Thread by @supriyapaul93

We were told that the bottom of India is a DAU farm and not a paying customer. A thread.

1/ Everyone agrees that the bottom of the pyramid in India are a massive DAU farm.

2/ The hard part was finding the right content that could get us to scale. We were not selling entertainment, bollywood, cricket, astrology, none of it. We were selling stories this TG had access to and were living amongst. And that was the hardest part. How do you crack that?

3/ Persistence. We built content for 5 years which is perhaps longer than most people ever would because we just believed that if we did that right, we would get attention in a way that most people wouldn’t.

4/ And it happened. We grew our youtube in 10 different vernacular languages to 9.3 Million subscribers and 17 Million unique viewers on a monthly basis averaging 45 Million monthly views.

5/ But not just that. We realised that Josh was not just another content channel. It had become the bade bhaiya/elder brother for our audience. And then the next question was, would we ever get to a point where would be able to monetize this?

6/ Obv monetisation was of course ad revenue which is not with any scale but everyone discouraged us to think of anything else. Almost everyone worth their salt. They said, Nahi ho payega, you know how to run a media business - so continue to do that..

7/ Grow your ad revenue, become profitable yoy. You can’t get to any scale in a B2C business with this audience set - it’s too late. But we said, no we’d love to. We wanted to do it in a manner that was outside of what we were doing.

8/ So we went onto the platform that almost everyone in our TG uses - WhatsApp and built a course that almost everyone in our audience wanted - English Speaking. And all that we did was in our studio where we shoot our talks, we got another speaker and recorded our first course.

9/ The intention was very clear - can we sell it at a point where we make money on the first transaction itself? Wherein we make money >> all expenses on production, marketing, teacher payout, everything.

10/ We did this for 7 months which was the largest MVP process that I’ve been a part of. The product broke, there were customer service issues. Everything that was possible broke but the thing that persisted was that customers kept coming. They just kept on coming.

11/ With every single transaction that we made, we made more money than we spent and that just became pure science to tell us that we had to do this. So without informing anyone, we built an app which is now - Josh Skills.

12/ All that we do is create courses that are outside of school, outside of curriculum, essential life skills in a language that our audience wants it, on topics that they can relate to and a price point that they can actually afford.

13/ And the only thing we measure is - are we making more money than we are spending on a transaction basis? And if we are, we just have to sell enough.

In the last 10 months - 100,000 people from our non English speaking TG have bought our courses.

14/ We are unit economics profitable since day 1 and continue to be.We have a completion rate of about 25% and a refund of less than 1%.

15/ Our loyal funnel of 17Mn who watch a Josh Talk every month are the reason we continue to have a brand that most people can’t buy overnight.

16/ We have metrics that so called - India One doesn’t have and the best part is - we have 400 Million of such people waiting.

17/ So for all those who believe that this audience cannot pay - think twice. I truly believe in the power of the non English speaking user at the bottom of the pyramid.