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Many million-dollar concepts have humble beginnings, and Pocket FM’s story isn’t any totally different. Rohan Nayak, the corporate’s founder, discovered himself staring behind a crowded metro seat throughout his every day commute from Gurugram to Noida. The three-hour journey was stuffed with the monotony of audiobooks, and a query sparked in Nayak’s thoughts: “Why is there no innovation in audio storytelling?”
This easy query on a crowded prepare journey turned the seed for Pocket FM, a platform that has revolutionized audio leisure in India. Launched in 2018, Pocket FM provides short-form, serialized audio content material like podcasts, audiobooks, and even dramatized fiction and the corporate lately secured a whopping $103 million in Collection D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Stepstone Group, a testomony to the transformative energy of Nayak’s thought and the execution of his group.
Pocket FM has efficiently accomplished its first Worker Inventory Possession Plan (ESOP) buyback, amounting to $8.3 million. Quite a few present and former workers participated on this buyback initiative.
The highway to success wasn’t clean crusing. Nayak, a product lead at a cellular tech startup Cube26 earlier than founding Pocket FM, knew the challenges of constructing a brand new enterprise. However the highway to success wasn’t clean. Pocket FM wasn’t Nayak’s first enterprise. He describes the preliminary section as a collection of “near-death experiences.” The group experimented with varied audio codecs, from podcasts to reside radio, earlier than realizing the candy spot: short-form, serialized fiction. This concerned testing totally different content material codecs and viewers preferences earlier than touchdown on the candy spot of snackable, partaking audio experiences.
“We had a near-death second at Pocket FM even earlier than correctly beginning up. What helped throughout this course of was having good co-founders and a whole lot of naïve optimism. I knew we may determine this out,” Rohan stated in an interview with YourStory.
Pocket FM’s deal with short-form audio caters completely to busy Indians with restricted consideration spans. The bite-sized content material is good for commutes, exercises, and even family chores. Moreover, Pocket FM prioritizes regional content material, guaranteeing a wider viewers can join with the tales and voices on the platform.
The corporate’s dedication to regional languages appears to be a successful method. Regardless of dealing with competitors from established gamers, Pocket FM’s distinctive strategy has garnered a loyal person base. This, coupled with their deal with creating high-quality, authentic content material, has propelled them to the forefront of the Indian audio leisure trade.
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