When it first started off in 2014, WittyFeed was a seven-member company. For its founders, all fresh graduates, it was a do-or-die situation. After having seen a couple of their start-up ventures fold, Vinay Singhal, Parveen Singhal and Shashank Vaishnav had pinned their hopes on their latest venture and had given themselves six months to make it work. After incurring huge losses, WittyFeed finally broke even in its seventh month. Ever since, there’s been no looking back, and today, WittyFeed is ranked the second-best content generator in the world after BuzzFeed.
For Vinay, Parveen and Shashank, all serial entrepreneurs and graduates from SRM college, the journey began in the second year of college, when they set up their first company. “We’d seen a lot of failures by then, and had already been bankrupt eight times in six years. Our run rate was more than one!” laughs Vinay, the CEO of WittyFeed. “By the time we set up WittyFeed, we’d borrowed heavily from the market and went into it prepared to incur losses for at least six months. Fortunately, the tide turned and things began looking up; soon enough, we repaid our debts as well,” adds Shashank, CTO of the now Indore-based company.
Ask them what WittyFeed is all about and Vinay says, “There are three things in the content business — content creators, distributors and consumers. WittyFeed is essentially a platform for all three. While to the world we are a content company, to us we are a tech company. We build tech offerings for the content business, in a way we are going to act as a content ecosystem.”
With so many players in the segment, Shashank says that they remain ahead of their game by dint of sheer numbers. “We have over 15,000 influencers across the globe. Also, when people see content on WittyFeed, they are sure that it is first news; so the speed at which we pick up data helps as well,” he says.
The trio originally began their entrepreneurial journey in 2010, while still in college, with four other college friends.
The company was called Vatsana (an alphabet for each of the members) and continues to remain the legal name for WittyFeed’s parent company. “We’ve been through it all. We’ve been thrown out of offices and have even built websites for as less as Rs. 500. We’ve seen product and branding failures. In the content business itself, we’ve re-branded ourselves four times. WittyFeed is what finally clicked,” says Vinay.
But at no point did any of the founders want to quit. “You don’t give up if you have the right reasons for doing something. It’s important to understand why you want to be an entrepreneur — you don’t do it just for money or fame. And there are definitely no flexible hours here; you’re working round the clock to make your company work. Also, if you think you don’t want to be answerable to anyone, you couldn’t be more wrong. As an entrepreneur, you are answerable to everyone; right from your investors to clients, employees and even your own families,” says Vinay.
An interesting facet of the company is the fact that they do not hire people with experience at all. Their interviews usually last six hours or more. “We like to hire rank freshers; there’s no unlearning happening that way. Qualifications don’t really matter to us. What matters is how passionate an individual is to learn and how loyal they are; our interviews are all about gauging this. Our accounts head is a B.Com fail and our design head used to be a door-to-door salesman. The average age in our company is about 23,” says Parveen, who is the COO of the company and also Vinay’s younger brother.
Personally too, all three of them are from humble backgrounds. While Vinay and Parveen come from a village in Bhiwani district of Haryana, where their father runs a small grocery store, Shashank comes from a village called Bakhatgarh near Indore, where his father is a veterinarian. “Our families are very supportive of our ventures. They didn’t entirely understand it, however. For instance, when I had to explain to my father what I was doing, I drew an analogy between his grocery business and our content business. I explained that we buy traffic on the Internet just the way he buys products to retail from his store,” smiles Vinay.
As their company grows from strength to strength, they strive to constantly innovate. “For, companies that don’t innovate die. We’re looking to work in the field of virtual reality soon,” says Shashank.
