When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the purpose of helping others. The things ‘not to do’ always take a upper hand over things ‘to do’.
Maybe it’s time we step away from that.
In this new blog Series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. Starting today, we are going to publish a series of posts on what we call the #OneThing. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups who find themselves in a similar situation. In the first blog of the series, we talk to Subrat Kar, the CEO of Noida based Vidooly, the video analytics tool that has just secured its first round of funding, and is on its way to becoming an Indian startup success story.
Subrat Kar, CEO of Vidooly
Vidooly has been one of this year’s poster boys for the Indian startup community. The product is awesome, the market is growing, and the opportunities are endless. The team is completely homegrown, and for a company that’s growing and making waves, has a founding team that lets their work do the talking. There’s no gimmickry and absolutely no noise, except about the product they are making.
When I talked to Subrat, he was travelling back to his home state of West Bengal, and I asked him the question point blank, because I wanted to know the first thing that popped into his head.
#TheOneThing
His answer was quick too – “That blog we wrote.”
On further investigation, this turned out to be a post on the Vidooly blog, published in October last year called ‘How to maximise your YouTube views organically’. Subrat said that though at that time, this wasn’t a marketing move at all on their part, the reader interest and viral lift they got out of that post made them believe in the power of content marketing. “We don’t spend any money at all,” he says, “Our marketing is purely content.” This is incredible for a new entrant like Vidooly, and Subrat acknowledges it.
“This is the one thing that helped us grow”, he says, “The confidence that initial number of readers and commenters told us that we were on to something. And we built on it. We didn’t do anything to actually make it go viral, so maybe there was an element of luck involved. But it convinced us that if we gave out good information, there were people hungry enough for it who would become our customers.”
About #PNgrowth
PNgrowth is ayear long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke. Content marketing will be one of the major areas being covered, as will all the other points our #PNgrowth series will highlight. Nominate your Startup here (Apply before 15th November)