Meet the 20-year olds whose startup wants to revolutionise content creation

Co-founders of Pepper Content Anirudh Singla (Right) and Rishabh Shekhar (Left)

On the call, 19-year-old Kishan Panpalia sounds jumpy. The words come out fast, the excitement is palpable, and there’s a feeling he’s trying to squeeze out everything from the few moments he has. That may well be true. Panpalia is juggling engineering classes with a senior role at a hot, venture-funded startup -- something people even double his age might struggle with. Twenty-four hours in a day seem too little for all he wants to do.

Panpalia heads business for Pepper Content, an online marketplace that connects content creators with businesses looking for content. Say an investing app wants some basic articles on how to invest. Or an ecommerce website wants product descriptions. Pepper will do it for you.

Panpalia, the moonlighting teenager, is the classic definition of hustle -- a way of life revered and reviled in equal parts by people. But if his life sounds hectic, meet his CEO, Anirudh Singla, who along with co-founder Rishabh Shekhar recently made it to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of young entrepreneurs, leaders and stars.

The 23-year-old Singla has made a career out of cold calling. A successful career, one might add. Singla is too young to legally drink in most parts of the country, but he is running a company whose revenue is growing 15 percent every month, and was funded by one of the world’s top VC firms, Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company is also addressing one of the modern business’ great but understated problems -- the need for quality content.

But let's take a step back.

Content is king

To understand Pepper Content and why it matters, the growing importance of quality content needs to be seen. The smartphone and social media boom led by cheap data prices for India’s 700 million odd internet users have changed the way brands look at content. Virtually overnight, millions upon millions of people and businesses are viewing and creating content- all day, everyday.

But just creating content will get you only so far. Because finding people who can create quality content for you at the price point you can afford “is a struggle”, entrepreneurs and marketing executives Moneycontrol spoke to said.

"Every company produces and outsources content in written, image, audio and video formats. There is a gigantic opportunity and existing customers who pay. And startups are disrupting these giant markets using the power of technology. I hadn't originally thought of it that way, but content is a pretty large category. I had seen it from a consumer lens, but from a B2B lens, it is a $400 billion market globally,” says Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed India and the man who led its investment in Pepper.

This is what Pepper Content is trying to solve -- connect content creators with businesses across various sectors and domains. It’s vast spectrum of activities include articles, social media posts, product descriptions, books and blogs in multiple languages for 400 top companies ranging from Adobe to Amazon and Swiggy.

It is akin to Uber for content creators. Businesses and creators can sign up online and they are matched based on various aspects like the domain, and the nature of content that needs to be created. There are over 30,000 creators on the platform.

The company, which now has a revenue Rs 1 crore, as pegged by a person aware of the developments in the firm, started from the dorms of BITS Pilani by four youngsters who were in their second year of college.

The beginning

In 2017, Singla was studying at BITS Pilani, one of India’s top engineering colleges. His primary interests in life are business and writing, but as Indian students often do, he chose engineering while pursuing other interests on the side. The summer he finished his first year, he cold-emailed about 50 publications for an internship.

In particular, he chased YourStory, a Bengaluru-based online news and media platform. He mailed them and their founder Shradha Sharma again and again, requesting for an internship. In his telling, at some point Sharma seems to have got tired of his mails and eventually told him to come to Bengaluru.

“Somehow I eventually hustled my way into getting into YourStory. I used to cold email a new person every week from their team,” Singla says.

It is also telling that unlike most of his peers, Singla looked for a writing gig, not in a conglomerate or a consultancy like most of his peers did. The hours were similar though. Singla says he put in 19 hours a day that summer, working for YourStory from 9am-5pm, and doing freelance writing the rest of the time. In a couple of months, he earned Rs 2.5 lakh, and learnt some valuable lessons.

“One thing I very strongly realised was that content is going to be massive and that India has a huge creative potential. The freelancing ecosystem is booming, and I thought the content creation scene was at an inflection point,” he says.

Singla then went back to BITS and started a B2B content marketplace, along with his batch mates Rishabh Shekhar, Parv Panthari, and Adit Mittal. In March 2019 when Singla and Shekhar decided to build Pepper Content full time, Panthari and Mittal left to pursue other career interests.

From Rs 16,500 to lakhs

It was not easy. Four second-year students trying to make do with limited resources. Juggling engineering college studies with entrepreneurship was not supposed to be easy anyway. Singla says repeatedly, that persistence was what turned the tide.

Starting in 2017, they got the first order of 250 articles on automotive parts. It came 10 days before their final exams.

They were just starting out. There was no platform or network of 30,000 creators. The platform in fact did not go live till March 2020, when they could afford to hire technology experts after raising seed funding of Rs 2.2 crore  in November 2019.

So, they wrote the articles themselves for Rs 16,500. The company continued to grow its revenue significantly to Rs 1.75 crore between 2017 and 2019 even as many wrote off the company. “There were several popular people who wrote us off saying this can be done by anyone. We have had those experiences,” said Singla. That also made fundraising hard.

“Building the initial network was very tough. I had to cold email about 80 people -- angel investors and VCs. At that point of time there were a lot of questions. What we were doing has not been done at scale before. It was a good business but people did not think it was venture fundable. Today there are no doubts about the size of the market as every company is a content company,” Singla explained.

Eventually, their first investors were Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Innov8’s Ritesh Malik and Slideshare’s Amit Ranjan. As if to validate the seed round, less than a year later, Lightspeed India invested $4.2 million in the firm.

The founders’ age does spring up in most conversations, but did not make a difference for Lightspeed, which had earlier also backed a 19-year-old Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo. The idea was more important.

"B2B marketplaces have traditionally existed offline for decades and have been very fragmented in areas like manufacturing, retail trade. And great founders can be any age. Anirudh has got the energy, vision and hustle. He has seen the opportunity and is going all guns blazing,” Lightspeed’s Khare said.

But building the product and raising money was just crossing half the bridge. Initial hires in a startup are critical for the company’s growth, which was challenging.

Hiring challenges

Imagine five 22-somethings hiring people in their 30s and 40s for the firm that is not well-known. “It was initially super hard,” admits Singla. However few things helped the company.

For one, raising seed money to some extent gave confidence for people to join. “Stories like these (being funded) brought in some sense of confidence and the ability to take a bet on people like us,” Singla says. Two, word of mouth. People were attracted to the ambitious vision set by the young founders, their perseverance and the value the company had already created.

“But I do admit that even today, convincing leaders from companies like Facebook and Walmart to join us will be tough. I hope it will change. The recent example is our new head of product. He was the leading product at Freshworks and at a very comfortable salary. But we were able to convince him. It has a lot do with the conviction you have for the business and the market we are in,” he said.

One thing I very strongly realised was that content is going to be massive and that India has a huge creative potential

- Anirudh Singla

Now, like most startups, growing the business fast, vertically, horizontally and every way possible, is the priority.

What in the pipeline?

Pepper already works with the major brands across the country. Now it wants to expand to the US.

“We were thinking of entering the Southeast Asian markets first and then eventually the US. But we figured out that it is key that we enter the US market directly,” says Panpalia, the head of business cited earlier.

The company’s reasoning was simple. One needs to eventually enter the US, one of the most mature markets that is willing to pay for quality content. The focus is to stabilise the Indian market and expand its operations to the US by the end of the year.

Currently about 4-5 percent of the company’s revenues come from outside India and the company is looking to expand the creator network and demand side globally.

There is also a huge focus on creating new products. It recently launched Peppertype.ai, an Artificial Intelligence-enabled content generator for short-form content. It can generate different headlines with the same keywords, extrapolate paragraphs from shorter ideas and potentially much more.

Panpalia said that the company is also looking to expand to audio and video content, which can be turned into products.

But...

Pepper Content is not for everyone, say two industry players Moneycontrol spoke to. While the demand for content has increased, enterprises have shifted from outsourcing model to in-house content creation, where they have control over the story.

A Bengaluru-based marketing professional in a startup explained that platforms like Pepper Content help companies that want to scale their content needs quickly but are on shoestring budgets. These will also work for firms, where quantity is more important than quality.

That is why it might not work well for a long term for brand building. “It is for a simple reason that it is very difficult to get outside individuals to care about the company as much as you do,” the professional said, requesting anonymity

But with demand for content booming, there will always be a market for businesses like Pepper Content. With over 30,000 content creators who specialise across domains, they would be able help companies churn out content.

But success depends a lot how the company is able to tilt the offline focused market towards online. A huge challenge, Singla admits, the company needs to overcome.