Episode 59: Building Inshorts & Public App w/Deepit Purkayastha
About Deepit Purkayastha:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Deepit Purkayastha. He is the co-founder of Inshorts & Public app. Deepit's entrepreneurial journey began in an IIT Kharagpur dorm room with his co-founders Azhar & Anunay. 10 years later, Inshorts is India's #1 short news app, with 10 million+ active users, and Public App is India's largest platform for hyperlocal content, with 50 million+ active users.
In this conversation, Deepit talks about how he convinced his parents to take a gap year to pursue Inshorts, his counter-intuitive insights about the Indian consumer, why Inshorts & Public App are unique, their product moat, and much more.
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Key Highlights:
The importance of timing for a start-up: It's important for start-ups to carefully consider the timing of their launch, as it can significantly impact their long-term success. They must identify and capitalize on the innovation gap at the right time. The biggest reason for a start-up failure is timing.
The moats of a leader: People’s interests evolve. Understanding this evolution and ensuring the product and the services are evolving with the customer’s changing interests creates moats for a leader. It is a challenging and iterative process. But it puts the leader in a unique position of influence.
The importance of visual content in media for creating connectivity and virality: The image is the first thing the consumer sees, which helps them judge if the news is relevant to them. It operates subtly on the psyche. So, it has to be related to the news and communicate the story effectively. Therefore, it becomes important for products in media to provide images that sync with the stories and drive consumers to the site.
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In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
01:24 Is a start-up an extreme expression of founders' nature?
02:48 How he convinced his parents to take a gap year to build Inshorts?
04:19 The importance of timing in launching products.
09:56 The future of Facebook?
11:30 Why is Inshorts & Public App unique, and what is their product moat?
28:28 His counterintuitive insights about the Indian consumer.
30:57 What is the importance of visuals in content consumption and virality?
34:00 The kindest thing anyone has done for you.
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