Thread by @vinaykrsinghal

We have crossed 60,000 paying subscribers on @STAGEdotin - grew 6x in 6 months and adding 1000+ new subscribers daily - all from Haryana alone.

Here is our story 🧵

https://twitter.com/_/status/1412709039000080386

Before we go into details, here is some product context - > @STAGEdotin is a Netflix for Bharat in dialects (बोलियां).

We serve the kind of content which you can enjoy with your family.

@AbhishekPonia was kind enough to write in detail about us here 👇👇👇

https://twitter.com/_/status/1428661839223607302

We launched @STAGEdotin android app in Haryanvi dialect in November 2019 with mostly artist led content such as comedy, poetry, folk etc.

People looked at us as the saviours of the local culture and the dialect. Product started to go viral organically.

Over the course of the next 12 months, we focused upon building a solid content library supported by relevant product features - user love kept growing.

https://twitter.com/parveenksinghal/status/1352980865928761344

In November 2020, we wanted to put movies and web-series content on the app, we discovered that Haryana didn’t have a film industry at all. No GEC TV channels, basically nothing.

Realised quickly that we are not only building an OTT app but also have to create an entire local Bollywood in Haryana from scratch.

Curated production teams, actors, directors, writers, etc funded their first projects - today 2000+ artists have regular work & a local industry is booming in Haryana.

Everything was going great, but we still had one final battle to win.

We needed users to pay for the content they were loving so much. April 2021, just before the second wave of Covid-19 hit, we went all premium - from all free to nothing free - it was a big gamble, but we knew the cards we had.

Building for Bharat has its own unique challenges. A lot of our users wanted to pay in cash - some of them didn't have the online capability but most of them actually had trust issues. They had been scammed by too many of these apps.

We solved this by giving them an option to pay in cash. @STAGEdotin is probably the only OTT in the world that sells its subscription through COD. We also gave them direct phone numbers of founders to call as customer care and verify that we are real.

Today we are at 60k subscribers in our journey, just in Haryanvi. If @STAGEdotin was to be a pan India product, the 60k subscribers in Haryana is equivalent to 3M+ subscribers. Netflix India has a total of 4M subscribers. And we are just getting started!

With this, we are proud to announce our pre-series A investment round of $2.5m with some amazing believers on board.

@BlumeVentures / @vaibhavbetter / @ipventures_in / @angelschennai / @aprameya @vijayshekhar / Sujit@Udaan / @gauravmunjal / @RomanSaini / @hemezh / @dhruv_rathee / @BeerBicepsGuy / @viraj_sheth / @vishnuprasathd / @rohitajmani / @akshatrathee / @GulatiSinghJ

Gratitude 🙏

Now that our playbook is ready for building the entertainment industry in any niche market, from artists to content to distribution to monetization, we are all set to start replicating it in 20+ such markets spread across the country (and 100+ across the world).

Onto restoring the pride, dignity and respect of the dialects (smaller languages) back to them!

#Rajasthani #Bhojpuri #Maithili #Magahi #Bundeli

@STAGEdotin - Kyonki boli me apnapan hai. 🙏

In case you loved what you read, here are some of the profiles we are hiring for -

Sr. Backend Engineer
Sr. Flutter Developer
Product Manager
Content Manager : Haryanvi Originals

DMs are open.