Shark Tank India Season 2 has recently seen a famous entrepreneur Vinay Kumar Singhal, who appeared on the show to pitch a business idea which he established in collaboration with Shashank Vaishnav and Parveen Singhal, know about their old platform WittyFeed and more about the founder
The trio has founded an OTT platform, The Stage which produces regional content with more than thousands artists from Haryana.
Know who was the founder of WittyFeed, what happened to it and why it closed and its story
Their old platform WittyFeed was India’s version of American company BuzzFeed. Earlier in an interview with Your story, Vinay opened up that at the end of 2016, their website has recorded around 120 million unique month-on-month users. He claimed on Shark Tank India that the company was banned by Facebook due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal which shook the US with even the Congress accused of using it in India.
The content created by WittyFeed was found to have flagrantly flouted Facebook policies which lead to its ban from the platform.
Moreover, the platform even generated 420 million page views and 2.5 billion impressions. But by the end of November, 2018, their team woke up with a nightmare as their Facebook page was wiped off.
In his statement, Vinay revealed that, “We got killed overnight without any particular reason by Facebook. As founders, we were in denial.
“We thought it was a glitch. Later, we were ready to fight Facebook. But as time passed, we realised that wasn’t going to happen.”
Later in 2019, Vinay along with Shashank, and Praveen decided to build their own digital platform Bharat titled STAGE.
For those who are curious to know more about STAGE, let us tell you, it is an artist and dialect-based OTT platform for Indians. As of now, the platform has recorded more than 2 million downloads and has over 1 Lakh paying customers.
The platform is backed by the likes of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Ritesh Malik, Blume Ventures, Venture Catalysts, and Inflection Point Ventures.
In the first episode on YourStory UNCUT, Vinay showcased his journey through almost losing his first company to building STAGE.
In his statement, Vinay further added that, ‘Our team kept saying that they won’t give up, no matter what. And that became the origin story of STAGE.”
Let us remind you, Vinay’s OTT platform makes content for Indian languages such as Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.
Meanwhile talking about STAGE, the Co-founder of the platform stated that it’s, “A true hyperlocal company built for Bharat would be a dialect-based platform. That is what STAGE is.”
As of now, STAGE only builds content in Haryanvi language and aims to target unserved markets of India.
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