. He's a true Kannadega, extremely understated, very humble, very easy to talk to, get along with.
00:37:59
Speaker
We were discussing various ideas and you know, I love travel and startups, right. Anything to do with mobility, transportation, travel is something that I really love. So, we discussed quite a few ideas and he said, you know, why don't you just help us out for some time. And yeah, I thought that was interesting and they sort of were the underdogs. I love being on the side of the underdogs.
00:38:25
Speaker
I thought it would be an interesting assignment. Did you stay with them till the acquisition? I was there till a couple of months before the acquisition. And we really scaled the number of transactions and things like that. So we had put in place quite a few things. I think there was a great team there.
00:38:55
Speaker
Raghu and Apu were very, very passionate about what they were building. The cap space was not the way you see it today. Most of the bookings would happen over a call. App bookings would be a single digit percentage of the total bookings. And I'm talking in 2014. Today, you can't imagine calling a call center to book your cap.
00:39:27
Speaker
So, you know, very different, right? It would need a portion, it would need to discount users, forget about, you know, doing search pricing, you can't imagine back then, right? You'd have to give users a discount to travel with some other guy in a cab who they don't know, you know, pay more than an auto fare and things like that, and hence it needed discounting and building supply. It's a very complex business to run.
00:39:56
Speaker
You know, it's very real, it's real time. Like I want a cab now. The guy has to reach in the next five, 10 minutes and drop me and he needs another booking and things like that. So I think it's one of the more complicated businesses on the internet, right? With a very, very heavy offline Android. So I found all of that fairly interesting. And yeah, that was another very fun journey. I was there till a couple of months before the acquisition.
00:40:25
Speaker
But me and Apramaya would basically talk and exchange notes pretty much every day and the team. So I was sort of working there like a consultant, but I would meet them in office every day. And we put in place a lot of systems that could help the company scale. There was a great team there, great leadership.
00:40:55
Speaker
So I basically play the role of putting together some of the playbooks more on the demand side. Okay. And so what made you want to move on and again found your next venture? Well, I was, you know, the main reason I did not want to meet them was, you know, my fear that if I get involved, I get involved, I can't be half-assed about anything.
00:41:25
Speaker
You know, that's exactly what happened. When I got involved with helping them, you know, I was thinking taxi for sure all the time, right? I was thinking the cab industry and that sort of moved me away from another app that I wanted to create back then. And I wanted to get back to that. And again, I thought it was, you know, all the things that I could have shared with them and processes we could have put in place, playbooks we could have created.
00:41:52
Speaker
We had created in the few months that I worked with them. So, I thought it was a good time to move on, you know. Of course, we had become very close friends and, you know, we would talk a video and discuss ideas. The team would reach out and we'd have chats every time, you know, they faced some place where they were stuck. They wanted to bounce some things off. If I got an idea of
00:42:17
Speaker
you know, just seeing something I would share with them. So they are actually become very close friends. And I thought, you know, it could work remotely as well. And you know, I'm always available. So I thought I could try building my own animal.
00:42:36
Speaker
Okay. So what was the concept like, you know, Goodbox is what you started. What was the concept behind it? So actually, you know, Goodbox was being run by a very close friend who was with me at Redbus. He was one of the guys who had interviewed me and got me in along with funny. So his name is Ebi.
00:43:06
Speaker
And he was trying to build something around buses, an entertainment system inside buses and things like that. And they were running multiple experiments there. And they hit upon the experiment of introducing chat inside buses. And they realized that a lot of these bus travelers had multiple requests saying, I want a bike once I get there, I want to stay in a hotel, XYZ, all of that.
00:43:36
Speaker
And they realized that a lot of commerce can happen on chat, right. And people had queries, they weren't necessarily using Google or just, they found the chat interface fairly easy to send messages and requests for stuff. And it was basically
00:44:01
Speaker
The company was running a hardware which was sort of like a box which was kept inside a bus and a simple name was good box.
00:44:13
Speaker
because it did good to people and you know while it started off as something for buses it pivoted to hey we can do something on chat as far as commerce is concerned and we kept pivoting our thoughts and said well we can do a lot of daily commerce on this there's a lot of local businesses that be printing with
00:44:40
Speaker
A lot of these dealings happen over a call, which is synchronous. But you can have asynchronous behavior over chat. And hence, Goodbox was born as an experiment saying, OK, let's give it to local stores. Let them market it to their users and say they can chat with them and place orders and stuff like that.
00:45:10
Speaker
see their menu and things like that. And so yeah, that's how Goodbox was born. In a way, WhatsApp is moving towards things. That's right. That's right. So a lot of this happens in China on WeChat. And we knew that this will definitely happen in India, where there are millions and millions of mom and pop local shops, being groceries, restaurants, pharmacies, and name it.
00:45:40
Speaker
So, we wanted it was also a time when apps were pretty hot right. So, every business if you ask somebody you want they will say I want an app on a website. Now, on the consumer side it is pretty clear that a consumer will not download 20 apps for 20 local businesses right, but if you told them that why do not you download just this one app and you can interact with all the 20 businesses in your area they would be ok with that right.
00:46:05
Speaker
So that's sort of the solution that we created, saying this is called a mega app. This is the Goodbox mega app. Users will download the mega app. Local businesses, on the other hand, will get something like a mini app where their mini app is hosted inside the mega app. So if you stay in HSR layout, you can just see all the businesses that have mini apps on Goodbox. You can add them to your home screen.
00:46:32
Speaker
And you can now start chatting with them, seeing the menu, make payments online, and all of that. So the idea was to take millions of local businesses online without them having to do anything. So again, this was a business of democratizing, having an app, having a mobile presence, and accepting online payments, having an online meeting, an online presence, online chat, being real time, all of that.
00:47:04
Speaker
So what happened? Is Goodbox still there? I mean, the idea is pretty ambitious. Yeah, it's a massive project. We always called Goodbox a project and not a startup. We thought that as far as our vision was concerned, we said everything can move online and work on a mega app just the way it does.
00:47:26
Speaker
on WeChat in China. You have government agencies around WeChat. Pretty much everyone is on WeChat. You're a home code business. You can be on WeChat. So we said everyone can actually have a mini app inside Hotbox. Even if you have BSNR, people could have different use cases, but you could use the chat interface or a menu interface. One app that users can use to interact with all the businesses, entities, organizations,
00:47:56
Speaker
in the country right. So, that that is why we call it a project because it was quite an undertaking right basically returning the ocean. So, you know it was quite ambitious we had
00:48:13
Speaker
a bunch of people who believed in what we were doing. They obviously knew this is a fairly experienced team. I think Goodbox got a lot of traction from the merchant side. It would obviously take a couple of years to build a system like this, and we've done various experiments. We had different interfaces for a grocery store, different one for a restaurant, a different one for someone who wants to collect just payments, things like that.
00:48:43
Speaker
So, I think a lot of companies back then sprouted up trying to cater to the same trader slash SME market or local business market with different solutions. So, there was good box trying to give them a mobile presence. Then came PTM and phone pay, PTM saying you can collect payments online.
00:49:10
Speaker
And there was 4-pacing, you can do UPI online. There were guys like Micho coming out to small businesses saying, why don't you make money online? So a lot of people, Swiggy came out saying, you can order food online. There was growers trying to say, order grocery online. So Goodbox, while it was trying to create an all encompassing system to take everybody online, there were vertical competitors.
00:49:40
Speaker
and there were horizontal guys offering payment solutions and online presence and there is other things. So, Goodbox was sort of competing with everybody in general, but nobody specifically.
00:49:59
Speaker
So, when you are in a position like this, where you are undertaking a long talk project, what you are doing is sort of a new concept and things like that, you are bound to hit certain roadblocks. So, I think we achieved quite a bit for the size that we were, but I think we faced a lot of competition from the payment guys who have been funded, they were funded to 300x.
00:50:27
Speaker
In fact, what we were funded, I still think Goodbox is a great solution. It is something that will happen in India one day. I think maybe we were too soon to have launched a product as ambitious as that. I think if you talk to a lot of traders and say that or restaurants saying, we don't like regulators because they charge us a lot of commission.
00:50:56
Speaker
And everyone loves, I think basic human nature is to move towards freedom. Everyone wants to be out of the clutches of another person. So they don't like giving commission beyond a particular point. They don't like to be arm twisted and things like that, which is sort of what was happening with a bunch of aggregators that were running restaurant delivery or grocery delivery and things like that.
00:51:25
Speaker
theme around Goodbox was go direct to your user, go direct to your customer. Here's an online presence. You are now as good as XYZ. Here's some delivery partners we've tied up with. Feel free to run it as your business without having to create any of this technology. So we were sort of, you know, they take on, saying, I'll give you the technology, please feel free to run your business the way you want it. Now, a lot of small businesses
00:51:55
Speaker
don't understand and didn't care about that messaging. A lot of them did. And those who did sign up, they understood why they should be on something like this. And they're competing with a big basket out there who's got access to great tech. So they understood that the users are moving towards online preferences and they need to have some online face and to build their own app would cost them anywhere from 10 lakhs to 20 lakhs. And we were giving it a thousand bucks.
00:52:26
Speaker
So they did understand that there's some value in something like that. But yeah, I think too early, fourth time and heavy competitors. Did it fail due to supply not being there, demand not being there or technology not being enabling enough? I think that it's a new concept. For customers, it was a new concept that I could interact with my stores online.
00:52:56
Speaker
For supply, it was a new concept that, you know, this is not exactly my app, but it sort of is. And so you have to market it to the supply side saying, you know, this is like your own app. You're just a mini app inside a mega app. And to the customers, the supply had to market it to them saying, well, come use my own app, but it's called good box.
00:53:25
Speaker
So it sort of became a little confusing for both sides sometimes maybe. But we still have a lot of sticky users and local businesses that we are using it heavily. Because once you get used to it, you realize saying, well, this is a new channel for me, right? And it's my own channel. There's no need to take a commission for me. I have nothing to lose. And the more people that get onto the network, the stronger it keeps getting.
00:53:55
Speaker
And it was an asset-like model. All we had to do was sign up a lot of businesses, give them this tech that was created already. And someone could create a shop within five minutes and be up and running with payments the same evening. So we had created a system that was as powerful as that. So I think that Goodbox is an amazing product
00:54:22
Speaker
It is a great system, it will take off in our country someday, you know, not very far away from today, right. So, like I said, I think it was too early for its times and lots of times things like this happened, right, where it seems like a bit of a stretch earlier.
00:54:41
Speaker
But if you project it into time, you'll say, hey, this was so obvious. I don't know why this is a great idea, but I don't know why it wasn't done all this while. And you'll realize you're saying, well, it was being done in some form and fashion earlier. UPI is an example. It's such an obvious thing. I can transfer it straight into someone's account. And you want to say, why didn't we do this earlier? It's so obvious. And you'll then think about it and say, hey, well, there was something like PayPal.
00:55:10
Speaker
globally, where you could transfer money to an email ID without knowing their account details. That's basically what UPI does today, but doing it on the debit card or the banking system. So things like that. I think Goodbox was something like that. Well, yes, of course, everyone should have an online presence and be able to cater to their users directly without having to pay commission. It's too obvious an idea.
00:55:37
Speaker
You know, I think you need an entire ecosystem for something like this to work, which means you need great delivery partners. You need a supply side that's really ready, desperate, and saying, just give this to me and, you know, we'll solve my problem. You need users who have app fatigue saying, boss, I'm done with apps. I don't want to down with 10 different apps. So when all these things come together, right?
00:56:01
Speaker
It will just balloon itself as the most obvious solution. Like PTM wasn't a very obvious solution till demonetization happened. Now, that doesn't mean that PTM was a failure to them. It's just that the time was right for this to happen. Big Basket has been marketing itself for almost a decade now, right? There are holdings of Big Basket for so many years have been seen.
00:56:28
Speaker
It really went into a different zone as soon as COVID hit saying, boss, you can't step out of the house to buy groceries. What are you going to do now? You have to order online. Now, it's not that the solution was wrong. It wasn't that, you know, big basket was a failure before this happened. But, you know, opportunity made preparation and solution at a time and, you know, that's your inflection point.
00:56:56
Speaker
So I think for us, timing went on. Do you think WhatsApp took a better approach of first building users and now they are onboarding businesses and giving features to businesses to do stuff? And because the users are there, so businesses are getting onboarded automatically. You know, like they don't have to sell the idea of doing business on WhatsApp because the users are anyway there. So I think that WhatsApp
00:57:27
Speaker
and sandbox have the same framework, which is make it easy for businesses to go directly to the users. It is always desirable to be running a network on a business that has already been built. What is an example of that? You have P2P chat happening on vChat. Now, it is very easy to tell all the businesses saying, hey, I have 800 million users.
00:57:54
Speaker
I'm going to launch the ability for you to run a shop, and you can accept payments XYZ from these 800 million things. So that's a slam dunk. The more difficult thing to do is to build both sides together, which is sort of what the network is, which is sort of what Uber did, Whole Arcade, Redbus, you know, name it. And that's really what the value lies. So that's what we were trying to do.
00:58:24
Speaker
is also worried about messing up what they have, which is a great P2P messaging service. They do not want that polluted with marketing messages and various things like that, which is why it is not like WhatsApp does not have the tech capability to focus on. But they have to walk a very delicate roof of
00:58:52
Speaker
still being a messaging service of choice and not pissing people off when they launch our business. And we knew they would always have these difficult decisions to make. And we had a window of opportunity to make good bugs happen with features back then that WhatsApp was not even thinking of. We had a menu inside your chat. We had payment systems inside chat. So WhatsApp business came a lot later.
00:59:20
Speaker
But you look at the Goodbox screens back then, we had a very, very sophisticated product that had been made up. So, yes, I think there will be a lot of things which will be very difficult to crack inside the WhatsApp kind of system, which Goodbox had the flexibility of doing. So, yeah, please. We will have to see how this thing evolves.
00:59:49
Speaker
OK, so from Goodbox to being a co-founder again with Apramya, how did that happen? Well, Apramya and me have always been discussing ideas. You know, Goodbox came to a particular point where it became
01:00:07
Speaker
important for some of us to diverge because good works had to pivot from being an app that gives a mobile presence to sort of trying out deliveries and working deeper in one particular vertical. We were running out of resources and things like that. So it was very important for a few of us to jump ship
01:00:37
Speaker
so that the ship stays afloat, right. And, you know, our premier was running multiple experiments on the next building user base, right. And we always wanted to work together on facts and authorities. So, we would, you know, we would keep discussing ideas. And when I was leaving Goodbox,
01:01:00
Speaker
you know, we met a couple of times and said, you know, let's, let's do this together. And he told me, you know, various experiments about running. And Vocal was just about gone as a thought from one of the experiments that he was running. And, you know, again, I started by consulting and, you know, working together with him, going to office every day and figuring out what's happening and, you know, making some of these things happen.
01:01:27
Speaker
you know, build confidence on what we're trying to solve here, is it a real problem, what's the right solution, things like that. And there's been heavy comfort around that. So, around working with him and things like that. So, we decided to make this happen. And, you know, quite obviously, it's a very large opportunity. We both have seen
01:01:54
Speaker
the journey of catering to the 100 million or maybe the 50 million of those seeking conveniences from the internet. He built a taxi for sure and we wanted to create products that could be used by the hundreds of millions of millions.
01:02:21
Speaker
To be able to do that, you have to break the language barrier in India because 10% of the country understands and speaks English. And hence we were thinking of multilingual solutions that work for a larger population. So, that is how vocal was born and various thoughts also led us to cool.
01:02:47
Speaker
Vocal is essentially like a Quora in local language, right? It's like a Quora, but instead of text, it's an audio and video. It makes it easy for experts to answer questions very quickly. It's not as involved as a video. So a lot of people find it very easy to give audio answers. Hit the record button, record your answer and send it out.
01:03:13
Speaker
It was a new format. Nobody had done this in the world earlier. There was also a lot of data from people saying that 40% of the searchers in India are happy with their voice, which also meant that it might have been even higher as far as the national audience was concerned. Which basically meant that there was comfort around asking questions and voice and the natural
01:03:41
Speaker
mode of answering that question may have been a wise answer as well.
01:03:50
Speaker
give limitations on how searchable is the content. I mean, often when I'm researching stuff, Quora will generally come up on page one if I'm looking for a good service to learn coding, for example. And typically, Quora will have a question where someone asks, what's the way to learn coding?
01:04:17
Speaker
So wouldn't that kind of be something you lose out on when it is all voice? So there are technologies that are fairly sophisticated that do a speech to text and languages also. That's right. So Google has a service. There are a bunch of other startups and some other
01:04:42
Speaker
large tech companies that provide these as an API. It has error rates, but it's still good to go over. When you do speech to text, all that content becomes indexable, searchable, discoverable.
01:05:04
Speaker
Okay. So on vocal, the platform, so when you are browsing through Q and A's, you will see both the text and the play button, listen to the audio. Okay. Okay. Okay. And how has the traction been for vocal? Vocal has been very interesting. It's been quite a journey. It's a new format, right? Q and A has existed
01:05:31
Speaker
since the start of the internet, right? I can think of every large company that sort of tried their Q&A service, whether it was Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and even tried it. So Q&A is not a new category in the world. It doesn't belong to Quora necessarily. That Quora was very late in the Q&A.
01:05:56
Speaker
nobody had tried voice answers to questions and you know it works for a country like ours because of the language diversity that you know a lot of the internet users are new they're not necessarily used to the keyboard the way you know who and I are where you know we migrated from a desktop to a laptop to a mobile and hence you are used to a keyboard
01:06:26
Speaker
Anyone who did not use a desktop or laptop is not used to a keyboard. Think about it. It's even difficult to identify with as a problem. If I give you a mobile, that's basically being used to make calls. I'll tell me to use a keyboard. What is that? I only use this for voice. Most of the Indian users went on to the internet as a mobile first user.
01:06:54
Speaker
First time they got 3G, 2G, 4G, all of that, they started using the mobile. Now, keyboard is a new concept, right? And hence they started using voice functionality. And hence, you know, having voice answers to voice questions became something we were identified with, right? Vocal grew from a very small base, from, you know, three answers, five answers, ten answers a day.
01:07:20
Speaker
to thousands of answers and double digit thousands of answers that we get every day. It has gone to millions of questions a month back in the day from having 10, 20, 30 questions being asked on the platform.
01:07:37
Speaker
So some way to like compare. So for example, does it have as much traffic as say a Hindi newspaper website, like say Dhanik Paskar. Does vocal have like a comparable amount of traffic as that or like you do something so that. Yeah, no, I think, you know, newspapers are a category
01:08:06
Speaker
which it's an every day thing. Whereas search and Q&A and stuff like that is a very weak based category. I'll come and ask a question when I have it, when I want it, when I want an answer. So local is crossing 20 million users a month.
01:08:30
Speaker
Then in Bhaskar's readership from whatever public sources I understand is close to about 20 or 22 million or 23 million. So yes, yeah. Okay, that gives a good picture of... So I think local is the kind of business that can be easily catered to 500 million users a month. That's the kind of
01:09:01
Speaker
usage it could have in the next few years. Because what's the largest internet company that you know, Google? What does Google do? It answers questions. It answers search queries. There is no content or there's very sparse content on the internet in Indian languages. Most of these were created
01:09:30
Speaker
Because if you look at the history of the internet, most of the content has been created by creators when they use things like Blogger, you had other blogging services, you had Twitter, you had YouTube. So these are basically creators trying to express themselves and create websites and stuff like that online.
01:09:59
Speaker
And they are the guys who were the content creators. And millions of users came to consume that content. So basically, tools have to be given to creators so that they can create content for millions and billions of internet users to consume. That did not happen in India in Indian languages. It did not happen in Indian languages because the Indian language user was not using the internet.
01:10:27
Speaker
It was the English language users of India that was using the internet. Guys like you and me. The Indian language user came onto the internet when Jio made it extremely affordable to have a data connection. When smartphones became very, very cheap, they became very affordable. When Flipkart and Amazon were selling smartphones and delivering it to your house. So an entire ecosystem came together.
01:10:56
Speaker
and took the Indian language user onto the internet for a first time, right. Now, the Indian language creator did not have the tools or reason to create an Indian languages because, right. The tools of the leaders, okay, make it easy for me to
01:11:15
Speaker
create content in these languages, give me a nice keyboard, give me the ability to record my voice, record a video, etc. Okay, what are people looking for? I do not know what they are looking for. Can you tell me what they are looking for? Can you tell me the questions that they are asking? So, vocalism attempt to bridge this gap, saying this is what people are asking. These are the various categories.
01:11:39
Speaker
These are the kind of people they want to hear from. You seem to be that guy. I'll make it very easy for you to contribute this content onto the internet. Here, click on this, record your voice. Voila. You're now searchable on the internet. So that's a very nice solution to give to the creator. And the creator could be guys like you and me. Like I know Hindi, but I've never created in Hindi. Why? Because I have to insert a
01:12:05
Speaker
Now the vocal is there and says, well, I get 20 million, 40 million people every month coming to my platform. Why don't you say something? I have every reason to do that because I might get more visibility doing that than contributing on an English platform where I'm lost among the millions of other creators. So that's the thought behind cool and vocal work that make it easy for the creators
01:12:31
Speaker
to start contributing in Indian languages because the Indian language user is now on the internet and this is going to double it. We want to double the size of the United States population as far as we know how internet usage is concerned. That is a massive market out there.
01:12:50
Speaker
Hmm. Hmm. Okay. Okay. So, vocal of course is like a Q and A platform. What is cool? Like what in terms of the more well-known apps, like what is it like? It's like Twitter. It's a microblog. Twitter is the world's microblogging platform. You know, while we were running, so I'll tell you how. And this is like first? Cool? No, it is, you know,
01:13:19
Speaker
the creator can choose how they want to create. So who was born out of our experiences at vocal? So we had experts that were basically answering questions. So the reason to create or the trigger to create is reading someone else's questions. And we had a few experts who came back and said, well, I don't want to answer a question every time. I have certain thoughts.
01:13:49
Speaker
And I'd like to share that as a free flow thought with my followers. How do I do that? And we asked them why they are not using something like Twitter. He said, well, just the way vocal helps me create in Indian languages, it's a little difficult to do that on Twitter because I need to write my thoughts in a notepad in Hindi.
01:14:20
Speaker
then I need to copy it, paste it and then push that out, right. It is not easy to get discovered there. So, they had certain points, right. And we said, well, we should see what is happening on this particular microblog as far as Indian language is concerned. And we did some research and we realized that the content being created in Indian languages on Twitter was very sparse.
01:14:46
Speaker
And the reason was multiple reasons. Both Aprami and me have a lot of respect for what Twitter has done as part of democratization of voice, thoughts, information, views, opinions, all of that is concerned. It's a great product. It delivers a great service to the world. It makes information easily accessible in real time.
01:15:14
Speaker
a true sense of democratization of voice. So, we wanted to do that for India. Now, a lot of these things which need to be translated to the Indian context need a tweaking. Every global product does not work in a country like ours which has the kind of language diversity
01:15:40
Speaker
We have hundreds of languages, each of them have different dialects, each of them have different kind of text that is being used. There is a certain preference for the kind of Marwali that you speak. So, we wanted to create a product that understands these nuances and takes care of it and gives people a very secure environment in which they can create and consume this content
01:16:10
Speaker
in their mother tongue. Like, I will give you an example. Imagine walking into a room where you are a Hindi speaker and everyone is speaking in English. You will feel very insecure there. You will have an inferiority contract saying, if I say something, will they look at me in a particular way? Will they think of me in a particular way? That's sort of a feeling that you get when you are creating on Twitter in any language, saying, yes, sublog English nabag kasare mose Hindi mein kosukana.
01:16:40
Speaker
Am I going to be judged? If I put the same person into a room where everyone speaking in Hindi, the guy suddenly comes to life. That's what I mean by a secure environment. So in cool, when you enter the app, there's a clear preference in terms of language, you can select that language, you get into the app, and you know, everything is in that language.
01:17:07
Speaker
You see people who have been creating in that language, you will see a feed in that language and the instruction is in that language. You will, you know, you have a people feed, you can see each person who's been creating, go to their profile, read what they've written. So, it's a fairly, you know, a deep experience delivered in Indian languages, but on microblogging as a service.
01:17:33
Speaker
Okay. And how tightly integrated are vocal and cool? Like could you sign into cool with your vocal account and your vocal followers become your cool followers or stuff like that? These are actually different use cases and different platforms and we, you know, not, not, uh, we kept them separate.
01:17:52
Speaker
OK, OK, so have you like one thing is, of course, that this is local language, but have you done other stuff to not be a Twitter like, you know, stuff which Twitter might have as an approach which you consciously decided not to do? I think in terms of product means.
01:18:14
Speaker
We have a lot of things that are different compared to what Twitter does. You know, simple one being a people feed. It's very easy to find people who are contributing, let's say in Telugu and Co. You'll see a list of people. If you go to Twitter, it's very search based. If I land you in Hindi and I say, okay, find people who are speaking in Hindi on Twitter, it's very tough.
01:18:42
Speaker
There's no list out there, right? You have to search. Who will you search for? You'll search for Narendra Modi. You'll search for Shah Rukh Khan. You'll search for Ahmed Khan. You'll search for the names you are aware of. Right? If you ask me about Twitter, I'm not going to search for Akshay Dutta. But I don't know who that is. But if you showed me all the creators as a list, there's a good chance that Akshay Dutta, who's supposed to be a great creator, or a poet, or an author, or whatever, is getting discovered here.
01:19:11
Speaker
So that's what's happening on who. And that is what makes it very interesting. Lots of mini features which are very different from what Twitter has. We also follow certain philosophies that are a little more nuanced than what they have. Like I said, we have a lot of respect for what they've done. I think it's a great global product. But I think when you want to cater to users who have multi-lingual preferences, it needs many tweaks.
01:19:44
Speaker
So we are almost at the end of our time. I have one area more which I want to explore with you is your journey as an angel investor. Do you have an investment thesis around the investments you make? How do you rate yourself as an investor? Do you think you are a savvy investor? That's one area I want to explore with you before we wrap up.
01:20:10
Speaker
Sure. So, I understand internet businesses, I sort of now understand entrepreneurship. And I think it has, it has hundreds of variables, right? But I think it all boils down to three things. It boils down to a market.
01:20:37
Speaker
It boils down to the solution and then it boils down to the solver and the solver is entrepreneur here. So, product, market and entrepreneur. If I had to place my bets on one thing, it is always entrepreneur because markets can change, solutions can change.
01:21:07
Speaker
The entrepreneur is the guy who can make both of these changes. So, if you have to bet money on someone, I bet money on the person. Because if he is a reasonable guy, he is happy to take advice, he is sharp, he has got a good background, he is called his heart in the right place, he is doing it for the right reasons and all of that, you can always identify a new market, a different market.
01:21:35
Speaker
You can always solution out a problem statement. So, this is my very simplified thesis as far as angel investing is concerned. I care about the person why they are doing it, how they thought of the idea, why they have chosen a particular market, why they have chosen a particular solution. And if all these three things align, you have got a good investment there.
01:22:05
Speaker
And I think typically angel investment is this only, you know, you are betting more on a founder than on the problem, the solution. That's right. And, you know, we've run multiple ventures, right? To understand where a startup could fail, right? Because I've had, you know, successes and failures at the same time. I've learned a lot of things. I know what I would not do again.
01:22:34
Speaker
that I did earlier. So, all of that makes for good advice, all of that makes for better judgment in identifying mistakes folks are making and identifying you know people who are doing it for the wrong reasons, stuff like that. So, I think you know you ask me do you think that I am good an Intel investor, I would say that I have better judgment today than I had 10 years back and that judgment
01:23:02
Speaker
may not be as good as the judgment may be a venture capitalist which is about starting off hats. They are going about understanding entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship differently from the way I understand it because I am executing every day. And things break not always on strategy, they break in execution because there is just so many Chinese
01:23:29
Speaker
between the guy who thought about it and the guy who is doing it and that basically defines your success. You thought of doing an email campaign and that is a big strategy for a company, well guess what someone forgot to write the right subject right. And instead of having the 60 percent open date, they have a 0.6 percent open date, now that defines success. So, sending out emails was not the wrong strategy, but you executed it badly.
01:23:55
Speaker
So, I know where things can fail and you know, I understand that I can advise on some of these things right from hiring to building operations to you know, having the right solution to getting the right investor, other angels nation and world, how do you build your core team. So, a whole lot of topics right and I actually enjoy doing it. I love working with
01:24:22
Speaker
people who are passionate. I love creating new stuff. I like brainstorming on new ideas, creating new solutions in the world. So, you know, that's really my, you know, getting going. So, yeah.
01:24:38
Speaker
To learn more about and start using KOO today, log on to www.kooapp.com. That's K-O-O-A-P-P dot com. And if you want to learn about Vocal, log on to www.vocal.in. That's V-O-K-E-L dot i-N.
01:25:00
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thebotom.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N dot I-N for a complete list of all our shows.