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Grit Stories

Episode 

68

The Ups & Downs of Aprameya's Startup Life, from TaxiForSure to Koo

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00:00 - 3:10 - Introduction 
6:35 - 8:38 - Parents not agreeing for his startup stint; Shift in his own inclination towards startups and getting conviction
9:04 - 10:24 - Grit to start TFS; anyhow getting people from point A to point B
10:57 - 12:32- Angel Investors being very scarce and lack of information
12:34 - 14:25 - Market explosion and TFS being not really ready for it
18:09 - 20:05 - Grit to build for local language and not English: Vokal story- empowering non-English speaking crowd
20:27 - 22:41 - Challenges as a founder of shifting from a transactional business into a non-transactional business
27:28 - 29:05 - Pursuing the right person to rope him in as a co-founder
32:08 - 34:04 - Atmanirbhar Bharat victory, being just a 3 month old product!
34:59 - 35:57 - Moving fast to capture the Nigerian market
44:11 - 45:03 - Advice to new founders: Start early & Always trust in your first thought!

There’s one thing I’ve always known about Aprameya - he loves being an entrepreneur. 

And he’s no stranger to this journey. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Koo, a microblogging platform catering to the Indian vernacular. Koo was born as an offshoot of Vokal, a vernacular question and answer platform. Within one year, it amassed over a million users, and became a force of its own.

Before this, he was at the helm of TaxiForSure, leading it to a successful acquisition by Ola Cabs back in 2015. I was part of this journey, and Aprameya’s clarity and grit has been something I’ve been aware of throughout.

It is this enthusiasm that comes across in every minute of this awesome episode. 

Listen and find out more on: 

  • Koo’s start and explosive growth in the middle of the pandemic, and how the team coped with it all 
  • How he discovered his love for entrepreneurship (spoiler: by being one!) 
  • Starting TaxiForSure with a drawing on a tissue paper, securing funding during a time Angel Investments weren’t as popular, hitting unit positive in Bangalore and more 
  • The Vokal story: how internet is built on content consumption and sharing, and why it was important to create avenues to do both that isn’t primarily English based 
  • Creating an entire experience based on local languages, with examples of how they designed interactions for Kannada-speaking audience 
  • Sneak peek into what is brewing at Koo, and what the future holds for vernacular content 

This was among my favourite conversations, and not just because of having known Aprameya for so long. It helped me better understand the fast-shifting world of content, and the directions in which it is headed. 

Koo is about to make some noise, and we are excited for it. 

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Jennifer Phan
Co-founder and CEO, Passionfroot

We’re building Passionfroot 1, an operating system for creators to manage their business.

We’re based in Europe and raised our $ 3.4m pre-seed round from Creandum and US angels such as Vlad (Webflow) and creators like Ali Abdaal.As we’re creating a new category and as the creator economy is global and mostly online, we’re building from Day 1 a global company and product that helps creators monetize around the world.

This brings a lot of complexities especially in terms of payments and taxes as our early users are based both in Europe and the US and deal with cross-border transactions.What are Do’s and Dont’s for European startups who have a global ambition and build products for a global customer base from Day 1. Anything you would do differently?

Krish Subramanian
Co-founder, Chargebee

Thanks @pjbouten! Love how you’ve thought about incrementally shaping a category with a focus on product and service, and only then thinking about getting the message out there vs the other way around.

And totally agree on the distinctions and overlaps both self-serve and enterprise motions share.

Community/Editorial, Relay

Thanks, PJ, for taking the time to address questions from the great vantage of shaping Showpad into a global, enterprise SaaS brand!


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