VerSe’s Umang Bedi on how a poll changed Dailyhunt’s game, content monetisation, and hiring hacks

VerSe Innovation's Co-founder Umang Bedi opened the second day of TechSparks Bengaluru 2023 with a candid conversation on how the company has managed to scale its two businesses—news aggregator Dailyhunt and short-video app Josh.

"It's a tale of two cities," Bedi said, describing how different both the businesses are.

Bedi played a pivotal role in helping news aggregator website DailyHunt touch a revenue of $300 million from $7 million. His experience across three different phases—six years in engineering, his role as managing director at Adobe and Facebook (now Meta), and now as the co-founder of VerSe—helped shape his career progression.

Dailyhunt has been EBITDA positive at 14% for the last 18 months and is witnessing strong double-digit growth since, Bedi said, during a fireside chat with YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma.

"We will continue to grow in line with the market and perhaps even beat the market," he said.

Short-video platform Josh, on the other hand, is looking to achieve breakeven in the next 18 months and aims to continue the EBITDA positive trend for another four quarters before considering a public-market listing, according to Bedi.

"The goal is to gather substantial data demonstrating scaled business operations before considering an initial public offering (IPO)," Bedi said, noting that the short-video business still remains untested and unproven.

The vastness of the Indian market offers great opportunities, if utilised well, and local languages are relevant (especially for short videos), Bedi noted. Indians love consuming news, right from Bollywood and cricket to politics, he added.

Leveraging adtech

VerSe built an adtech platform in 2018 to tap into the country's monetisable audience and understand user behaviour. It then floated a poll powered by market research firm Nielsen in 14 languages to predict the outcome of the 2019 general elections. The poll included questions like "What do you think of Prime Minister Narendra Modi?" and "What do you think of PM Modi's policies?"

"We held a press conference after running the poll for 10 days. Media coverage termed me the spokesperson of Modi but I didn't care about the outcome of the poll. I only wanted to know the number of people who engaged with the poll. It ended up being the largest poll in the history of mankind," Bedi said, drawing loud applause from the audience.

"This is how we shaped our monetisation strategy," he added.

Today, the Bengaluru-based unicorn's proprietary technology platform has over 300 million users who consume content in their local language.

The company raised $805 million (~Rs 6,675 crore) in a funding round last year, led by global investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), Luxor Capital and others. It has raised over $1.4 billion so far, according to data by market intelligence firm Tracxn.

The unicorn recently announced an expansion to the UAE, marking its first international foray. This will enable it to add 60 million users from the region to its total addressable market.

Content struggle

Acknowledging that monetising content in India has been tricky, Bedi said VerSe has been able to monetise content effectively by understanding the consumer and whether they will find value by paying for content.

All consumers need to be categorised into specific verticals based on their interests (finance, health, pharmaceuticals, for instance), and the focus must be on the top three players in every space to draw in audiences, said Bedi, elaborating the monetising strategy.

"Work on verticalising (sic) effectively instead of spraying and praying in your approach," he advised.

Hiring the right talent

When asked about how he sets up a strong sales team, Bedi shared his secret strategies for the first time ever on a public forum.

Apart from looking for curious and hungry individuals, Bedi asks candidates to name three reasons why they shouldn't be hired, while "arrogant" individuals are asked to sign a blank piece of paper.

"The piece of paper is the resignation letter to help them part ways in a mutually good way without them suing my company," he said, advising founders to create their own hacks to hire effective talent.

Aristotle's mantra

Amid the funding winter, Bedi offered tips to founders on pitching effectively to investors.

"Remember that the investor, nine out of ten times, is not an entrepreneur and has not built a business on their own. They don't understand all aspects of entrepreneurship. You have to do it in a slightly different way," he said.

Bedi said he uses a simple framework to ensure seamless communication between the founder and the investor—power, negotiation, and persuasion.

"As Aristotle said, there are three legs of persuasive communication—ethos, pathos, logos—which mean ethics, emotions, and logic respectively," he elaborated.

"What appeals to investors is the total addressable market, the differentiation factor, and how the founder is looking to solve the problem," Bedi said, noting that Aristotle's mantra will help founders crack the funding game.