{"id":1771,"date":"2022-05-11T10:00:54","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trica.co\/capital\/blog\/?p=1771"},"modified":"2022-07-15T10:34:15","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T10:34:15","slug":"my-job-is-asking-all-the-right-questions-not-having-all-the-answers-umang-bedi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trica.co\/capital\/blog\/my-job-is-asking-all-the-right-questions-not-having-all-the-answers-umang-bedi\/","title":{"rendered":"My job is asking all the right questions, not having all the answers: Umang Bedi"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Pranav Mahajani, Head – Company Relations, trica capital<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They say that we are what we repeatedly do; excellence is a habit, not an act. I see that dedication for excellence in very few people \u2013 those who have conviction in their ambition and are ready to give it their 100%. Such individuals almost can\u2019t help but be on the go. Repeating success is the only way to be. Serial entrepreneurs are the best example here. I think of them as serial leaders. To lead more than one organization to great heights is not an easy feat. It takes an outstanding person to do that \u2013 a trendsetter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>When we decided to start a new series of interviews at<\/span> trica<\/span><\/i>, we named it \u2018The Bellwether Club\u2019 to reflect the kind of intelligentsia profiled here. And when we decided to list the most successful entrepreneurs and investors in India, one of the names that immediately came to my mind is that of Umang Bedi.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Umang made news when he became Facebook\u2019s India head in 2016. He was the MD of Intuit India when he was hardly 28, and had also headed Adobe for five years before joining Facebook. At 40, he left the corporate world to make an impact by himself and eventually embraced entrepreneurship.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Today, Umang is the co-founder of startup unicorn VerSe Innovation, which powers content aggregator platform Dailyhunt and short video apps Josh and PublicVibe. (Umang joined as Co-founder in 2018, at the request of his long-term friend and VerSe founder Virendra Gupta.) Recently the company raised $805 million at a valuation of $5 billion. What started as a local language content aggregator platform in 2014 has now become a multi-business conglomerate with a family of apps serving distinct use cases for large target audiences across Bharat.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As the first guest on The Bellwether Club, Umang tells me about his journey. One of the most interesting traits I found in Umang was his clarity of thought. Read on to find out why.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Pranav<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/b>Dailyhunt has 225 million active users today on the app, and more than 100 million users on the mobile web. I\u2019m one of them by the way. But today, the news business is a very tricky one, especially in a polarised socioeconomic milieu. What is the credo at work at Dailyhunt? What are the building blocks you keep going back to every time you think there is a deviation? And how did you arrive at these building blocks?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Umang<\/b><\/p>\n


\n<\/b>We have had three core beliefs between Viru (Virendra Gupta) and myself. One, that the Internet is pivoting, and in the next four years we will get to 1.2 billion people online and 80-90% of them will consume content in local languages. The second is that when that happens, the kind of experiences that we deliver across news, entertainment, and infotainment will need to change in terms of mediums and formats of delivery and the last mile. Thirdly, whoever does this well and addresses this opportunity successfully can create an infinitely large outcome for its ecosystem of partners, creators, publishers, advertisers, investors, and of course, add value for the customer.\u00a0<\/span>It was with these three core beliefs that we restarted the Dailyhunt journey in 2018.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, Dailyhunt was a pure play news aggregator, bringing together content from 800 newspaper partners largely across 14 different languages. The product looked like an erstwhile BBC or CNN; just a very small deck of cards with the name of the publisher and the headline – this was the standard interface across all the 14 languages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>We really wanted to bridge the digital divide and serve our readers a superlative content experience, by owning the mindshare, the timeshare, and eventually the revenue share of local language audiences. We wanted Dailyhunt to be the largest Indic platform that allows users to consume, to engage and to socialise with content that is not just informational but also engaging and entertaining.\"\"<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The little text cards have now become a multimedia-focused feed with viral cards, multimedia content, images, video, live TV, all embedded, and it gets dynamically updated in real time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Today we get two million unique pieces of content every day in 14 languages, and we now have 220 million users on the app, 105 million who come back every day and who spend 30 minutes with us daily. We have $200 million in ARR and have broken even.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The hardest part in this business is the creation of a business model, wherein you can monetize this content. Most platforms rely on ad networks. If advertising is their business model, and the ad network is external to you then you’re never in control of your destiny, because the yields are minuscule.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Pranav<\/b><\/p>\n

With all these put together what you’ve actually developed is a platform effect. You have an infinite supply of news – you’re not developing the content, you’re curating it. Plus, you can go to an advertiser and tell her \u201cI\u2019m bringing you customers from micro managed communities across the country.\u201d<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Umang<\/b><\/p>\n

Absolutely. Today we have audiences coming to us from 21,000 of the 22,000 pincodes in India. Half of our business comes from large enterprises in terms of advertisers, but the other half comes from small businesses. For example, in a city of one lakh people, we may have only 7,000 on the platform but maybe there are 10 businesses there that want to reach out to that 7000 people. So the advertising yield is so pinpointed. That\u2019s how we are driving growth at Dailyhunt.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>We are also present for every new handset user as we are pre-burned on Android phones, and on WhatsApp we enable sharing with deep links that invokes discoverability. Soon we will get into new, more relevant formats – audio rooms for example. <\/span>(We are already present in video format via Josh and PublicVibe.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Pranav<\/b><\/p>\n

And that was my next question: “How is the Josh?” The world is moving to video. And the newspaper industry across the globe is probably just going to end in the next few years.\u00a0 How do you see content video creation growing?<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Umang<\/b><\/p>\n

The definition of news is changing today. So at the core of Dailyhunt, one very big focus is on video. In fact, video is 30-50% of the overall consumption of content today. The other thing that’s emerging is audio. You will see us adding that very soon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the really big one, especially for local language audiences, is super hyperlocal stuff – what\u2019s happening in my <\/span>taluka<\/span><\/i>, what is the local corporator saying?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To solve this, we have launched a new app called PublicVibe, which is a hyperlocal video app, where creators use a tool called \u201cLocal Star\u201d to create content. It allows users to create a video that looks like a TV experience with the click of a few buttons. Mobile journalists can write and publish content on PublicVibe and this also serves itself on Dailyhunt.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Pranav<\/b><\/p>\n

PublicVibe is what Twitter was in the earliest days – if something was happening in my neighbourhood, I was tweeting it. You\u2019ve created infinite touchpoints for individuals anywhere in the world to loop in.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Umang<\/b><\/p>\n

Twitter is for upper-middle class, English-speaking users, mostly from metro cities. But we are building a Bharat experience and that is a huge opportunity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We are the only local language focused platform in the world that is operating in India, and has cracked a three prong code: user growth, engagement, and monetization. A lot of other companies have cracked one or two of these three points; but no one has cracked this at scale – where there are 20 million monthly active users, another 135 million users on mobile web per month spending 30 minutes with us daily, and we have got $200 million in ARR. That is unique. What we have done is extend that goodness to another use case, which is short videos. We believe that short video is a phenomenally large use case. That has played out in infinite forms in China, and has created several companies valued over $200 billion and it gives us the confidence that whoever wins the space will serve this audience effectively.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, there is Instagram, but it serves largely English speaking users. Local language audiences find the content on Instagram very intimidating. It\u2019s not even aspirational, because it’s all about fancy food, fancy cars, fancy fashion, fancy holidays.<\/span>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n