FactorDaily, a newly formed startup in India, has raised $1 million to kick-start its efforts in tech publishing. Jayadevan PK (Co-founder & Head of Product) goes through how they raised venture capital without a proposed monetization model. He also delves into the product development lessons (using tech) he's learned which will be bringing Factor Daily to break even in 2019.

 

Podcast Transcription

Vahe Arabian: Welcome to Episode Six of the State of Digital Publishing podcast. State of Digital Publishing is an online publication and community providing resources, perspectives, collaboration on musical digital media and publishing professionals in new digital media technology and audience development. In this episode, I speak with Jayadevan PK, co-founder and head of product at Factor Daily. Hi, Jayadevan, how are you?

Jayadevan PK: I'm good, how are you?

Vahe Arabian: I'm good thanks. Great to connect with you. If you don't mind just starting off just letting our audience know more about you and about Factor Daily.

Jayadevan PK: Yeah, sure. We started Factor Daily about two years ago, and the idea was to raise the bar of technology journalism in India. And we come from different backgrounds, mostly from a journalism background, but we have people from tech and people from design in our teams. The idea was to say, "Hey, technology is affecting everybody's lives in India in a big way and we need to do justice with the way it's covered now". Nothing has changed in the last 5-10 years because it's always been the newspapers, and it's always been the blogs that cover technology.

Jayadevan PK: So, we said, "How can we change this?" That's how we got together. So, I was with the Economic Times a couple of times, and I also worked for a startup blog in between. A couple of general newspapers, and my co-founder, Pankaj, he used to work for Tech Content. A bunch of other publications including Meet, which is India's second largest financial daily and the Economic Times, which is India's largest financial daily. So, two of us and we had ... That's how we started off, luckily for us we managed to raise some money and we put a great team together. So, yeah, here we are. Two years out.

Vahe Arabian: No, I read that from a series of investors you were able to raise one million dollars, which is very rare in our space given the declining ad revenues and everything else. How were you able to convince or present the proposition of what you mentioned now to the investors? And how were you able to get them to invest in you guys, given that, like you've said or from what I've read, that you're still working on developing the product?

Jayadevan PK: You know what everybody understands is that media is changing, and the old type of media is not going to work with the new audience. And what everybody also realizes is, hey, there's a lot of flux in the market as to how news is distributed, or how news is gathered, and how news is consumed. Our proposition was, “hey, we have a lot of journalism background, can we fit technology into this? And can we see if we can come out with something interesting, something better than what is out there already as a product?” That was our proposition. I think the investors ... we have typically… do larger investments. But in India, if you've noticed, that it's a new trend that a lot of larger investors have started cutting smaller checks. Because they don't want to miss out on getting in all little companies. I think we were one of the guys who they thought had the right mix of journalism and tech background. And I don't think they gave it too much thought.  So, I think that's how it happened.

Vahe Arabian: I understand. If we could just take a step back,