Snigdha Sur on Building for the South Asian Diaspora

Jacob: What I love about Niche Media is that there are literally thousands of different topics and communities and subjects out there, and we just keep finding new ones. The Juggernaut is no different in that it serves a very specific audience. Can you tell us what The Juggernaut is and why you decided to launch it?

Snigdha: Thanks, Jacob for that observation. The Juggernaut is a media company and community for South Asian stories. We are primarily targeting the South Asian diaspora, starting with the US first, but we truly are more of a big tent inclusive tent strategy where anybody is welcome if they’re curious about the region or its people but we are bringing the expertise to bear when it comes to centering South Asian stories and reporting.

Jacob: When you say the South Asian diaspora, you mean countries like India, Nepal and those families that have left there and gone around the world?

Snigdha: Yes, when I say South Asian diaspora I mean the Asian subcontinent that includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, some definitions include Afghanistan and Burma, Bhutan, et cetera. What’s really interesting about this diaspora that there’s a couple of geopolitical things. One is that many of the lines in this region were created in the 20th century because when the British left, they basically created these lines that led to the formation of what is now Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. What’s also interesting about this demographic is that they’re actually the world’s largest diaspora and that happened after 2010. My favorite cocktail, fun fact, or one of my favorite cocktail fun facts related to The Juggernaut is that the country before that, or the region before that was Russia. You can see some of the examples of that in the US already with Google and Larry and Sergey Brin.

Jacob: The Juggernaut covers the South Asian diaspora, for other communities that have gone through that similar diaspora, are there other contemporary websites out there that cover those other communities?

Snigdha: When we think about other communities I guess just to be specific, do you mean like specific South Asian communities like Indian American or Bangladeshi American, or Nepali American, et cetera?

Jacob: No, I would say like so the Russian diaspora, do you find that there are any English-speaking publications that serve that community?

Snigdha: Yes. That’s a great question. One of the reasons it was really important to see The Juggernaut in the world is I actually looked back at the history of US media. What’s interesting about American media is that it has very much, based on what you started with that observation has had really thriving community media outlets. When you look at the history of New York City, like in the 1800s even people were selling even like Jamaican newspapers, Italian language newspapers.

In Pennsylvania there were German-language newspapers. One of the companies I admire immensely is actually BET, Black Entertainment Television. It sold to Viacom in 2000 for $2.3 billion. It’s not exactly technically a diaspora as much as it was obviously a forced population. We have to acknowledge that, but it’s really been important to center Black voices and we’re even in what I call Inning two, where we have companies like Blabbity.

We have companies that have transitioned to becoming– not transition but become our digital native. We also have older companies like Telemundo or Univision and now we even have [unintelligible 00:04:43] and Mitú which targets the Hispanic community. Lastly, there’s also communities such as 88rising which is focused on East Asian music. Taking artists from China, bringing them to the US, and vice versa.

There’s also been companies Sinocism which is by Bill Bishop, and it’s specifically targeting China watchers. What’s really interesting about Bill Bishop’s business is that you don’t necessarily need to be Chinese to read Sinocism. You just have to be curious about the region and understand its significance in geopolitics in the world today. It’s really interesting when we talk about Niche Media, it’s not just about specific communities or specific diasporas. What’s really interesting is that you can kind of define it in these very community-centered ways.

Jacob: What is the significance of the name, The Juggernaut?

Snigdha: The juggernaut comes from Sanskrit roots. It would say Indo-Oregon language originating from the South Asian subcontinent and it comes from this word called juggernaut which refers to this large procession that happened in India specifically to this day. It still happens in the state called Orissa. When this procession was happening in the 1800s, the first recorded version of the word was the British bastardized in English was a British bastardized Juggernaut spelled J-U-G-G-E-R-N-A-U-T.

Unlike the words like astronaut, it actually doesn’t have like Greco Latin roots here. It’s actually a Sanskrit word. I was excited by the word when we named ourselves as Juggernaut because domain was available, thejuggernaut.com, number one. Number two it had this kind of South Asian roots but that were also kind of bastardized by what I call let’s say, the white gaze. It felt interesting and important to reclaim that.

Jacob: Diving now into the actual business, you and I talked a few months, probably about six months ago and one thing you and I both shared was that we both just always wanted to be in media. How did The Juggernaut really get started? What were the early days like and how have you seen the business evolving over the past year prior to Y Combinator?

Snigdha: Sure. Let me start addressing maybe a not question but sort of implicit question. What you asked is why did it want to be in the miss of media? What I love about what you’re doing, Jacob is pointing out how media is actually a real business. It’s not just something that is easy to pull off. It’s also a really difficult business. Why are people going out of their way to build media businesses in the late 2010s when so many people feel burned by certain aspects of the media industry and it seems like journalism is a dying industry? I’m going to start with that. Why do we love or why do I specifically love media? I grew up an avid reader. I have to be so thankful to the Bronx Public Library and the Queens Public Library.

I felt like I was Matilda growing up. I would go out, go there and like check out all the books I possibly could. That was essentially my education in America. I’m an immigrant. I was born in India, I moved to America when I was three, I moved to New York City. When I first came here, I did not know much about America at all but I was an avid reader. Being able to read and learn not just about, I guess American culture, but also history and politics and all of this good stuff, that became really important to me. It really showed me how so much of what we consume, whether it’s reading, listening to music, or even watching movies, really helped shape who we are and what we believe and what we question. It was really important to me to be in that business. From a very young age I think I told my mom when I was five, I wanted to be a novelist or a journalist.

I didn’t end up becoming that just yet but I really, really knew I wanted to be in that business. Going into The Juggernaut, how did it start? The very first kernel of an idea related to The Juggernaut I had when I was 24, and this was in 2014, and I am obsessed with Bollywood. This is an indirect answer, but I was obsessed with Bollywood. I studied it in college. I actually wrote my senior thesis on Bollywood over 125 pages worth. Whenever I watched movies, it was so difficult to find them, so difficult to stream them.

I thought, why isn’t there a Netflix for Bollywood? There was a company back in the day called Drama Fever which took this kind of elements that you see in The Juggernaut today where they were acquiring rights to Korean dramas and then streaming them in other geographies like Latin America and America. I thought why can’t we do this? Why can’t we build this? I did the game strategy in my head and talked to a lot of mentors and advisors and I eventually realized that I thought Netflix would get to my strategy faster than it ultimately did and I couldn’t beat Netflix and acquiring these titles.

I moved on from that idea. Fast forward to 2016, I was interning in Los Angeles and I was interning at a PE firm that had just invested in Reese Witherspoon. What was really interesting about this PE firm’s thesis in life was that they also believed in targeted media. Some people call it Niche Media, some people call it Targeted Media. The idea that let’s target people who haven’t been properly served by the market. Mainstream media already exists, you know, like of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, et cetera, or Washington Post, let’s go after people who don’t feel like they’re served.

It was that summer when I started really investigating a lot of different business models and a lot of different media companies including BET, that those cogs started turning again. We were like what would it look like to build something that is much more like BET? That was the first kernel of The Juggernaut. I let that pass for a bit, didn’t really act on that. Thought I was going to start actually a version of this with somebody else, didn’t end up working out. Then I kind of let that idea go for a while. I won’t lie. Then fast forward to 2018 or 2017, sorry, 2017. Fast forward to 2017, and I thought, you know what? I want to test this idea. The first version of The Juggernaut was a newsletter called [unintelligible 00:10:50]. I started seeding it with 150 of my friends on MailChimp, and I would curate and read.

I was a news junkie, so I was reading all these articles and I would select the ones that I thought worth most interesting and write my own analysis on it. Something that many people don’t know about me is I was an economics and South Asian studies major in undergrad which means that I actually know a ton about South Asian economics, politics, history and culture and studied it in an academic form which is very surprising to most people. Not only am I really obsessed with Bollywood but I actually studied it in academic context and also studied South Asian geopolitics. I started analyzing these articles and presenting my perspective on them in envisioned like a Money Talk but that’s really about South Asia. My friends started reading them and opening them and sharing them.

I went back to my business school reunion, my one year reunion. It had been a few months since I started this newsletter project and people were stopping me in person and saying, how do you have time to write that because I really love your newsletter. It gives me so much joy. It’s not even something I thought I needed. That’s the interesting part. It’s not something we thought they needed because nobody had verticalized along that way before.

There was no such thing as Sinism for South Asia, really for a western audience which is surprising when you really think about it. People weren’t India watching in even 2017 even though it’s obvious that you should be in a way. That’s when I decided that hey maybe there is an idea here. I saved up a lot of money. I was a planning ahead. I saved up for about five months of runway and I quit my job. I was at McKinsey at that point the second time I quit my job and I started fundraising in New York City and I talked to a couple of VCs. I was not good at this at all. What I did have was knowing that I had five months of runway I started talking to people and saying hey, I want to build a media company.

I knew ahead of time because of thank you my MBA, that I wanted it to be a subscription model. I was like I want to do this and I want to charge people’s subscriptions and I want to target this audience and target these stories. I think it’s really important. No one’s really doing it before. No one’s really done it before. I think that because no one had done it before and exactly this way there had been the athletic, which is focused on sports journalism but so many VCs were like sports is a huge industry.

I felt a little bit like how Airbnb probably felt explaining to people about sharing apartments, because people hadn’t seen it before, it was really hard for people to envision what it could be. It came to the point where I was getting tired of the New York Venture Capital scene and so I decided I needed to hack fundraising. I ended up applying to Y Combinator. I applied late. For anybody who ever thinks about applying Y Combinator go ahead apply even if you think it’s late. Didn’t think I’d get an interview. I was a solo founder, which is very rare for YC to invest in. The second piece I was building a media subscription company and one of the reasons I thought YC would get it was because they had invested in sub-stack and they had invested in the athletic.

They have been secretly behind the first checks or the early checks of a lot of these media giants today. I thought maybe they’ll get it. I was in Spain at a friend’s wedding at the time, didn’t check my work email. I remember coming back to– it was like the day before I was coming back to New York and I thought let me check my work email in case I missed anything this past week.

I opened an email and it said hey, congrats you got an interview but because I was the last person who’d opened the email there’s only one slot left. It happened to be less than 24 hours after I arrived back in New York. I quickly booked my ticket from New York to SF, flew back to New York, flew to SF, interviewed at YC. I actually go t a “We don’t know” after my first interview, so interviewed a second time that same day. By the end of the day I got the news that they’d funded us and five days later I flew back to New York, ran the New York City Marathon and the rest is history from there.

Jacob: What’s interesting about Y Combinator is they did invest in Substack but Substack’s a technology platform play The Juggernauts not. During your interview and during your conversations, what do you think that they saw that made inviting a media company to a traditionally technology focused accelerator? What do you think made that happen?

Snigdha: That’s a great question. I’d love to go back and ask the person who ultimately invested in me that question without his hindsight bias because he obviously had all this information about me when I finally got up the nerve to ask him. We’d been working together for a few months and when I finally got up the nerve to ask Jared Friedman who’s a partner at YC I was like “Jared why did you invest in me?”

You need a great answer. I’ll tell you what it is at the end of the story. When I went to the Y Combinator interview I brought printouts like over 14 pages of all my Mail Chimp data. I showed them how my Mail Chimp grew organically and it also showed them our open rates and our unique open rates and they were off the charts.

Our unique open rates were above 70% and our total open rates which means like how many times total people were opening it were above 80%. At a certain point I think people regardless of how many I guess like hesitations they have, it’s really hard to fight against data sometimes. I think YC is a very data driven institution. They’re also a very intuition driven institution. One of the things that many of the investors say or many of the partners say, not trying to put words into any specific person and not trying to speak for YC here but just my observation, they often say that they really look a lot for founder problem fit. Is this a founder who’s really going to change the game? Do they have the grit? Do they have the hustle?

I even misspoke by saying Founder problem fit. I literally mean just founder fit. They really look at the founder because they know in so many instances people have pivoted or changed their ideas. They often talk about the story of Brex. Brex is this credit card company where I think they started off as a VR company but they really invest in the founders because the founders seemed just so– they had so much grit and they had the hustle and they felt like they were going to fight for it.

Similarly, there have been some companies where their first year and a half they didn’t perform that and then they pivoted and then the rest is history. One company like that is called Signet which is into the analytics. They started off as like a company that was measuring classroom sentiment. They really loved the people. I think ultimately maybe what they saw in me was here’s this person who’s trying to build this contrarian media company in 2018. She’s a solo founder. She has this data with her. She seems so convinced. I think what Jared ultimately later told me to continue the storyline is that he saw this history of grit in my background.

I don’t really talk about it much but I worked really hard in high school. I worked really hard in college. I worked really hard in grad school. Not saying that ever is necessarily connected one to one to how you build your business but I think they’d seen a track record of me not really having very much to start with and fighting for it and doing more with it. I don’t come from a very resourceful like resourced family. I’m an immigrant and we didn’t really have much growing up but I think they saw a lot of that in that interview in that very short 10 minute interview. I think they also saw that I wasn’t necessarily thinking from the usual perspective that I had my own first principle reasoning that I was using to justify what I was saying, which is like you guys have invested in the Athletic before which is also a media company.

The reason it works is because it has a subscription business model. The reason subscription business model can work is because they have a much higher multiple. The reason that this company can work is because we have winner take all dynamics that if we can truly be that big tent media brand, we’ll essentially be like the New York Times or BET and they trade at billions of dollars. Media isn’t such a small market as people think it is. At the end of the day my advice to a lot of people when they go to YC is to bring them their best selves, show their history of grit and all of that and also show why they really think this can be a successful business and ot to be ashamed of that potential because I really made that case and I think they had to believe it by the end of it.

Jacob: I want to dive into the comparisons to BET because I really think that’s an interesting future for The Juggernaut that I really want to get your thoughts on. Before we do, let’s talk about The Juggernaut. Right now you are a pure play subscription business. Really, really gritty here but what technology currently powers the business and more specifically your subscription business?

Snigdha: That’s a really great question. In terms of ink through the stack, I’ll talk about the meta first before I tell you the answer. In terms of thinking about the stack, one of the things we really thought about as a business was what is the landscape out there and where is the future? What is the tech stack that will allow us to scale? When you think about a lot of older, news sites, not even necessarily mainstream news, I mean like older new sites that started off the ground, even five years ago or even 10 years ago many of them were working off of WordPress, many of them were working off even– some of them were built on medium. When we were looking at where the feature was going a lot of it is very much react.

A lot of it is very much like really quick load time. What’s really beautiful about react, it’s a Facebook library of JavaScript which allows certain components on a page to change. That’s like your famous like button was made possible by React, where you click it and only that button changes but nothing else on the page changes in terms of load which means that it really makes things much faster and it also makes it easier to build your site with building blocks.

We knew we wanted to do this. Also one other thing I did take a five month coding boot-camp so I’m a little bit more technical than I let on to people so I have some technical background which is definitely helpful for me when I was trying to build our architecture. We knew we wanted to be React based so we ultimately picked a CMS called Contentful. Typical API structure, you can run queries and bring back JSON structured data and then render them onto your site. Some people think about it as like a headless CMS which means that it’s a content management system where you can input all the data, but when you throw it out into the front end into terms of what users see, you can really really customize it.

That’s our content management system. In terms of our payment system, we also were very careful that we wanted to own our payment data and we want to own our customer information directly, and that’s why we use Stripe. Stripe is also API driven, which means that you can like really program it to customize it to be what you want it to be. That was very helpful. Important for us for two things, two reasons. One is of course, control of data. The second thing is control over financial destiny. One of the things that really will happen, and Jacob, we’ve talked about this a couple of times, is that a lot of payment services often work by taking– a lot of platform services often work by taking a percentage of what you earn. What ends up happening is when you become really successful, you’re going to get really annoyed that you’re paying a little bit of that percentage, right?

From the very beginning we thought, well, instead of having that situation happen down the line, going back to our meta infrastructure thought, let’s, let’s build this for scale. We started with stripe from the beginning and that’s really what powers our subscriptions in terms of– and our website, those two key things, Stripe and content pool. We also added our own analytics stack, and this is a very controversial decision. We’re thinking about actually working with the consultant at this stage now to take our analytics to the next level.

We used a mixture of amplitude to instrument and measure different things on our website and also to display it back to the business operations so that we can understand what’s going on. Let me explain what that means. We measure how many people view an article, how many people then click that button called subscribe on that article if they’re not logged in and then how many people ultimately convert from an article? We call these article conversion funnels. We look at this because it’s an apples to apples conversion, like apples to apples comparison across our articles. We do know that some people might subscribe by seeing some other article and ultimately go somewhere else.

We get that, but we needed to start somewhere. This really allows us to see what’s working, what’s not working, what are the categories, what are the authors who are doing really incredible work, where could we have done better? Which days are better to get better, more subscribers? That’s been really helpful for us. That’s definitely a page that I really want to take out of the athletic book, which was how can we be data oriented about what we’re doing?

Analytics is basically a huge part that we do need to build further. More on that soon, but that’s how I think about a stack right now. Content for CMS, Stripe for payments, Amplitude and Signet essentially for data. We also use Google Analytics, of course. We’re still on MailChimp as well for newsletters because that’s what we started with. I’ve actually had some conversations with Tyler Dank at Morning Brew about, figuring out when we would ever graduate from that because there’s so much more to do when it comes to emails.

Jacob: Yes, and email being probably one of the most important channels for conversion, which I do– I am curious about your conversions in a second. Actually, let’s talk about conversions. You started as a free newsletter, you then built out a a subscription company. Of the various channels, how has the newsletter to subscription funnel worked for you from a conversion perspective?

Snigdha: That’s a great question. I will say we have not been optimizing our newsletter to paid funnel. We should be, we haven’t optimized it yet. We have a point in time, number that we like talking about. When we launched, so we had our newsletter since let’s say about October, 2017, very irregularly. We launched The Juggernaut in its current form with the second product being , paid access to original reported articles, like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall, hard paywall. We launched that February 15th, 2019, and at the time we launched it, we noticed that over, I would say basically six to 10% of our free newsletter subscribers, free newsletter readers subscribed and they paid.

We also noticed that a lot of people started subscribing from, and this is something that athletic has talked about, our authors. Our authors would say, Hey, just publish a piece in the Juggernaut, check it out, support it if you can. We would get a lot of conversions that way. What’s been really incredible for us, interestingly enough, especially during COVID, is Instagram ads. We never really expected this because most publications, they usually have one super channel and many publications super channel if you really look is usually Twitter. Twitter is where journalists started, right? Many of them. That’s where many publications have really, really landed and expanded and really grown their followers.

We somehow, and I don’t know if this is because of me, because I personally am Instagram native, I am much more comfortable with Instagram. I don’t know if it’s because of me, but we just did really phenomenally well on Instagram and we’ve had pretty good conversions from there as well. That was a little bit counter-intuitive for not only us, but a lot of people we chatted with because publications which are so focused on words, we did pretty well on a very visual medium. I think Instagram has become a little bit the new place where a lot of people are sharing information.

Jacob: You mentioned that you went paid in February of 2019, which means February, 2020. Was the was your first year renewals for all your annual subscribers, what was your retention like and were there any exercises you took to try to reduce any churn that you might have had?

Snigdha: That’s the other secret of The Juggernaut. We have not optimized anything when it comes to churn. To this point, we don’t even have a past due credit card flow, which is, hey, like your credit card has changed or you’ve lost your credit card. We should be telling you, and I’m telling you these dirty secrets because we are hiring our first full-time engineer. We haven’t even created our past due flow to really remind you. We are at a very under optimized form in terms of The Juggernaut. We don’t even allow you to pause your subscription yet. We’re really working on it. We really take this seriously.

When our first year at came due, what I was really looking at, there’s two things I actually look at. I don’t just look at annual renewals, I also look at cohort analysis. Thanks to Stripe, I can see, okay, the people who started subscribing and let’s say February, 2019, how are they doing a month to month? How many people are leaving this cohort month to month? I’m not going to reveal, I’m so sorry, I’m not going to reveal my exact retention numbers. What I will say is that every single month that we’ve been in business, our cohorts have got gotten stronger and stronger and stronger, which is what you want to see.

Even looking at our December cohort compared to our February cohort or December 2019 cohort, people who started in December, 2019, first, our February, 2019 far, far stronger. It makes sense. When you’re launching, you probably don’t have that many articles. Well, we didn’t, we didn’t like have a backlog of like 30 articles to start with. We only had two or three. Many of the people who first joined were tasters. They didn’t really know what we were doing. We didn’t do much PR. I have this advice for anybody if once, if you’re ever launching a media site, please, please invest in telling everybody from the top of the world that you exist. We did not do this because we were in the middle of Y Combinator.

We just didn’t have the bandwidth. If I were to do that over, that’s probably what I would do. Not many people knew we existed. Our denominator for February, 2019 was very small. Those are my caveats, which is observationally, our cohorts have gotten stronger and that’s what you should be tracking. I think one of the reasons from our qualitative customer calls, I do them every Thursday. I haven’t been doing them recently because we’ve been doing some other stuff on Thursdays. Our customer calls usually say that they felt that the quality of the editorial got much better for the past few months. I think we also started doing events in New York City. We started piloting them in 2019. We held four events. They were all sold out and we would’ve loved to have doubled down on that in 2020. We were in COVID time. We’re going to have to figure out how to transition that to digital.

Jacob: I love the fact that you do those customer calls just because I think as a creator, I have the ability to email with all my people that subscribe to my newsletter. It’s a way to really build loyalty that I don’t think a lot of media companies really think about. Obviously it’ll be trickier when you’re at, 5,000 or 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 subscribers or maybe you’re already there. I don’t know. Obviously, when you’re starting out, it’s a great way to really, really build loyalty with those people.

Snigdha: 100%. Those are the very people who want to tell you how to be better. I read– many people might not know this, but I read every single customer email. I get forwarded every single customer service email too. I read it and I try to figure out like, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Sometimes people tell you stuff in person and over the phone when they’re seeing your face or over zoom that they would never tell you in an email. Sometimes they’re really angry and they will tell you everything over an email. It’s been really interesting. Regardless of our size I have managed to have an EA now and that’s been very important to us where like I have to do usually eight customer calls every Thursday. We’re cooking up something else. There’s a reason why we haven’t been doing them the past couple of weeks, but hopefully we’ll be restarting that soon.

Jacob: My last question on your subscription business is it’s around pricing. You offer three tiers either monthly at $9.99, annually at $3.99 per month but then you also offer a lifetime plan, what went into your pricing strategy and why did you add that lifetime plan?

Snigdha: That’s a really great question. We added the lifetime plan around January of this year. The thinking behind that was, I’m a huge believer in looking at past playbooks and figuring out what works under what context and then applying it to us. Our pricing strategy, in the beginning, was very similar to The Athletic. We launched, a monthly actually originally had $4.99 A month then there was an annual at launch two, which comes out to about $52 a year or about $3.99 a month. We actually also have a student planner, which is about $29.99 a year, which amounts to about $2.49 a month. These exact numbers actually came from me looking at Wayback Machine analysis of like the athletic and looking at what they were charging when we started and where they are today.

Along the way, I guess 10 months in, I started noticing and getting targeted for ads by Calm and I started noticing that they had a lifetime subscription. That was about 7x The price of their annual. I thought, well, you know what, we should start testing this out and if we limit the test, this could really be an interesting way to understand where the biggest power users are but also overserve them and see what happens. We knew from the beginning that we were going to limit it to 200 lifetime subscribers and that’s it. Like the first 200, let’s see what happens. We haven’t reached 200 yet but I’m shocked every week we get anywhere from one to like 10-lifetime subscribers just organically. That’s been just shocking to me, we run zero ads against lifetime.

Some of these lifetime subscribers have ended up becoming our investors. That’s how invested they are in The Juggernaut that they’re willing to shell out if you really think about the process here, $250 upfront without really trying our product and we’re like, “Hey, I’m down.” The second thing I want to really talk about is one of the things I’m really proud of is that also because we have this kind of customer call connection is that we talk to these lifetime subscribers. Sometimes I try to send them stuff ahead of time to try to figure out what they want and what they need.

It’s kind of an interesting, like proto, kind of Beta group within a Beta group. All of our early adopters are going to give you tons of feedback but then the lifetime subscribers can give you other feedback that you’re like, “Wait a second, if I want to get more lifetime subscribers like these, this might be interesting to test.” For example, we have an app. It’s not out in Alpha yet. It’s in Beta but we do have an app. I’ve been thinking about sending our lifetime subscribers and link to the app and be like, “Hey, knock yourself out, tell me all the feedback, tell me all the things you want,” and having them be my early testers even before I launch it to the rest of my subscribers. That’s an interesting thing I’ve noticed about the lifetime subscriber group.

Jacob: I want to pivot to a discussion around advertising. You are a pure-play subscription company right now. Whereas I take more of the approach of subscriptions and ads can work together. Have you since the launch of the company experimented with any sort of ad or sponsorship products across whether the newsletter site or you mentioned events?

Snigdha: Yes, we have. It’s a great question. We did test a sponsorship of our newsletter. It actually went well and I might be hiring up somebody to help scale that. That’s new news but yes, what we have noticed and I’m pretty staunch about this. I really hate ads in the paid experience, if that makes sense. I really hate having Ads on my New York Times app or my Wall Street Journal app. I’m already paying for the subscription. It really annoys me when I see an ad pop up as I’m reading. I really want that seamless reading experience. I think I’ve noticed that certain formats, people care about ads less, think about podcasts. Think about newsletters. Newsletters are usually a free product anyway. People mind less when there’s an ad there.

I think people mind less when there’s an ad in a podcast because they might need a break anyway or it feels like it’s much more conversational. We do want to scale our sponsorships or newsletter. We have done events without sponsors but we’d love to add sponsors on the line for events. One thing we are definitely very strict upon is that no sponsor will change your editorial policies, we remain editorially independent. That’s really important for us, that separation of church and state. It’s really also important for us to have that separation of church and state with our investor. Regardless of who our investors are we always acknowledge who they are but we also say this doesn’t really directly affect our editorial policy. Yes, there could be ads on the line, I think that could be huge business.

I think there will be other formats on the line, we’d love to– we are working on some podcast ideas and that could have their own entire business model. It was really important for me to at least get one thing right, as a founder not to do everything at once and the one thing we want to get right first was our newsletter. The second thing we want to get right was a great written journalism subscription product and probably the third or fourth thing might be podcasts or getting more ads onto our newsletter. So stay tuned.

Jacob: I do want to talk a little bit about audience development because when you are a hard paywall, I have to imagine it’s tricky to build a top-of-the-funnel audience. What does audience development look like at The Juggernaut and what tactics have you been deploying that you found particularly useful?

Snigdha: This is something we think about a ton, which is, how do we have people experience The Juggernaut before they convert and there’s a couple of ways that we think about this. One is our Instagram channel, I highly suggest anybody who wants to check out instagram.com/_theJuggernaut all one word and check out our posts. What we’re really good at is putting out those first three paragraphs to really entice people to understand what the story is going to be about. Then hopefully, if that story is compelling enough, you will put in your credit card to read it during your seven-day free trial. Even though we’re a hard paywall, we give everybody a seven-day free trial, no questions asked, unless you’re a lifetime subscriber, then you’ll just convert.

During that seven days, if you don’t like what we’re doing, you just cancel and you don’t get charged. That is one way of doing audience development. We do have obviously database of some people who did come up for that seven-day show trial and for some reason or the other, whether they came just to read one article, whether it’s because they didn’t want anything more else or they didn’t have the money at that point. Those are definitely a group of people we can definitely develop over time, we keep them on our free newsletter. Hopefully, over time, maybe they’re ready for us again and we’ll actually subscribe and stay. That’s part one. Part two, obviously, is what I talked about before, which is social media and using that to whet people’s appetite because they could see a lot of our content and our style and our topics just through our social media.

The third piece is, this is a tech feature that we built ourselves that we borrowed lovingly from the information, which is we give out some of our hard-hitting reporting for free through a share link, which means that we will share the link as The Juggernaut to the public through social media and we ask the reader to enter their email address to read it. That way, we capture a lead, we add you to our free newsletter and you get the drips to understand who we are and hopefully subscribe and convert. It also is a great holding place for people who might want to read an article or two, enter their email address and read all of it but we don’t give them much more than that.

During BLM, the summer, during the protests, we really should try editorials to address this issue within our community and outside of our community. All of those articles were provided for free, any of our hard-hitting COVID articles that interviewed people in the community who were hardest hit, we did one on Chicago and stimulus checks, etcetera, all of those were provided for free. Hopefully, that gives people enough of a taste. That’s the third way we do this, which is just providing articles for free. All of those three together is our current solution and of course, the fourth piece, sorry, of course, is our newsletter, so you can just see a little bit of our quality there.

What I want to do in the next phase of our growth is we really need to AV test that. The reason I didn’t start with a metered paywall, which is another option is if you look at the study that Nielsen and the Financial Times did and I think we talked about this last time, Jacob is that when the Financial Times of the study, they saw that when you have a metered paywall, you’re reinforcing counterintuitive bait behavior. When you have a metered paywall, people want to avoid reading more. Once you hit that 1, 2, 3 or 10 articles, you want to avoid reading more or you try to find loopholes to read more. Publications have gotten better at eliminating those loopholes. What you ultimately end up doing is just read less.

Even though you might want to have read 10 articles from the Financial Times you end up reading only three if that’s what their metered paywall is. That’s not the behavior you really want for your ultimate subscriber. You want people to subscribe, who will read a ton of your writing, so you’re also attracting for the wrong people. Financial Times started doing a hard paywall and they’re a really hard paywall, you have to pay like $65 a month to commit to them. That’s it. They do not give you anything for free, maybe once in a while. It’s incredible because it’s worked for them. They found that when they switched from a metered paywall to a hard paywall, they actually might have had maybe slightly lower conversion but their LTB, their lifetime value increased significantly and their subscriber growth also increased significantly.

They were finally able to find the right people and they were finally able to figure out the right way to retain them. That’s my thoughts on audience engagement which is if you are choosing a hard paywall, understand some of the trade-offs. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t testing it. We still should be testing this stand line. We should be ab testing a metered paywall. Once you’ve chosen it own it and then try to figure out how to do all those audience development things in all those other formats so that you can get there. We are also thinking about the fact that if we are going to try a different business model for let’s say our podcast, if that is going to be more sponsored then the podcast can be the free product. Then we bring in people to subscription by maybe saying the first three episodes are free, the last episode is on The Juggernaut. Things like that.

Jacob: We’ve talked subscriptions, advertising, audience development that is The Juggernaut as it is today. As you look forward and you mentioned before BET, how do you see The Juggernaut evolving from here? Three years, five years and 10 years down the line?

Snigdha: I’m trying to be like both excited to paint our vision but also I want to keep some of the cards close to our chest. In terms of the way to think about our future I sometimes talk about us like BET and even like the New York times in the sense that most successful media companies by the end of the day, are multi-platform. Jacob we’ve talked about this. Which is yes, you might have the written word, you might be in email, but you ultimately have a site or then you have a podcast.

You might even have a film and TV deal. We might be working on a film and TV deal, by the way. How do we as a media company become multi-platform? That is basically The Juggernaut audition for the next three to five years. Do we even start becoming a product studio and start building brands for this community? Do we start becoming a marketing agency down the line and help companies who are trying to target this demographic? Do we create those film and TV deals for the likes of Netflix and Hulu and Amazon based on our own reporting and based on our own expertise? Do we create certain podcast deals with Spotify and the like? There’s a lot to do here and we’re just beginning.

Jacob: Every entrepreneur, whether it’s in media, technology, anything makes mistakes. What are some mistakes that you’ve made either individually or as an organization that and what are some ways to prevent them from happening in the future?

Snigdha: These days? I’m thinking a lot about– it’s so funny. One of my old friends, someone I hired back in the day when we were students in college for a student group, we were talking a lot about this. I’m thinking today a lot about scale, which is how do we scale The Juggernaut through hiring. That’s something I’m thinking about a ton. There’s an article he sent me on First Round Capital, which was talking about letting go of Legos.

The idea is when you start building a Lego set you often want to do it alone let’s say in the beginning. As you add more people you can get more of the Lego set built faster and you can actually probably build something even bigger than you ever imagined. Like instead of just building let’s say a minorette you’re now building the Taj Mahal. My current lens right now is how do I hire really well and scale us? I’m not exactly saying we made a mistake, I’m more thinking to the future which is how do we hire out the people in this organization, especially when we’re building something new. I don’t think there have been many verticalized media organizations along this vertical situated in the diaspora, headquartered in New York. It’s really hard to sometimes find these people. That’s something that I’m telling myself that we need to get really great at as we scale to the future, really great at hiring. I don’t think it’s going to be easy but I’m really excited for that challenge.

Jacob: What is some advice that you would give to somebody who is looking to get into media specifically launching perhaps one of these verticalized media companies like you’ve launched?

Snigdha: I always think about MVP, MVP, MVP and data, data, data which is how can you– first of all think about why you’re building what you’re building? Obviously I really do think that especially in the days that there are so many lows, it’s often that passion and often that really wanting to see this in the world that gets me through. Number one, why are you building this? Second, how can you build the most minimum viable product? From us it was obviously a MailChimp newsletter that was free back in the day. I paid $0 per month to send it out to 150 people a month– sorry, like 150 people in the beginning. It was $0 a month for several months before we decided to make it our own brand. How do you test your idea?

The cheapest way possible doesn’t have to be a newsletter, it could be a texting system, it could be something else. How do you test it so you know it’s true? Really the goal during this time is to be really hard on yourself, not in a bad way. I thought of all the ways because I’m that kind of person. I guess because I was trained in business school that my idea wouldn’t work. I thought of all the ways my idea wouldn’t work. This goes back to part two which is going back to the data. What can you find in the data that nobody else is noticing but you? When I was digging into the data, I was one of the few people that was noticing “Hey, South Asians have become the world largest diaspora. Hey South Asian Americans have become the world like America’s fastest growing def demographic”.

Hey, we have this interesting tale of two cities where many of us are pretty rich but then we also are the second largest group of illegal immigrants. What’s going on here? There’s so many stories to tell. We have 460 billion to spending power. What’s going on here? We vote really Democrat. When you look at the 2016 elections, South Asian Americans tend to lean way more Democrat than many other populations.

When I started looking at the data, there were so many interesting things about the community that I wasn’t finding in mainstream media. I thought that’s great. I had MailChimp data to prove our open rates. That’s really my advice. That’s the three part process for I think launching your own thing. If I were to really, really simplify it first, figure out why you’re doing it. Second, figure out how to test it as cheaply as possible.

Third, find the data that only you see. I think the last piece obviously which we have to talk about is capital and resources. Trust me, I’m so aware it’s been so hard for us to– our first round raising was really hard. Our second round raising was really hard. It’s not really easy to raise for a media company because many people still have so many biases. Think about the model that you can pull off that allows you to be as independent as early as possible but also allows you to make your company the biggest it needs to be. Venture capital is not the answer to everybody, for everybody. I’m very well aware of that. There was a reason I took venture capital for a business very specifically. I wanted a certain rate of growth and I wanted to have certain outsize outcomes.

I also knew I wanted to move fast because this narrative shade, which Bedrock Capital talks about, this narrative shade, it’s going to go away soon. People will start noticing how important this demographic is, and I want to move fast before that actually plays out. All of those reasons forced me to choose to take venture capital. The last piece really is thinking about the capital and the resources you need. It could be human capital, it could be money, it could be other things and figuring out how you can get it. It’s going to be hard but you’re going to get through this if you have 1, 2, 3.