According to Accel’s Sarthak Singh, up-and-coming entrepreneurs and digital services platforms for Bharat have not only mastered monetization but are also giving established businesses “a run for their money.” Previously perceived as a startup haven, Bharat is currently drawing more and more attention from business owners keen to create customized products for the market niche.
In a SeedToScale “Decoding Bharat” episode, Sarthak stated, “We always thought that there is a very strong demand pull for both paid and unpaid apps and platforms for Bharat.”
The middle-class households in Tier 2, Tier 3, and rural India that make between Rs 5 and Rs 15 lakh a year are referred to as Bharat by the country’s leading venture capital fund. Customers in India are aspiring and becoming more eager to upgrade to better lives; they are looking for high-quality goods and services that may satisfy their changing requirements.
Singh’s perspective reveals a significant change in the audience’s predominate perspective and perception of Bharat. It dispels the myth that people in this group are not ready to pay, highlighting the fact that Bharat provides a dependable and scalable revenue source for online media. The increasing consumption of localized content in India suggests a significant possibility for businesses to monetize.
The fact that Seekho, an AI-powered ed-tech platform, started out as a subscription-only service shows how ready Bharat’s audience is to pay for high-quality material. Seekho’s founder, Rohit Choudhary, asserts that consumers are prepared to pay for goods or services they believe offer value.
“One thing that came out when we started building Seekho was that people are super ambitious, super aspirational, and they’re looking for content that can help them grow, help them succeed, but it just didn’t exist because no one ever thought that Bharat wants that content,” he stated in the episode.
Among the platforms catering to Bharat is Seekho. With an emphasis on India’s many dialectics, Stage is an OTT platform that caters to entertainment needs and has a sizable subscriber base. During the conversation, Stage Co-Founder Vinay Singhal stated, “This entire notion that Bharat doesn’t have paying capacity or doesn’t want to pay and Bharat is only in villages and outside cities is something that needs to be challenged in a very, very big way.”
There are many chances in Bharat, but there are also certain special challenges. As Prashant Sachan noted, people who are tech-savvy may recognize certain cues and iconography, but those who are less tech-savvy or who are unfamiliar with the internet may not respond to these components in the same manner. He stated that it is imperative to pay close attention to these distinctions.
Sarthak believes that there is a lot of room for growth and possibly international expansion for Bharat platforms in the future. According to him, if these companies are able to effectively handle their fundamental issues, their future developments may be just as significant as their present successes when taking into account the total addressable market (TAM). He continued, saying, “I would advise all the founders of content startups to look towards China and see what China has been able to do just with the content first companies.”
