Cloud tech helping us to tap global creator economy: Kuku FM Co-founder

As content consumption goes through a churning in India, with the creator economy surpassing all metrics, Kuku FM which is a podcast platform is re-inventing the traditional radio by more diverse audio contents.

With more than 1 crore listeners and creators, more than 13 lakh premium listeners and available in nine languages, Kuku FM is currently working with over 30,000 content creators, writers, voiceover artists across the country.

Vikas Goyal, Co-Founder, Kuku FM, told IANS that with the help of cloud technology, they have been able to scale up business and launch new services to reach a global audience on a manageable budget.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

Q: You recently crossed the 1 million paid subscription mark. Tell us about your content strategy which is working so well? What gives you the edge over other audio streaming apps?

A: We are focusing our energies in creating content that is focussed on giving tangible, valuable outcomes to our users. Our Non-Fiction library is full of self help, personal finance, historical and motivational content that will help our users move forward in life. By focusing on their aspirations, we are able to make a very strong argument to ask for their wallet share.

Q: A large proportion of your audience resides in tier-2/tier-3 cities. What kind of growth do you see from this market segment over the next five years?

A: Audiences in tier 2 and 3 cities have a very large appetite for products and content that can solve their very unique problems. They are not only the target for international giants to find their next wave of growth but also for home-grown Indian startups who want to solve large Indian problems. The impact of Jio and the UPI is that now any business can easily build machinery to feed this hunger for high quality products in small town India.

Q: How many content creators are you currently working with? Are they making content exclusively for you and what is the revenue sharing model?

A: We currently work with over 30,000 content creators, writers, voiceover artists across the country. For a lot of them we are either the only source of income or the most major source of income. From subject matter expertise to influencing the end user to try us out, creators are integral to our success and future strategy.

Apart from upfront payments, we encourage them to enter the revenue share agreement so they get their just share in our blitz-scaling success.

Q: Apart from giving content creators a platform to showcase their work, how are you training/empowering budding artists (script writers, etc)?

A: We are building a community of content creators who get a single platform to transact with us across creative, operational and payment processes. We have been running workshops with top long-form writers and journalists to help our creators upskill.

All our creators are highly educated, well qualified young people from small town India who have felt left behind because they chose to focus on a language other than English. But a vernacular platform like us gives them an avenue to balance the scale with their English-educated counterparts.

Q: What has cloud technology allowed you to do better?

A: Cloud technology has allowed us to serve our customers across the globe. With the help of cloud technology, we have been able to scale up our business and launch new services on a manageable budget. Because of managed cloud technology, launching new projects has been easier, faster and stress free.

Access to vast computing power and infrastructure to reach a global audience has given flexibility to experiment and iterate which has helped us to serve our customers rightly.

AWS being one of the largest cloud service providers, offers a vast suite of services which are needed from day 1 to experiment and build. Having prior hands-on experience with AWS, we have been able to leverage a lot of services offered by AWS.

Simplicity of the platform and support from AWS and developer community has enabled us to explore new things which have helped us to make our services scalable and reduce cost. A wide coverage of data centres and regions of AWS has helped us to serve our customers efficiently and provide good customer experience on the product.

--IANS

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