The birth of OTT platform STAGEx

YourStory UNCUT aims to explore the biggest challenges and failures startups and entrepreneurs have faced in their journeys. Today, Vinay Singhal of STAGE talks about his journey of building and losing a business and starting up again.

Tuesday May 24, 2022 , 3 min Read

Hello Readers,

In 2016, content website WittyFeed’s founders Vinay Singhal, Shashank Vaishnav, and Praveen Singhal woke up to a nightmare. The company—India’s answer to American company BuzzFeed—lost its Facebook page overnight.

Later that year, the trio set out to build a Netflix for Bharat—STAGE, an artist and dialect-based OTT platform for Indians. Today, the hyperlocal video entertainment platform has recorded more than two million downloads and has over one lakh paying customers.

This week, on YourStory UNCUT, Vinay of STAGE talks about his journey of building and losing a business and starting up again.

Despite facing years of struggle and rejections while building STAGE, the co-founder says he would not change a thing.

“Jo hua acha hua (Whatever happened, happened for the best). It only made us better entrepreneurs in the process…If you don’t give up, life does give you a way out,” Vinay tells YourStory, Read More.

Editor’s Pick: I Dream of Sunny fan verse

Actor-entrepreneur Sunny Leone has launched ‘I Dream of Sunny’, a fan verse that combines NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Artificial Intelligence (AI), fan verse, gaming, lucky draw, winning combination, and more to reach out to a wider audience. Sunny tells HerStory about her entrepreneurial journey so far and lessons learned along the way. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Goodbye warranty cards

BITS Pilani alumnus Shashwat Agarwal noticed that many households misplace physical bills, warranty cards, AMC (Annual Maintenance Contract) receipts, service bills, etc., of most appliances.

In 2021, he launched TOTOKO, a post-sales management startup that offers a centralised platform to assist households and MSMEs with warrantied items and post-sales services. Read more.

News & Updates

Foodtech platform Zomato reported a loss of Rs 347.4 crore in the fourth quarter (Q4) of the fiscal year (FY) 2022. This is nearly five times the loss in its previous quarter, and 2.5 times the loss it reported a year ago in the same quarter.

In a series of tweets, former Twitter India head Manish Maheshwari talked about the difficulties his edtech startup Invact Metaversity was facing, and hinted at shutting down operations—only three months after raising funds.

In an all-cash deal comprising primary capital and secondary buyouts, consumer goods major Marico Ltd has acquired a nearly 54 percent equity stake in HW Wellness Solutions Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates breakfast and snack brand True Elements.

Nearly 100 CEOs and over a dozen government authorities from India are in Davos, Switzerland to attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Some of the startup founders attending the event include Oyo's Ritesh Agarwal and BYJU'S Founder Byju Raveendran.

Match Group has announced that Google will allow alternative methods of payment for users of its Tinder mobile app on the Android platform. This comes after Google asked Tinder, Fortnite, and all other apps to only conduct billing via the Play Store.