Rohan Nayak, the 32-year-old co-founder and CEO of Pocket Entertainment, was in grade 6 in DPS RK Puram, Delhi, when he discovered his first love – Naruto, a Japanese manga television series. The first love affair lasted seven to eight years before it gave way to movies. When he joined IIT Kharagpur in 2010 to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering, he spent the first year watching around 150 movies from different genres, languages and formats. Therefore, it sounds like an understatement when Nayak calls himself an entertainment enthusiast.
Life was not all fun and games, though, as he also started dreaming of entrepreneurship. He and his co-founder, Nishanth K S, would often brainstorm ideas about starting something up. “The thought of building something that millions of users could use was incredibly exciting to us. It was that sense of possibility that sparked my entrepreneurial journey,” Nayak says.
And what a journey it has been. Nayak, along with his co-founders Nishanth and Prateek Dixit, has created one of the top audio series platforms in India, Pocket FM, which has surpassed the `1,000 crore revenue mark.
But the idea to combine his interest in storytelling, entrepreneurship and his learnings at IIT came much later in life — it was during Nayak’s long commutes from Delhi to Gurugram from 2015 to 2017 when he was working as a product lead at Paytm’s Cube26. “I used to experiment with various content formats to keep myself entertained, and that’s when I realised something. While video entertainment had a wide spectrum—long-form content like Netflix, TV shows, and movies—there was a noticeable gap in audio entertainment,” he says. It was like an untapped white space. That’s when the idea really took shape, and he instantly knew there was something big he could build.
Even at Paytm, where he was working on content ideas, he realised that for the first time in history, artists and creators could reach an audience without any gatekeepers. “That idea really excited me—I wanted to help bring new artists and art forms to life,” he said.
He and Nishant started working on the idea three months after that eureka moment in the Delhi metro. Dixit, who was a mutual friend, also joined them. The co-founders then adopted the “first principles” of marketing strategy and research, which is a method of problem-solving that involves breaking down complex issues into their most fundamental, basic parts to gain a deeper understanding and develop effective strategies.
YouTube became their go-to platform for content insights. “We noticed that many audio creators were repurposing their audio content as videos by simply adding a thumbnail, and these were getting millions of views. In the comment sections, users were sharing download links for the audio, revealing a latent demand for audio stories,” he says. That insight validated the potential for an audio-first platform. Nayak then shared the idea with his family and decided to leave his job at Paytm. “My family was incredibly supportive,” he says.
The co-founders then onboarded a few YouTube creators, which helped them get their first 1,000 users from their existing audiences. Pocket FM’s first office was a small space in Koramangala 4th Block, Bengaluru. “We had a team of just 10 employees at the time, but the energy was incredible as we all worked together to bring the idea to life,” Nayak says.
Pocket FM was finally launched in September 2018. Day one was exciting, but the journey to achieving product-market fit was a long one, filled with many pivots and learnings along the way. “Our idea went through about 10 pivots in the early stages as we worked to figure out the right format for audio entertainment. Each iteration taught us something new, and we kept refining the concept until we found the right fit, which was an audio series,” he recalls. The audio series was a combination of long form and fiction, in a serialised fiction format. He calls it, “a TV show in audio”. The byte-sized 10-minute episodes had all the elements that could offer a cinematic experience, such as voice acting, sound effects, and a background score.
Within a day of the last and final pivot in 2020, two and a half years after the inception of Pocket FM, the consumption time per user per day increased from 30 minutes to 120 minutes. The first viral show was Kitni Mohabbat Hai, which garnered a million downloads.
“We went through 10 pivots, but one significant learning was that we should have pivoted earlier. When you recognise that something isn’t working, it’s crucial not to iterate incrementally but to aim for a big, fundamental change. Some of our initial pivots took as long as eight months. However, after realising this, our approach to experimentation improved, and we started making faster pivots toward achieving product-market fit,” he says.
After reaching a scale of 1,000 users, the co-founders met their first institutional investors. This was during a time when short video apps were booming, and video content was the craze. “When we pitched our idea, many investors would ask us who would listen to audio. We responded by emphasising that audio storytelling is a fundamental art form as old as time and deserved a place in the digital landscape. Fortunately, Lightspeed believed in our vision and backed us very early in our journey, continuing to double down on their support ever since,” he says.
Besides Lightspeed, the Series D-funded startup is today backed by Tencent, Times Internet, Tanglin Venture Partners and Goodwater Capital and has raised a total of $196.5 million. The startup has 200 million users globally and has also successfully expanded into the US market. Currently, 73% of the total revenues come from the US, and 5% from Europe. Seven audio series have now joined the `100 crore club, including popular titles like Insta Millionaire, Saving Nora (Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To), and Insta Empire. “Our mission is to empower and enable content creators to reach their audiences without gatekeepers, unlocking their potential to share stories that resonate on a global scale,” says Nayak.
