Friends, have you ever desired to get inside the minds of young, successful entrepreneurs, who have created successful business that we admire envy and love in equal measure?
I had an opportunity of diving inside the minds of Arunabh Kumar, founder & CEO - Chief Experiment Officer, TheViralFever (TVF) and got a perspicacious insight into what went into making TVF a mastodonic success – it has over 1.5 million subscribers and a base of over 2.3 million community members.
Here’s a preview into his thinking, which catapulted TVF to pole position:
- Competition: There are only 3 things certain in life – death, taxes & competition – therefore competition is inevitable and I believe it is a good thing.
- How does TVF look at entry of big boys? We welcome the entry of big boys – Yash Raj Films (YRF), Eros, Star etc. because we do not see them as competitors, but as recognition of the great work that we are doing which is so stunning that it has attracted them into our space. When viewed in this context, we feel their entry is a pat on our back. In fact their presence encourages us to do even better.
- Is the TVF office ambience designed to make people creative? We believe that good ideas do not come from smoking up and having fun nor does it come from having colourful bean bags in the office. We believe that writing is our job and we want to excel at it.
- Attracting talent to TVF: We make certain type of content and we attract people who like this content and who want to create it along with us.
- How does TVF ensure that its content does not get lost in the digital jungle? We believe that in the digital jungle, content travels purely on merit. And our content has enough merit to stand out in the digital jungle.
- Advertising strategy of TVF: We believe that our content does our advertisement therefore we put $1 more, in what we make, rather than in advertising. This is how we let our content do the advertising for us.
- Where did TVF get this idea of advertising? We took a leaf out of German car companies - they do not believe in advertising. They put money in creating great cars which does the advertising for them.
- Strategy for making TVF ‘cool’: We keep on doing one scary thing every three months to remain ‘cool'.
If you are excited by reading this, then I would invite you to view the complete conversation I had with Arunabh Kumar, published on
Founding Fuel series, New Rules of Business, produced by Ping Network. It will give you key insights from his entrepreneurial journey, which you too can apply to create a business as successful as TVF!
Click here to view -
http://www.foundingfuel.com/video/how-tvf-took-the-digital-jungle-by-storm/?Src=insideiim
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here.
