This episode of Two by Two was first published on 24th April 2025.

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Stage is an interesting, counter-intuitive, and extraordinary company.

It’s a company you’ve probably heard little about and know almost nothing about.

Vinay Sighal, co-founder and CEO of Stage, describes it as a Netflix for Indian cultures. It is a company that’s on the verge of something big. Stage is an OTT company that, in Singhal’s words, offers premium, sensible content in three cultures. Yes, cultures, not languages—Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and Rajasthani.

At a time when OTT platforms and consumer content companies are figuring out how to make their business work, Stage is an outlier.

It has 4.2 million subscribers and nearly 150 crores in revenue. Stage has also figured out a way to do this sustainably by reducing its burn by nearly 70% from last year to this year.

In today’s episode, Vinay tells the story of how Stage was created, how he built a company and lost it overnight, and how he then re-emerged from it by doing the exact opposite of all the things that brought him success earlier.

He switched from advertising to subscriptions, from going for international markets to local markets and from depending on platforms like Facebook to direct distribution.

To do this, he did not just have to build a company; he had to build entire movie industries. Stage is a story you must listen to if you want to understand how entrepreneurs and founders are building companies for Bharat in ways most of us cannot understand or even imagine.

In this episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are in discussion with Vinay Singhal, CEO and co-founder of Stage.

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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

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