In 2018, three years after entrepreneur Lal Chand Bisu sold his edtech startup Easyprep to Mumbai-based exam preparation platform Toppr for an undisclosed amount of money, he got hooked on listening to audiobooks and podcasts.
That was also the time when Bisu was looking for ideas for a new startup, as he had been working as Toppr’s lead engineer since 2015.
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He, along with two other colleagues – now his co-founders – decided to test their theory regarding how serious people in India were when it came to podcasts. They ran a survey and found out that not only were people looking for new podcast channels, they were also ready to pay for exclusive content available in vernacular language.
“Once we realized that a podcast channel in regional language could be a game-changer, since there weren’t many players in this space, we jumped right in,” Bisu, co-founder and CEO at Kuku FM, told KrAsia.
To get started, Bisu, together with Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal, put in their own money and began developing a new podcast app. After only three months, it was ready for beta testing.
“When we checked our user engagement rate in September 2018 and found that users were listening to our audiobooks for 40 minutes per day, that excited us, and we started approaching investors,” Bisu said.
The company managed to raise a small pre-seed round of funding by the end of 2018, allowing them to run for 12 months. The firm then raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding earlier this month from 3One4 Capital, Shunwei Capital, and India Quotient. The cash will be used to expand its content library and user base, Bisu said.
He said people are now willing to consume content such as poetry, investigative stories, mythological stories, and game shows in audio format, making podcast distribution platform appealing to users in India.
Targeting mature users
Unlike other internet-based entertainment companies that are going after first-time internet users in smaller cities, Kuku FM believes targeting such users will take a longer time to monetize, so it’s specifically going after professionals, students, and retirees who are looking for quality content.
“First-time users come on to the internet for instant gratification and mostly use services like TikTok and YouTube, and are not willing to pay for content,” Bisu said.
Currently, around 85% of Kuku FM users are from India’s tier one and two cities. Bisu said that after a while, when first-time users realize they are wasting their time and will start looking for meaningful content, his company will target them as well.
“Podcast users are busy professionals who want meaningful content in their life and choose podcasts because it’s not as intrusive or as time-consuming as books. Plus, we can add rich content in podcasts to make the experience better than reading books,” he added.
Kuku FM has been partnering with publishers to gain intellectual property rights and create audio content from popular published books. He did not reveal the names of publishers that the company is in talks with due to competitive reasons. However, the platform features books such as Rich Dad, Poor Dad, The Secret, and the Bhagwat Gita in audio format.
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