Josh Talks Broke Even in 2017 After 2 Years of Losses, Expecting a Profit of Rs 2 Cr This Year

Josh Talks, an online educational content company that uses personal storytelling to inspire viewers across India to achieve their true potential, achieved a break even year in 2017-2018 and monetised through advertisements and brand partnerships. Gurugram-based company which saw a loss of Rs 10 lakhs in 2015 & Rs 50 lakhs in 2016, is expecting a profit of Rs 2 crore in this year.
Launched in January 2015 by Supriya Paul and Shobhit Banga, Gurugram-based Josh Talks had raised an angel round of funding in November 2017 led by Girish Mathrubootham – Founder, Freshworks, Rohit Chanana – Hero Corporation, Apurva Chamaria – CRO, Rategain and more.
By bringing out stories of people from diverse backgrounds including sports, stand up comedy, entrepreneurship, bollywood, politics and more, Josh serves as a platform that caters to everyone’s interest.
The idea started off with a simple conference where multiple speakers came and shared their story on stage to an audience size of 300 people and then grew to India’s largest conference in 2016 with over 5000+ attendees but the founders felt that the impact that was created was just not enough and then came the decision to take Josh Talks content online.
Now, Josh exists as a multilingual platform with content in over 8 languages covering Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Hindi & English and a viewership of more than 40 million views each month with penetration right down to the bottom of the pyramid.
Josh Talks aims to inspire people from the grassroots of India through stories. “While most content & media platforms focus on Millennial audiences from metropolitans, Josh Talks focuses on making content comprehensible by people in smaller towns and cities – people who have had no such exposure to different career streams before.
The content is curated in the form of personal experiences and stories to be relatable to this audience and is also delivered in languages that are understandable by them. There is no other knowledge sharing platform in the country that exists in vernacular languages,” said Supriya Paul, Co-founder, Josh Talks in an interaction with BW Disrupt.
Its revenue model is currently divided into two folds – offline and online. A large part of the online revenue comes from advertising through Brand Partnerships & Youtube and the offline programs are usually co-created properties along with sponsors.
Some of the organisations that Josh Talks is working with/has worked with include Facebook India & South Asia, ITC – VIVEL, Reliance Industries, United Colours of Benetton, Amity University and more.
While speaking about the challenges faced by the company, Supriya added, “Building a team to scale regional languages has been very difficult and Josh is still in the process of cracking it. Josh talks is currently managing a team of 75+ full time people from across 12 cities in India, and it gets tougher with each new person.
Another major challenge has been understanding each language, as its almost been like understanding a totally different country with different level of interests, aspirations and more. Getting the right team in place to build our product has been challenging as well since the founders come from a non tech background.”
On an average, Josh Talks is getting about 30-40 Mn views each month across all its channels. Josh Talks has also reached out to over 150,000 people offline through its events in 30 different cities and workshops in over 800+ colleges.
A lot of the expansion is going to be in vernacular content as Josh Talks grows more in the languages that they are currently in and expand into new ones. They are also in the process of building a career mentorship platform for people from smaller towns and cities who have big aspirations but lack the right kind of direction to get them going.
Commenting on the market size & opportunity, Supriya mentioned, “Market size would be the entire youth population of India – 600Mn+ people currently. Opportunity in terms of revenue is the digital ad market of Rs 12000+ crores.”