The Pratilipi storyline — highlighting entrepreneurial lessons of 2016

Pratilipi, one of the largest Indian language self-publishing platforms, currently operational in eight Indian languages, is allowing Indian writers to publish content in their own regional language and fostering vernacularism in Indian media. Founded in 2014 and helmed by its five founding pillars, Rahul Ranjan, Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Sahradayi Modi, Ranjeet Pratap Singh and Prashant Gupta, the company is continuing to stand strong.

Learnings from 2016:

Ranjeet Pratap Singh, co-founder, Pratilipi, told YourStory, “2015 was the year of building and executing various experiments with little support from facts, resources or domain expertise.”

He added, ”While we continue to operate on the same basic principle of continuous experimentation, I think the defining phrase for 2016 has been "laying the foundation". We have started figuring out and laying down the values that work for us, the kind of people we want to work with, the kind of environment we want to work in and the kind of business we want to build.”

In 2016, they moved to their first real office, went from serving less than a million readers in all of 2015 to serving more than a million readers a month, and also raised their first large round of funding, which meant they didn't have to worry about how to make rent at the end of every month.

Ranjeet added, “A lot more importantly perhaps, we believe that we have played a small part in helping a few people get closer to their language, their culture and their fellow people.”

He firmly believes that

• It is very important for the early team to have a shared set of values and beliefs.
• The team needs to be compassionate and have empathy towards each other and to our users.
• It is critical to remain laser-focused and say no to everything that doesn't help us serve our users better.

Key Milestones till 2016:

• Over 18 million content pieces read.
• 6,500 writers who have published over 40,000 content pieces in eight languages.
• Launching Android app this week.

Pratilipi Storyline: 

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