Varun Mayya was in college when he along with his friends started up a t-shirt manufacturing business called SIZR. Later on, he went into building a recruitment platform, Jobspire. And they were one of the youngest teams to raise venture capital of Rs 1.7 crore even before they graduated, and scaled the company to serve 4 million requests in 2016. In 2017, they sold Jobspire to a New York-based company.

Varun also authored a book named Pyjama Profit which is a guide for millennials to get started with an online freelance practice, while developing the skills needed to succeed.

Along with running a youtube channel, Varun also co-founded Scenes, a community platform for creators to manage, moderate, and monetize their communities in one place. Scenes has raised funds from some notable investors including Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Tanmay Bhat as well Tanglin Ventures, Better Capital, Whiteboard Capital, iSeed Ventures, and Blume Founders Fund.

Tune in to this insightful episode with Varun to learn about building a brand, processes around content creation, and leveraging your youtube channel to scale your business.

Notes –

03:10 – Intro

04:05 – His journey before entrepreneurship

06:49 – Getting introduced to oDesk (now Upwork) via his mother and earning his first $100

09:10 – Starting a visual version of Naukri in fourth year of college

11:09 – Writing an Amazon Bestseller Book – “Pyjama Profit: The Millennial’s Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career”

12:48 – Starting Avalon Scenes

18:07 – Two rounds of fundings for building a community space

19:22 – Top clients and why do they use Scenes?

22:11 – Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

24:09 – What excites him the most about Scenes?

26:40 – Solving a problem really well v/s Building a large business

28:41 – What’s their longterm goal with Scenes?

33:02 – Can Scenes eventually replace Discord?

34:36 – Why he continues to a creator with Scenes growing?

41:25 – Learnings on YouTube and Twitter around content creation

46:15 – One of his best videos on YouTube

52:44 – “I think we live in a trust-deficient economy and content is the only way to beat it.”

 

Read the full transcript here:

 

Varun 0:00

So some of our top clients are GG Nation, they just raise like three mil or something like that. We have a growth school who’s using scenes, we now have companies in the US like Wings of the world. We have companies in Canada, like one of our investors, Pure plays, who kind of jumped on scenes. We’re at about 400k revenue. We’re adding about 3200k of new revenue every month. In fact, by the end of next month, we’re expecting to be around 600k, just in terms of pipeline, growing pretty fast. Every month, it’s like very consistent sales in the report, I can sort of predict it. At the start of the month, they tell me what the pipeline is at the end of the month, they close. And it’s such a predictable number. We even know the conversion percentage. It’s a very cat driven business. So you spend money and then you get a customer and then they go through the motions, we have a sales motion after the customer discovers us.

 

So, we’re doing very well, why do they use us? Two reasons, I think we have two very specific ICP. Like personas, the first Persona is like creators. These are people like Ankur Warikoo. For example, Ankur Warikoo uses Scenes, Finance with Sharan uses Scenes. For them, it’s the same problem that I had. We have an audience on YouTube, we want to own that audience. For once we want to own the distribution that we have, otherwise you don’t own it. It’s just you’re renting it from YouTube or Instagram. So very, very obvious use cases for them. And eventually, they’ll monetize with courses. And Scenes has the infra to do courses as well.

 

And on the other hand, I think if you look at businesses. For example, now we’re doing a pilot with Monster jobs. Where they just went live yesterday. And if you look at them, for them, it’s like we have a high DAO. We want to convert that into retention. And for some businesses it could be GTM. It could be, hey, we just want to have, like there’s this one company called Nova HQ that uses us where they just want to have people engaging, and then they’ll find a way to monetize it. Very similar to how we did it on our Discord. So three different use cases, I would say two different personas, but three different use cases. And every day, the fact that Scenes is so complex and vast, you can even do things like custom CSS, or you can make it look like your own platform. Because it’s so vast, you can use Scenes in any way. So every day, we get surprised with new use cases where we didn’t predict it. It just came on the platform by itself.

 

we’re growing pretty fast. And right now if we spend x we know we can make y so it’s now a question of how much x to spend and should we raise money for it and those sorts of second order questions, I guess.

 

Nansi 2:39

Hi, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to share that this podcast is brought to you by Prime Venture Partners. An early stage VC fund led by Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya and Sanjay Swami. Prime is often the first institutional investor in category defining tech startups in FinTech, SAS, healthcare and education, such as Mygate, Quizizz, PlanetSpark, Bolt and Glip. To know more about Prime, visit https://primevp.in/

 

Siddhartha 3:10

Hi, this is Sidhartha Ahaluwalia. Welcome to 100X Entrepreneur Podcast. Today I have with me Varun Mayya, founder of Scenes, one of the largest products for creating communities by content creators, by enterprises. Varun is also a very well known content creator on YouTube, on Twitter, Varun started his journey in entrepreneurship at the age of 19 by founding a company called Jobspire, which is now acquired.

 

Today in this episode, we’ll deep dive into Varun’s own journey, his mental models, his frameworks, and how he manages to balance a startup and journey of a content creator with having more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. And Varun has one of the most intelligent audiences on YouTube. Varun, Welcome on the podcast.

 

Varun 4:03

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

 

Siddhartha 4:05

Varun, I would love to know your journey before entrepreneurship. Where did you grow up? Your parents, their background and your education?

 

Varun 4:14

Yeah. I grew up in Bangalore. I’ve been a Bangalore boy all my life. The only time I ever left Bangalore was to study. I went to Manipal. The Mangalore one and my mom’s a CA, My dad’s a doctor. So they both come from, so my mom comes from Udupi, my dad comes from this place called Bantwal. It’s a village. So they did okay for themselves because they kind of accelerated from a tier two, tier three sort of ecosystem and then finally made it to Bangalore, which was a big thing in those days. It gave me the kind of platform to be able to at least finish my college.

 

I think the best thing my parents ever did for me was they gave me a computer very young. At The age of seven I was gifted a computer by the age of 10-11. I had already started playing games, in fact, one of the first games I played, most people don’t know about this game. But it is a game called Mugen, where you can create your character. So you could have Superman play against Pikachu and Flash play against Iron Man. So it was crazy. And the game allowed you to also write in your own character. So you can code the characters in and you can also sort of change the sprites. So I had to do a little bit of design on changing the sprites. And I had to do a little bit of code as well. So I made my brother as a character in the game, I remember. And at the age of 13 I fully started coding. I use this programming language called Delphi. Most people don’t know, don’t remember Delphi, but it’s a very old programming language back then. Delphi, I think now is dead.

 

I started coding at the age of 13. By 16-17 I was proficient. And when I went to college, I think in the first year, I studied computer science In Manipal. And in MIT, and in first year, I just decided, this is not my cup of tea. I don’t want to sit in class, listen to teachers. So first year I went to this friend of mine called Abhinav Chikara, who ended up becoming the head of design of Unacademy. And this other guy called Karthik. And so bunch of people, we got together, and we decided, hey, let’s start a company. We had no idea what company we wanted to run. So the first ever company we ran was a T-Shirt Company. And we said, we will print, we’ll put designs on the back of T-shirts, personalize them and give them to classes. And we sold 500 T-shirts or something. So we did reasonably well. But T-shirts were too high of an effort and too low reward. And I felt like one of those baniya type people who was running around with a T-shirt every time there was a fest saying Isko Khareedo, isko khareedo. So I didn’t want to do that.

 

So what ended up happening was my mom actually sent me a link to this platform called oDesk. Today it’s called Upwork. But back then it was called oDesk freelancing platform. She said, you know how to code, So why don’t you code on this platform? Maybe you can make some money. So I signed up. And in fact, one of my first projects on oDesk was for a Malaysian eye clinic, three month long, it took me three months to finish the project. And I was also a noob. So I said, I’m not very good at this, please give me a chance as my cover letter. And I got paid $100. And my friends made fun of me. They’re like $100 is nothing, but it was $100. And that time $100 was 6000 rupees. today’s like 7000,

 

Siddhartha 7:23

Which year are you talking about?

 

Varun 7:24

So 2013-2014, something like that. So very, very young.

 

Siddhartha 7:29

So, second year of Manipal?

 

Varun 7:31

Yeah, my second year of college was when I started freelancing. And as luck would have it, when you’re a decent coder sitting in India, and you can also do a little bit of design, you end up getting a lot of projects, because you’re the cheapest on the market. But slowly, we started increasing our take rate, I mean, how much we charged, our brand started increasing, because on oDesk or Upwork, your portfolio started showing up. So everyone gives you ratings, and so on and so forth. So we were doing reasonably well. In the fourth year, I was billing $150 an hour, Abhinav Chikara, was also billing $150 an hour, we weren’t technically working together at this point, we were all working in the same room, but separate projects.

 

So one of the things I really, really respect, and thank myself for doing in college was freelancing. Because now that I can freelance, I always knew I can come back to this and I have gone back many times in life. Because, worst case scenario, what’s going to happen, if I fail, I’m going to go freelance. I want to make $150 an hour, that’s not a bad life.

 

It also ties into why I start building distribution later in life. I’ll come to that in a bit. But the idea was, I can build anything, and I can build this for other people and other people want things built and they’re willing to pay for it. I think in my fourth year of college, the entrepreneurship bug sort of bit me. And it’s very different. They’re similar in some ways, but they’re also different in some ways to freelance and then be an entrepreneur. Because freelancing, you’re not taking the risk. It’s like you’re using your skills, but you’re not taking the emotional ups and downs of running a company. You’re basically responsible for the outcome of a company when you become an entrepreneur. So I decided to start a company called Jobspire. We basically wanted to build Naukri, but we wanted to build a very visual version of Naukri. If Zomato can do certain things for menu scanning, we can do certain things for job scanning, in a way.

 

We wanted to show people the way the office of a company looked so you could sort of window shopping and then decide which company you join. So in the fourth year we start building that. And you asked me a question of what my insight was, in that company. To be honest, I had zero insight. I was so young and for me, it still felt like a college project in fourth year When I was doing this, because it didn’t feel like an actual company. Today, It feels very different to run Avalon compared to back then.

 

We scaled to about 150K Applicants. we had more than 4 million requests in 2016. We worked with 1500 recruiters, including Uber and swiggy. We were doing 100k revenue which was not great. I was super young. And I think in early 2017, we sold to a New York based company called TurnToTech. We sold for single digit millions. It wasn’t a great venture scale exit. No venture investor would be happy with that exit. But I was super young. And for me, it was like, hey, at least I finished one circuit.

 

Siddhartha 10:34

How old were you back then?

 

Varun 10:37

I was 22, 22 and a half. So for me, it was big. The one thing I wasn’t happy with, though. I mean, TurnToTech was a New York based company. One thing I wasn’t happy with is that they put us on a four year vesting schedule. I hated it. I hated every minute of it. I liked the company. I liked the founders, but I really hated vesting. I was like, I don’t want to work for somebody else. So I think in the year after that, when I was working for them, and I was doing code engineering, I was writing code, I was doing front end for them. I don’t know why I just went out on YouTube and started putting out content. So I was like, I’m going to talk about term sheets, I’m going to talk about how to sell your company. How do you talk to investors? What’s the difference between a seed round and a Series-A and whatnot. So I started putting out tactical content on YouTube, which at that point didn’t exist. And the reason I put this out was because me and Abhinav because we’d done that freelancing journey.

 

Bloomsbury, which is the publisher that published Harry Potter, they had come to us and they said, Hey, write a book on your freelance career. For some reason, they were more interested in freelancing than the entrepreneurship part, because they felt it was time for freelance in India. And the book we wrote is called Pajama profits. And the book literally means Pajamas, as in, sitting at home and making money. It was a very cliche title, in a sense, but we kind of predicted remote work at that time. Nobody took remote work seriously, back then. This was 2017 or something like that. But we were quite bullish on remote work. We were like, anything that is tech enabled can be done from home, as long as you have the right process. And we have done freelance enough, worked with enough teams on slack to know exactly what the process is like. Because if you’re hiring engineers from India, you better have a process. Because otherwise, they’re gonna just keep wasting your time. And I was very young, so I would be very good at wasting people’s time. So being on a clock, sitting on Slack, those things were important. And the things we use today as well, obviously, not the clock, but you know, some of the processes that I learned from the freelancing days I still use today.

Then, after Bloomsbury published the book, the book did really well and became a number one Amazon bestseller. But Bloomsbury in order to promote the book, they asked us to go and put out some content on YouTube. So we started putting out some content on YouTube for that reason. And that did well, because I was putting out tactical content in a world where all the business gurus were putting out content about “21 din mein paisa double”. It’s like the first signal in a world of noise. So I was incredibly proud of it. A small audience started forming around it. And I said, Hey, for the first time ever I now have some feedback. Because in Jobspire we never had feedback. It’s a very one time use thing. It’s like Jobspire had high DAO. But if you looked at the cohorts analysis, the retention is very poor. Because, you’ll come to a recruitment platform, you’ll use it once, and then you leave. There’s no reason for you to come again.

 

So because my YouTube audience would tell me things, I finally started understanding what India is like. In fact, that’s what I thank YouTube for. It’s never happened to me on Twitter. It happened to me on YouTube. On Twitter it’s like the same problems as, English school educated engineering Boy, that’s twitter. That may be slightly more woke. But YouTube is very different. YouTube is India. It has the entire spectrum of India from people who don’t make any money to people who cannot speak English, to people who are super affluent looking for how do I change my tap? So it’s a very diverse audience. And I got to learn a lot from them. And that’s what I thank YouTube for. And I think, a year after that, after I started doing YouTube, when we were at, 50k, I moved to Instagram because Instagram is giving us a more organic headwind at that point.

 

So we got, I was at about 125k audience on Instagram. At that point, I decided, I’m going to start a services company. I’m going to quit this company. And I didn’t have a fantastic idea on what to build yet. And I wanted to build some more bank in a way. We started an agency called Avalon. where we said hey, we will just work for companies for a while, build some banks and then build a product. Like every agency person’s dream. The problem with that is you get sucked into the agency in itself. Because we had scaled to 50 employees. We had lots of engineers and we had lots of marketing personnel. So some of the clients we worked for were MongoDB, we worked with FireSide Ventures, we worked with Kapiva in India.

 

There was an Itochu funded company, we worked with Dockety. So plenty of companies work with and you get sucked into the middle of things. But to be very honest, after maybe the first six months, when we were hustling, getting the agency live, I really hated the process of running an agency. I’ll tell you why. Talent will come to you and ask you, what is my long term plan here? What am I doing here? And I wouldn’t have an answer. And I’m like, as I didn’t have the heart to tell somebody well, as long as the client exists, you exist here. Whereas it’s very different today at Avalon, where everyone knows that there’s a long term goal, everyone knows something they’re working towards. And that’s when I saw some slide deck by somebody I saw where he said that it’s easier to build a Google than it is to build an agency. Because if you say that, your long term goal is to build, let’s say, artificial general intelligence, you’re more likely to pick up smart talent that wants to work with you. And who will stick with you over the long term. Whereas if you say building an agency, people stick for six months and then leave.

 

We had crazy attrition problems at Avalon. And it wasn’t the greatest place to be. So I wanted to build a product. I wanted to galvanize everything. And, because we had an audience, we said, let’s first build a community, it was just a thing we wanted to do. But we wanted to build a community. So we still hadn’t gone to the product phase yet. And we built a community we built in fact, one of India’s largest youth communities on Discord. we had 68% month six retention, the crazy retention that we had. And a very, very loyal audience. So it is the audience we had on YouTube, me, Shashank, my co-founder and Abhinav, my co-founder, we just moved our audiences to discord, like 50k people and it was good. And we started monetizing that audience. We knew there was a business here.

 

But I wanted to build a platform. I didn’t want to do everything on Discord because tomorrow discord can pull the rug and then you’ll be gone. In fact, that happened on Discord today, because of the NFT wave, now many people started joining many servers. And when they join many servers, they forget about the old ones. When’s the last time you clicked on an old Discord server? It doesn’t happen. And the way discord notifications work, if you start getting notifications from discord for a server, it lasts five minutes after it stops. You don’t get notification from a Discord server unless it’s below 20 people. We didn’t know this. So we thought a Discord is going to be forever, but actually, we knew it. So that’s why we’re gonna like to get out of discord. So we wanted to move and we started building a platform of our own.

 

So first, we built a platform saying that everyone can be on the same platform, then we realized that if we wanted to scale this beyond 50k-100k, and prevent the noise, we need to have other creators come in or other entrepreneur businesses come in and kind of create their own communities. So that’s how we built Scenes. We raised some money from it, we raised about 1.1 million, 1.5 million at that time. So we did two rounds, one a small round with Peer Place, this Canadian company and a little bit from Poorvi Capital. And then in the second round, we raised from Better Labs from iSeed, from Kunal Shah from a bunch of influencers. Lots of investors like Whiteboard Capital, Tanglin. So a bunch of investors we brought together and we said, the goal is to build the ultimate community platform, most of them knew that we were in the community space. And most of them respected us in the community space. So they said, here’s some money, go, figure it out.

 

And I went out and hired some really good talent very differently from the way we did Avalon 1.0. So a very small team, very focused on objectives. Even now, the core team is maybe just 15 people. Very focused Objective, hey, we’re going to build this. And we’re going to you this is our TG and we just want to target more people like us. But we didn’t target them in India, we wanted to go to the US and target them. Because I don’t think in India, there’s a big market. We actually had an experiment in India, but it didn’t work so well. Yeah, that’s how Scenes came to be. I think today, we’re a community platform. We’re doing fairly well top quartile performance for SaaS. We just need to keep doing more of it, I guess.

 

Siddhartha 19:22

And can you share some of the numbers on Scenes like, where would you be in terms of your ARR? The number of clients who would be your top clients and Why do they use Scenes?

 

Varun 19:34

So some of our top clients are GG Nation, they just raised like three millions. We have Growth school who’s using scenes, we now have companies in the US like Wings of the World. We have companies in Canada, like one of our investors, Peerplays, who kind of jumped on scenes. We’re at about 400k revenue. We’re adding about 30-100k of new revenue every month. In fact, by the end of next month, we’re expecting to be around 600k, just in terms of pipeline, growing pretty fast. Every month, we have very consistent sales in the report, I can predict it. At the start of the month, they tell me what the pipeline is at the end of the month, they close. And it’s such a predictable number. We even know the conversion percentage. It’s a very cat driven business. So you spend money and then you get a customer and then they go through the motions, we have a sales motion after the customer discovers us.

 

So, we’re doing very well, why do they use us? Two reasons, I think we have two very specific ICPs, personas, the first Persona is like creators. These are people like Ankur Warikoo. For example, Ankur Warikoo uses scenes, Finance with Sharan uses scenes. For them, it’s the same problem that I had. We have an audience on YouTube, we want to own that audience. For once we want to own the distribution that we have, otherwise you don’t own it. It’s just you’re renting it from YouTube or Instagram. So very, very obvious use cases for them. And eventually, they’ll monetize with courses. And Scenes has the infra to do courses as well.

 

And on the other hand, I think if you look at businesses. For example, now we’re doing a pilot with Monster jobs. Where you just went live yesterday. And if you look at them, for them, it’s like we have a high DOW. We want to convert that into retention. And for some businesses it could be GTM. It could be, hey, we just want to have this one company called Nova HQ that uses us where they just want to have people engaging, and then they’ll find a way to monetize it. Very similar to how we did it on our Discord. So very, three different use cases, I would say two different personas, but three different use cases. And every day, the fact that Scenes are so complex and vast, you can even do things like custom CSS, or you can make it look like your own platform. Because it’s so vast, you can use scenes in any way. So every day, we get surprised with new use cases where we didn’t predict it. It just came on the platform by itself.

 

we’re growing pretty fast. And right now if we spend x we know we can make y so it’s now a question of how much extra spend and should we raise money for it and those sorts of second order questions.

 

Siddhartha 22:12

Dear listeners, before we dive further into the podcast, I would like to welcome Prashant Ganti, Head of Product Management at Zoho payroll and Zoho Books, Prashant, what is your long term vision for Zoho payroll?

 

Prashant 22:24

Thanks, Siddhartha. So for us right at Zoho, everything we invest for the long term includes Zoho payroll. We will continue to invest in R&D, and push innovation in the payroll domain. And what we are we will also do is Payroll straddles both HR and finance. And many times we see many of these problems as situated applications like payroll or something that just addresses one domain. What we have observed is all these applications have wide implications. All these departments like payroll have wide implications across the organization. So we will continue to ensure that the data residing in payroll applications disseminate across the organization, and help with decision making across various departments.

 

Furthermore, we are emerging as a payroll platform, the way we encourage our customers to solve problems that we ourselves have not imagined. And they are also seeing that payroll plays a larger role in the ecosystem, like for example, payroll, we connect with banks, going forward we might talk to insurance providers with regulatory authorities, so end to end automation across the entire ecosystem. So that’s our long term plan for payroll.

 

Siddhartha 23:58

Thank you, Prashant. Dear listeners, you will find more about Zoho payroll in the show notes. Now, let’s further continue with the podcast.

What is the one thing that excites you most about Scenes that didn’t excite you in your previous entrepreneurship sprint?

 

Varun 24:16

Well, I think a problem with the word excitement is I think that eventually, you run out of excitement for everything. If you run a SaaS company for too long, you can go talk to any SaaS founder who’s in his 10th year. Unless something exciting has been happening in the other parts of businessman life, maybe going IPO, they’re all gonna say the same thing. And you worked in SaaS for so long, you know what they’re gonna say. They’re gonna be like, I’m bored. It’s more of the same. I think lots of people, especially people like me, really enjoy the zero to one and the one to n is boring.

 

So for me, I don’t know if it’s about excitement. It’s for me, it’s about solving a problem I had. we wanted to run a community I one day I plan to run my own community on Scenes that’s it, and I want to build the ultimate product before that, so technically I’m building the ultimate product for myself as an individual and Scenes happens to be that product and lots of other people happen to have that problem. So I have a problem. So it’s less about excitement. This is a difference between now and Jobspire. With Jobspire I never, even though I was in the placement age, I never had the challenge of wanting to get a job.

 

So I didn’t know the core motivations. I could guess what the core motivations are, okay, people want a job, maybe to make money, to afford a better lifestyle, to get married, like lots of, a bunch of different motivations, but I didn’t feel them. And if you don’t feel the motivation yourself, you probably don’t know what to build. You’re probably building haphazardly. And one of the things we’ve done at Avalon. I’ve told you a story. But it’s been a very muddled story, in the sense that we’ve been through a lot of pivots. First we’ve said, community platform should be owned completely by us. Then we said no, no community platform should be owned by the creators, and we’ll do a take rate? Then we realize, Okay, even creators want SaaS? Even Ankur Warikoo When we were consumer social, didn’t want to use our platform. He said no to me so many times, and then the minute we turned SaaS, he’s like, I’ll buy now.

 

So we went through two-three pivots. And I feel like when you’re very excited about an idea, you hold on very dearly to it. But when you’re excited about a problem, you don’t care about looking like a fool in the short term. You only care about building the best platform. And I think we’ve been through two three pivots to get there. And I feel if I was too attached or excited to something I wouldn’t have gotten here. And also, I’ve learned a lot of things along the way, I guess.

 

Siddhartha 26:40

But there’s a difference between, solving a problem really well, and building a large business. So Which part do you care more about?

 

Varun 26:50

Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t be saying this on a podcast listened to by VCs, but I just really want to solve the problem. And I feel, at the end of the day, it’s always about the best product, the best product wins. I understand, I know, the VCs have this question about GTM or how are you going to capture n number of customers, how you’re going to win the market and whatnot? I feel like those are lesser, smaller challenges for us. And it’s something I don’t say often because I know it for granted. And a lot of VCs don’t. But for us, the minute I know, there’s a product that people love, and people really want, I will get the distribution. Distribution is our bread and butter. We are the only founders to apply a consumer social DNA to SaaS. In fact, you could argue that the end user of our product is still a consumer. It’s still an end user. it’s like WhatsApp, you build, I mean, not WhatsApp, WhatsApp is the wrong example. But here, the end user maybe uses our chat or chat channel on Scenes or the forum channel on Scenes, is still a consumer is still the kind of consumer we create for on YouTube in a way.

 

So I really, I want to solve my own problems. And I feel like if you solve your own problems, and you do it really, really, really well, you come up with a really good product. And then what do you need to do? You need to take that really, really good product and advertise and market it very, very well, in a very creative way. And I feel like that left brain right brain balance, I had to learn all the way if you’ve since the age of 11, or 12, when I used to use that game engine. When I started making characters on the game engine, I had to use both the sprites as well as the code. So I had to do the left brain right brain juggle then. So I feel for us that struggle is only meant to build a great product that people want. Rest GTM is not our problem. I know it’s a problem for a lot of other Indian companies. It’s not a problem for us.

 

Siddhartha 28:41

And what’s your end goal? Do you want to see 1 million creators or businesses in the world?

 

Varun 28:52

I think this is a long term bet. if you look at 10 years ago, you had geo cities, you’re familiar with GeoCities, Yahoo GeoCities. Everyone used to tell me that don’t buy a domain, just build your website on Geo cities. And their reasoning was this. Geo cities have trust. So everything is going to be housed under that trust. What ended up happening? What ended up happening was everyone ended up using domains. Right now the thing about scenes is, scenes is the ultimate community platform, we have the most comprehensive community platform on the planet, bar none. You can take all the other community platforms we like, the reason we’re stealing customers from them is because we have that feature set. And we really focus on that feature set.

 

In our platform, you can also spin out custom mobile apps. Okay, so a lot of people ask us today, why do people need custom mobile apps? And I keep telling them, if you’re an educator, or if you’re in the EdTech space, which is most of our clientele, You will eventually want to transition into a custom mobile app. you’ll want to own your cohorts, it ends up happening. And even if you don’t, if you’re charging money from somebody, they keep coming back to the platform for your lessons. So my personal belief is in the long term, just like GeoCities and

GoDaddy ended up winning, I feel like we will end up winning because we are the white labeled version, or the SaaS version of, let’s say, platforms that exist today, or Maven or Unacademy innocence.

 

So with the antithesis of that, and I feel one company that’s done that reasonably well is Classplus, where they actually spun and Teachmint, custom apps for creators and teachers, and those teachers run their business on that app. Scenes is like version two of that, a very international version of that, because Classplus is not suited for the international world. For example, international teachers will want their audience to be on HubSpot. They’ll want some CRM integration and they’ll want to be on Zapier. Which Classplus doesn’t solve, Classplus is different TG. So I feel like class was for the US. But we can handle communities as well, It’s not just courses, it’s also communities that we handle. I feel like long term, everyone will have an app, you will introduce spending three lakhs five lakhs a month on a developer by Scenes.

 

It costs you $300 a month and even you as a creator, because technically, on this podcast, you become a creator. Eventually, when you own your audience, when you want to have that private group of 100 founders for your own deal flow, that could be a very selfish need, I want deal flow. And for the founders, like I want to be connected to other founders, where you’re going to do it, you can’t do it on Zencastr, you can’t do it on YouTube, you have to choose a platform. And the best platform that will come to your head is Scenes because even though you might not want a custom mobile app now, you’d be like, if I get larger, and I want to evolve into a business, Scenes is that for me throughout my journey. In fact, we now also have an API releasing SDK soon. So even if you expand beyond us, you become a fitter, let’s say you use Scenes and you become fitter and you’re making 100 crores a year, you can still use our SDKs and evolve beyond us.

 

So the entire roadmap sort of built out for people. And I want to do it very differently from the way most other Indian businesses do it. Most Indian businesses do it in a very cumbersome way. Like, if you look at most successful businesses, let’s take Edtech for a second. Every company will have like 1000 employees, they’ll have like 50 people running after creators, they’ll have 100 people doing some rubbish in the company. For us, it’s like, I want to be a very small team. It’s a product we’re selling, we sell a product, We don’t sell anything beyond that product. We have ecosystems built around it. Like you want a community manager, we have an ecosystem of community managers who we train ourselves and we count the inside of plates in your company if you want them. And then obviously we have sales machinery and stuff that’s always going to be human.

 

But it’s like it’s done very differently. So I can run the business, the revenue per employee is going to be super high. And I don’t understand because I’ve been an engineer for like, almost like a very long time, almost 16 years. I just feel like anyone who hires 100 engineers for something like a super tiny product, I don’t know what they’re doing. And maybe I don’t like it. Maybe that’s a lack of experience on my part. But for us now, we want to be a small team and build a very focused product and just get advertising eyeballs basically on the product, which we know how to do well.

 

Siddhartha 33:03

And you believe that Scenes can eventually replace Discord?

 

Varun 33:07

I don’t think so. I think this is something people get wrong about discord, Discord is a huge engagement. But most of the engagement is communities or groups with under 10 people. 10 to 20 people, It’s like I want to play games with my five friends. I want to play FIFA with my five friends or I want to play some, I don’t know, validate with my friends. I jump on a Discord server. That’s most of their engagement by the way. In fact, discards revenue comes from Nitro. 100 million they make per year from the Nitro subscription. Nitro is not, it’s like a very weird offering. It’s like a very ambiguous offering. And the bet from all the VCs is that hey, we will invest in Discord. You guys will figure it out. Valued at $7 billion on a you will figure it out sort of thesis, We are very different. We are SaaS, where you pay us money, you’re using this product for something,some of you will churn. On Discord churn is very low. Because I mean, this churn is in the user. There’s user churn, people just stop using the platform. But here we will also have revenue churn.

 

So very different. We are for larger communities than Discord or WhatsApp. The ideal size is 250+, if you have a community of 250+ Scenes is the best option for you. Below 250, even we recommend going to WhatsApp, the last kind of community we don’t go after is Dev communities. We prefer we actually tell them to go to GitHub discussions. That’s a better place for you to do this. Yeah, that’s it. Every other community, we sort of handled with our initial kind of injection point is educators, anyone who’s teaching because we find those communities have highest retention.

 

Siddhartha 34:36

With scenes having such a large potential Why do you continue to be a creator, isn’t that a distraction for you?

 

Varun 34:46

So, two reasons. First reason is I feel like this is something I learned from Nas daily. I went to Dubai, he housed me in his place and we were just talking about being an entrepreneur. He’s raised like 20 million or something like that and still continues to be a creator. Ask him why he’s like, the first meeting with anybody is on the NAS brand. That’s it, like the first meeting with anybody on the NAS brand. So if you have a large brand, a personal brand, people will take a meeting with you. It’s just a guarantee right? And believe it or not, I’ve had interactions with people like Jason Calacanis. I’ve had interactions with people like a lot of VCs who even discard me through Twitter. In fact, my entire last round happened, because Gaurav saw one of my tweets on Twitter, called me, sent me a text and said, Come to my office, he would never have discovered me if I had cold emailed.

 

So it’s like, a lot of founders do a lot of push. They’re pushing and saying, Please take my meeting. But the problem with push is imagine if you get a cold email from someone, Versus you learning about someone organically, you are more highly intent if you learn about someone organically. So I feel like I don’t have to push anymore. First meetings always in the house, like Avalon people will take a meeting, whether you’re like the last, we’ve closed, like five very big creators. In fact, the total size of the audience of the creators we’ve closed just in the last one month has been like five mil plus. The only reason they’re taken to a meeting is because they know who Avalon is. They know who I am. And they respect me as a creator. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you might not take a meeting with me, the entrepreneur, you might take a meeting with the Creator, if you’re a creator, you might not take a meeting with me, the creator might take the meeting, you need the entrepreneur.

 

So it’s like a double hat thing. And also, I feel like a lot of people who see me as a creator do not understand how little time it takes. First year, it took me a lot of time, because I was truly sitting doing research about topics and like putting out content. Today It’s like, I sprint for five days. And then content just gets produced and Twitter is different. My process on Twitter is I just spit the ball. I’m just like, I’m thinking this thought let me just write it down like Kunal Shah, the way Kunal Shah does it.

 

Obviously, granted, it also brings you like a bunch of haters. Like I don’t like your thoughts, in general light. And it creates a very, like, a lot of people become polarized. Some people really like you, some people really hate you. That’s the same content. But the truth is, it opens every meeting. And right now for Scenes, we need the meetings. And one other thing, or two other things that I’ve learned from being a creator is I learned who the audience is. I learned what they want, what their core motivations are, as a convent educated person, you always have this idea of what humans are, which is not true. It’s like a very bookish version of what humans are. But when you see hundreds of 1000s of comments, you’re like, Oh, I get what you guys want. I understand your needs and ideas.

 

So I feel like I lose that touch with reality if I stopped being a creator, and I’ll start making bullshit decisions, which are, it’s not first principle decision making, it’s not something that people want. It’s just some random stuff, where I’ve heard from somebody is like, that’s how my other founder friends make decisions where they be like, Oh, I heard from this person, this is a good decision. So I’ll make this decision. You have no real insight. Whereas I can do this right now. I can go to, and I’ve done this before as well. I can go to my Instagram. I put up a story saying hey guys, would you like A or B? Or do you prefer A or B and I can have like 20,000 people replying to that poll. That is like larger sample size, then obviously biased sample size because this is the smartest audience in India, which is what I pride myself on, but if you look at, if you zoom in on Accenture, even Accenture won’t give you a survey with that many results. Accenture is the brand that does surveys, right? If I remember correctly. Deloitte I know was different. But basically, I know that the smartest audience I can just ask them, what will you pay for? And I get the answers from that.

 

So I feel like my quality of ideas gets sharpened. And I feel like as a CEO, one thing that the most important thing that content has done for me is I can put a swipe up and I can have 100 engineers applying for the company tomorrow. Every single person we’ve hired except like one or two people who we’ve hired from agencies, every other person we’ve hired from Twitter, I hired the first employee of native base. One of the most popular GitHub projects through Twitter, I just put up a tweet saying we’re hiring a senior React Native engineer. I had him apply.

 

We hired senior guys from Unacademy, we hired senior guys from Byju’s, all because I put up either tweets or like Instagram stories. So I feel it’s like a great hiring tool. And one last thing is when you build a good team and they enjoy working here and whatnot, which is something I failed at in my last company to be honest. I didn’t build the best culture here like you learn from your mistakes, so much better culture in the last one one and a half years. Once you have that and once you have it on autopilot. I think your job as a CEO is three things. Raise capital, Communicate the internal Story externally and tell the external story internally very well. And I feel like the last thing is to make like two three very high quality decisions a year.

 

So I feel like all I have to do now at this point is to make two or three very high quality decisions, and obviously continue to raise capital. And I feel like the two ways to raise capital one is to go tell an awesome story, which I can do, but like, in our previous interaction before the podcast, I refused to tell a lie. Refused to say that this is a bazillion dollar business when I’m not convinced. So that’s one way. The other way is to say, Hey, I’m convinced about A to B, and I have a very clear idea of A to B. This is who we’re going after, we know them very, very well. Here’s the data. So I feel like when your business starts doing well, and you and your business starts making money, then you don’t need to fundraise in a storytelling way. I think the VCs come to you, like I said, push versus pull.

 

So I feel like living a pull life is much better, and creator allows me to, to live a

pull life, talent investors, telling the story internally, externally, the pull life is more convenient, I guess, the price of that is that I have to go, last week of December and go into sort of like a sanyasi mode and create content like continuous. We have a studio where I just, I spit balls for like, hours and hours. My editors hate me for that. But yeah, that’s a small price to pay, I guess.

 

Siddhartha 41:26

And tell us more about your learning on YouTube. And then again, for Twitter, in the last four years of creating content on it, what works, what does not works.This is for the entrepreneurs and creators who aspire to build an audience like you.

 

Varun 41:42

I’d be honest, and I think a lot of Indian VCs are going through this because a lot of Indian VCs are now becoming creators in a traditional sense, I feel like one thing that I didn’t get back then, which they also don’t get right now is that they create content with their self image in focus, which I did for years. I was like, This is me, this is who I am. This is what I talk about. And yeah, I can’t. I have to hold this very close. For example, I will tweet about five quick Commerce Trends and write a thread about it. Here’s what I believe about quick commerce and write a thread about it. I feel like that’s good. It attracts one kind of audience. But if you truly want to build a brand, you have to take a stand. You have to stand for something. And YouTube really rewards people who are authentic. Even Twitter actually, like if you’re authentic, if you truly believe in what you’re saying. And people can see when you truly believe in what you’re saying, you build a brand.

 

And I feel like for me on YouTube, the first thing I learned was, you can have two people, one with 100k followers, the other with 100k followers, people might take this person 10 times more seriously. And the person’s conversions, the person’s audience, everything could be much better here. And it could be much better here because that person has built a particular brand and taken a stand. Whereas the other creative can just be writing threads about basically, that’s the difference between being a trend jacker versus being someone with long term thinking, in a sense. And I always chose the idea of wanting to be a long term thinker. Now a little bit, I sprinkle a little bit of trends in there and try to tie it in with the long term and like maybe two years in the past I would have spoken about Coronavirus, I would have given my thoughts on Coronavirus. I don’t do that anymore. It’s not my domain, and I don’t want people to get muddled and think of me as a general purpose, talk about everything sort of person. I want to be known for just two or three things.

 

And more importantly, I think on YouTube and Twitter, you need to entertain Twitter less but YouTube, you need to start entertaining, you need to edit well. And obviously I don’t do my editing. I have a team that does editing. You need to edit well, you need to entertain, do you know, Harry Stebbings? I don’t know if I’m taking his name right. The guy who runs the podcast 20 minutes VCs. So I don’t know if you’ve seen and I have a VPN based Tik Tok Just for research. I hate the platform, but just for research. I followed them on Tik Tok, the kind of content they do for any VC in India to do it. I would be very surprised if VC in India does it. Like funny content, there’s a video where the guy is wearing a bald cap and running around and whatever. But apparently it brings them five to eight leads a day. Which is crazy, because at the end of the day, the founder is going to discover through the things you say and things you do.

 

And the funnier you are the more relatable you are the more they want to work with you. I’ll give you my own example. There was once a VC, like a tier one VC that was evaluating us we had gone through the ICV. We didn’t make it through the last round, because in the very ending, they were still on the fence by the end of it. But we were talking to multiple VCs at that time. And I really wanted to work with this VC because the partner seemed chill. He seemed super chill. He was just like, I’m gonna be there for you, cracking jokes with me on things like zoom, zoom call and whatnot. And I was like, when you use tik tok, or YouTube or whatever, you get to see that personality before you talk to the person. That interaction I had with Zoom now you can have millions of people. And so when I hear your podcast, and I and I hear that you understand SAS very well, and you’ve spoken 10 times about how you get from 1 million to 10 million ARR, That is super valuable for me.

 

So I would love to work with you, versus another VC who’s writing threads about quick commerce. So like I said, you have to take a stand, you have to be there also means alienating some people. If you talk too much about SaaS, the consumer social guy is going to be like, hey, I don’t want to work with you. Because you’re a SaaS guy, which is okay. Like I said, there’s a trade off.

 

Siddhartha 45:54

But there’s always something, you can’t please everyone in the market.

 

Varun 45:58

Yeah. And I think once you start with your stand and you understand that you need to entertain, I think these are two important things. You start with a stand, you need to entertain, then your content flows through, then you be like, when you’re jotting down an idea, like, am I taking a stand on this idea? Like if I talk about some random stuff, like, let’s say,

 

Siddhartha 46:15

or take an example of some of your best videos that performed.

 

Varun 46:19

Yeah, I can tell you that. One of the best videos that performed for me was leaving home. I’m very bullish on the fact that young kids 20,21 should leave home at least for two, three years, to become independent, to learn about the world, to understand what real problems are there in the world, and then come back. So I feel like that was me taking a stand. And I got, like, half the videos. In fact, I had first put out a tweet about that topic and the tweet got like, 7-8000 likes. And there was an article on Storypick about that tweet, where lots of people in the tweet were saying bad things 7000 likes, but lots of people are saying bad things, or whatever you can do outside you can do at home. Which is fundamentally not true, you cannot do at home, what you would do, if you went out for one or two years, if you live with your own roommates, and you had those fights and you left the geyser on and the roommate shouted at you and you were sick, and nobody’s there to clean the plates when you’re sick, and your parents are not going to be there. Because if you’re sick at home, your parents are going to eventually go clean the plates. But if you’re alone, and you have nobody to help you, your parents are not going to come and magically teleport there. So you’re gonna have to do it for yourself.

 

So I was very bullish about that, that’s me taking a stand. And that’s also me understanding that, or rather making it a little bit entertaining. So the video is a little bit entertaining. I’m not gonna just boringly say leave your home. I’m gonna make it fun. I’m gonna draw parallels and stuff like that. And that has come naturally to me. Like, that’s the part that people underestimate. When you’ve been a creator for four years, it doesn’t take the kind of effort that it takes in year one. But by year four, you know what the audience wants to hear, you know, what you stand for. And you also know how to make it entertaining. It’s natural that when you speak, you will speak in an entertaining high retention fashion. What I mean by high retention is you make sure nobody drops off you make sure okay, I’m trying to say boring things. Let me switch topics.

 

Last thing is, I also feel, and this is something that I’ve started doing over the last one or two years. There’s a very Pareto principle that applies on Twitter, you could have one really good video that booms, that does superduper well, and you could have 30, terrible videos, which do nothing for you. So you need to look for the hits. And the way to look for the hits is a very VC style approach of doing things, TAM. Leave home, leave your home, please leave your home is a super high time video. There’s another video I did, which did very, very well called three incredible tips to improve English.

Nobody would expect me to do this topic in year one. But in year four I did it. And the reason I did it was because I’m like I stand for this. I stand for the ability to learn communication skills, especially in English, because I think that that’s the language of opportunity. But more importantly, I feel like the TAM for this, for people who want to improve their English skills, is super high. So there’s a third thing, three things right. First is you need to make sure that you stand for something you need to be entertaining. And then you need to have a super high TAM. Follow these three things, then write down 10 ideas that belong to these three things. Because once you have these three things, writing ideas is very easy, super easy.

 

Like you can sit down and like in a day, you can have like 50 ideas. And then maybe you spend another two days, just jotting down one to two bullet points for each. You don’t need to make long videos. Three to four minutes is enough. Jot down bullet points, then go to the studio for two, three days, wrap everything, like just literally have to be exhausted by the end of the day, it needs to feel like a shoot, and then you’re done. Then you just give it to the editors. And in fact 90% of my views come from short content, which I haven’t explicitly shot. It’s just my old videos, which my editors go and clip.

 

So in fact, like 90% the content that you will see on short content that is on my YouTube is all content that I’ve made at least three years in the past. So that’s my formula, in a way. And obviously, there’s some data science around it as well. I think YouTube cares about three things, mainly, the first thing is it cares about the average viewer duration, YouTube wants to make sure that you’re spending as much time on videos as possible, because it doesn’t want to click out. The more time you spend on the video, the more money they make. So they want you to spend as much time. Second thing is CTR. So we’ll do thumbnails, it has to be crazy thumbnails. Like I said, that’s the problem with me three years ago, where I wouldn’t make a funny face. Because I’m like, if I make a funny face, all people think of me. I’m like, I will go to the studio. I’ll make 10 funny faces and be like, do something. Use AI worst case, I’m not going to do it again.

 

And so you do CTR. So your thumbnail has to be good. The title has to be slightly click Baity, Because if it’s not click Baity, it doesn’t work. And so most of the time these days, if you look at YouTubers, the title and the content doesn’t make any sense. It’s just the title is there to get you to click and content something else entirely, which is fine, actually, on YouTube. As long as you deliver, the content delivers in some ways it’s fine. And then finally, I think it’s also about the topic in itself. Like some things people just don’t care about. I’ve tried this type of video three times, I’ve tried a video about hunger. And there’s this thing about hunger in India, right where hunger in India, like India is now producing 300 and something million tonnes of food. And we need 250 million tonnes to be food secure.

 

So India’s already food secure. isn’t like a big chunk of India is still hungry because of poor infrastructure, we’re not able to get food to the right people. It’s a good topic, I personally believe it’s an important topic. But nobody cares about it. Every time I do a video about it, and I’ve done a video about it thrice because I’m like really changed. I’ve tried different thumbnails, like the craziest thumbnails, the best entertaining content, it always pulls like 5-10k views. That’s it.

 

People just don’t seem to care about it. And even though this theoretically, the TAM seems to be high. So sometimes Youtube confuses me also. But when you’ve done three, four years of this, and you’ve seen this back to back to back your keen sense of what people like, and when you have a keen sense of what people like you can build for those people. And like I said, the end consumer of a product is still a consumer. They have the same needs, same boredom, same motivation, same everything. So yeah, it’s like, it takes me far less time than most people imagine. And I think the ROI for me has been really good, especially with opening meetings, or just understanding what people do and make and hiring in general.

 

Siddhartha 52:44

And the same process you applied for Twitter also?

 

Varun 52:50

Twitter is different. Twitter is like, if something comes to my head, I just type it. I just have a Twitter open in front of my this thing, I write one tweet to two tweets a day. Sometimes I don’t write also. I just go and type whatever. I’ll give you an example of Twitter being done right. Okay. If I were to choose to raise money from an early stage investor, okay, if I were to do it again, I would choose Vaibhav Domkundwar. And I will tell you why. Because I’ve seen so many tweets from Vaibhav Domkundwar appear on my global feed, without me following him. Now I follow him, but back then I didn’t follow him. I’ve seen so many tweets of his insight. Like I said, taking a stand right of his insight, and the stand taken now is that a business has to be profitable, blah, blah, blah, which is good. I don’t know if you had the same stance two years ago. But when I see that, I’m like, I have an affinity towards this person. And after three, four months of seeing his tweets, I’m like, I know this guy. I trust this guy. That’s it. We live in a trust deficient economy.

 

When you choose a community platform tomorrow, you’re going to see five options, and then you’re gonna be like this one option. I know the founder is Elon Musk, Or whatever. Whoever the founder is. I know him very, very well. They might not spend on marketing, but I know the founder. I trust him. And I’ve seen this founder appear with God knows, Jackie Shroff, whatever. Because our brains are very associative in that sense, You see a person with some big personality with Modi or whatever, suddenly, you’re in your head, even if you hate the person you’re like, your status elevated plus phi, And that status can also be transferred from person to product. That’s one big learning for me. And that’s something that we have seen that a lot of creators have seen with cred.

 

You could be Kunal Shah and your thoughts, your ideas, especially someone’s watch an actual like 10 minute video of Kunal Shah, even a 10 minute video, they have that affinity towards him which he transfers to the product. So even if the product might be useful or useless or whatever, many people have their opinions on it. The fact that Kunal Shah is doing it means people don’t write it off. And that trust gets transferred. So I feel like we live in a trust deficient economy. And content is the only way to beat that you can’t beat with ads and ads are anyway getting 10 times more expensive.

 

Siddhartha 55:04

Yeah and the proof of that is Kunal Shash being I think the only Indian to be featured on Farnam Street by Shane Parrish.

 

Varun 55:14

I saw the knowledge project. See, that’s another thing, just an example of content, you see the knowledge project. Now, if Kunaal Shah was a SaaS entrepreneur, and I had a problem, which Kunal Shah’s product solved, 99.9% of the time, I’d use Kunal Shah’s product than any other product, because I don’t know any of the other products, you could run ads, and I could go to google and type community products, and you’ll see ads, you don’t know any of the products, and anyone can run ads. And you know, and I know that anyone can run ads, we don’t trust any of them. So for me, the content plays trust, by the end of this decade, you are going to trust me and Avalon and my content more than anybody else. And then I’m going to sell you a community product, then I’m going to sell you okay, if you have a problem with video, I will teach you, I will have a product for video, like an in video. Then I will have an entire suite for anyone who is like me, who is content creator, turned educator turned entrepreneur. That’s it.

 

And I think there are enough, like this pattern that I’m going through, like I said when you created enough content, you’re not special. I know, there are so many people like me, that it’s a large enough market. Now the question is, is that a 10 mil ARR market or 100 million ARR market? That I don’t know. And because it’s so new, I don’t have a sense of it. But I feel it might expand and in the worst case scenario, we’ll build a suite for it. Now it depends on what’s the spending capacity. Am I going slightly more enterprise? What are the enterprise problems, because recently I met this guy who joined Slice. He’s a content creator of joint slice. He calls him the Chief Investment Officer at slice.

 

And I know that if choosing a community platform was a thing, he would make that choice. And if he made that choice, he trusts me, because he follows my content. So like I said, content is very powerful and I feel people are sleeping on it. And that’s why I continue to create. I feel like distribution, it’s easier and easier to build a product. If you had to build Scenes 10 years ago, it would take you five years. Scenes now took us a year, a little more than a year to build. In five months or let’s say another few years, a platform like Scenes is gonna get even easier. Like what is the hard part in SaaS tell me. Now there’s like, if you want to build a cross platform, you want to build a mobile web. And let’s say desktop, users flutter. You can hire engineers from all over the world, talent is open. Lots of open source tools.

 

You want to do, for example, authentication when I was 13, if you want to do authentication, username, password, that’s like a two week job. Today, if you want authentication, we use our back end Ruby on Rails. So you can use either there’s a tool called devise in Ruby on Rails is a gem called devising Ruby on Rails. Or you can go and use Auth0 or, or any oauth based solution. plethora of tools for everything. Everyone’s made these micro services that you could just API together, you can just stitch the API’s together. In fact Scenes, the real product in my head is like a visual API connector. We’ve got so many different API’s. And we connect them together in one visual format, so that you don’t need to use Zapier and build the front ends yourself.

 

If it’s getting easier, what’s getting harder? It’s getting users. That’s why VCs are so concerned about how you’re going to do GTM and how you’re going to get customers. And that’s the least of our problems. Because when you’re done content, one sphere, you can do it in multiple other spheres. In fact, we have a content series with Sal Yusuf for Scenes, where we talk about how to use the platform, it’s so entertaining. It’s so entertaining, you will have love right after watching it. And obviously Sal Yusuf has an American accent. And there’s a reason for that. Because like I told you before, in SaaS also there is some little bit of racism, if you’re an Indian presenting on screen, nobody cares. Nobody wants to like then your trust goes minus minus. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Indian CEO, talking about stuff that people will trust.

 

But if your content on your website has a very Indian, Indian accent, it’s like it’s not physically Indian. It’s culturally Indian. If it’s culturally Indian, then you get into a little bit of trouble. Where your trust gets you, you lose some brownie points. So yeah, that’s really great content. That’s why, we’re trying to, we think there’s a big business here, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

 

Siddhartha 59:20

So it’s been fantastic listening to you. I learned a lot being a content creator, being an entrepreneur and Now needless to also apply to venture capital. Especially on the trusts. The things you mentioned on trust deficit for me, Journey of 100X Entrepreneur has been learning. So and still it’s the same entrepreneur who sold his company, but thought that next time, how do I become, sell it for 100x? The only way to grow to that level is to become 100x of himself. So that’s the journey I’m living and I’m living on this podcast with my listeners.

 

Varun 1:00:03

Yeah whenever you plan to build a community next I know what’s going to pop into your head I hope Scene is gonna pop into your head into everyone listening as well.

 

Siddhartha 1:00:09

Yeah thanks thanks a lot you know really enjoyed this conversation

 

Varun 1:00:15

Likewise thank you for inviting me.

 

**Sponsors**

• Prime is a high conviction, high support investor, backing star teams with differentiated ideas. All partners at Prime work actively with the entrepreneurs post-investment to accelerate building a great company. Prime focuses on building differentiating companies whose solutions are 10X better and are powered by technology and product. Prime is now investing from its fourth fund of $ 120M and is often the first institutional investor in category-defining startups such as MyGate, HackerEarth, Niyo, Glip, Bolt, and Wheelseye. To know more about Prime visit primevp.in

 

• Being an entrepreneur means balancing a lot of tasks, and payroll is just one of many. But handling payroll manually is particularly time-consuming and chaotic. Teams inevitably end up processing inaccurate salaries, struggling with compliance, or losing track as your business expands. With Zoho Payroll, you can automate routine payroll tasks such as salary calculations, payments, payslip distribution, and compliance. Set up payroll once, and as your employee count grows, your payroll process scales without you spending additional time or effort. Try our 30-day free trial, and simplify your journey as an entrepreneur with Zoho Payroll.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download