The Ups & Downs of Aprameya's Startup Life, from TaxiForSure to Koo

00:00 - 3:10 - Introduction 
6:35 - 8:38 - Parents not agreeing for his startup stint; Shift in his own inclination towards startups and getting conviction
9:04 - 10:24 - Grit to start TFS; anyhow getting people from point A to point B
10:57 - 12:32- Angel Investors being very scarce and lack of information
12:34 - 14:25 - Market explosion and TFS being not really ready for it
18:09 - 20:05 - Grit to build for local language and not English: Vokal story- empowering non-English speaking crowd
20:27 - 22:41 - Challenges as a founder of shifting from a transactional business into a non-transactional business
27:28 - 29:05 - Pursuing the right person to rope him in as a co-founder
32:08 - 34:04 - Atmanirbhar Bharat victory, being just a 3 month old product!
34:59 - 35:57 - Moving fast to capture the Nigerian market
44:11 - 45:03 - Advice to new founders: Start early & Always trust in your first thought!

There’s one thing I’ve always known about Aprameya - he loves being an entrepreneur. 

And he’s no stranger to this journey. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Koo, a microblogging platform catering to the Indian vernacular. Koo was born as an offshoot of Vokal, a vernacular question and answer platform. Within one year, it amassed over a million users, and became a force of its own.

Before this, he was at the helm of TaxiForSure, leading it to a successful acquisition by Ola Cabs back in 2015. I was part of this journey, and Aprameya’s clarity and grit has been something I’ve been aware of throughout.

It is this enthusiasm that comes across in every minute of this awesome episode. 

Listen and find out more on: 

• Koo’s start and explosive growth in the middle of the pandemic, and how the team coped with it all 
• How he discovered his love for entrepreneurship (spoiler: by being one!) 
• Starting TaxiForSure with a drawing on a tissue paper, securing funding during a time Angel Investments weren’t as popular, hitting unit positive in Bangalore and more 
• The Vokal story: how internet is built on content consumption and sharing, and why it was important to create avenues to do both that isn’t primarily English based 
• Creating an entire experience based on local languages, with examples of how they designed interactions for Kannada-speaking audience 
• Sneak peek into what is brewing at Koo, and what the future holds for vernacular content 
  

This was among my favourite conversations, and not just because of having known Aprameya for so long. It helped me better understand the fast-shifting world of content, and the directions in which it is headed. 

Koo is about to make some noise, and we are excited for it.