 Today, we will talk about Scroll Stack. Scroll Stack is an Indian answer to a lot of similar platforms like Substack where creators can create their account, publish something, and it also integrates payments. You can also charge your audience for something while you're developing your audience on the newsletter. It is mobile first and it is in various Indian languages, so you don't just have to write in English. Obviously, there will be elements of social in it in the future, I guess. Ritesh is co-founder of Scroll Stack. He has worked in Facebook and Google before and few other companies. He had written a very good article why they created Scroll Stack for the Indian economy, for India. That's a great link on our page. Ritesh and I will be discussing how the Scroll Stack happened and how it will help our creators and what are the takeaways for the audience today. In the first session, Ritesh will present how the idea came and how they developed, what were the challenges they're trying to address and how it will help us. In the next session, I will be putting up questions to Ritesh and we will also take up questions from the audience. Let's start today's edition with Ritesh. Over to you, Ritesh. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Abhishek for the intro and for setting the context. Thank you, Zainab and team at Hasgeek for arranging this and good morning everyone. On a Saturday morning, I hope you guys have a good morning happening wherever you guys are in India. What I'm going to do essentially is I'll start with the product demo because nothing tells the story like a working functioning product. I will do it fairly quickly just to show off what we've built so far and then I'll also sort of quickly touch on what's coming up in the next couple of weeks and then I'll go into a very short presentation that sort of explains why we landed where we are today. So let me share my screen and we can get started. Go share. Someone tell me once you guys are able to see the screen. Yes, assuming you can see the screen. All right. Yes, we can see. Perfect. Great. So if you're a creator on scroll stack, this is essentially what your home page for your own home page would look like. First thing that I want to draw everybody's attention to is if you can see the address bar. It says ritesh.scrollstack.com and not scrollstack.com slash Ritesh. So essentially one of the promises that we have at scroll stack is we'll always put you as a creator first or we'll always put creators first before scroll stack the brand. If you look at my top part of my creator page, there is no scroll stack branding that you see here. Your scroll stack profile or your scroll stack feed is actually about you, who you are as a creator. One of the things that we aim to give you is a beautiful identity on the web, which is not a boring LinkedIn profile where you sort of talk about where you worked and what you've done, but essentially as a creator, who you are, right? So Abhishek touched about passion economy. This is essentially what your passion and what your obligations are. So you can sort of talk about what you believe in. You can talk about what are you currently obsessed about, who are your favorite things, people, places, what are you in search of. You can also add custom sections here if you want to and you can also link to all of your social places. Your homepage or your feed is where you actually create all of your content and this content as Abhishek mentioned doesn't have to be in English. So let's say I was born and I grew up in Gujarati and Gujarati is my first language. So if I want to write in Gujarati, as you can see, it actually looks beautiful, as beautiful as English would look. If you want to write in Hindi, these are the only two languages I can write in. Same thing here, Hindi would also look beautiful as well when you start to create. And as Abhishek mentioned, social elements are already built in. You can email it, you're post to somebody, you can tweet it, you can put it on Facebook. And also if you're on mobile, you can also see this that you will be able to share this via WhatsApp as well. For Indian market, we actually think WhatsApp is a lot more powerful than email because that's where most of the people consume their content or access a lot of daily reading material or content consumption happens. Creating content is as easy as you see. So essentially you have three choices. You can make all of your content free or you can make some of your content free. So for each piece of content that you create, you have the choice, whether you want it free for all, whether you only want the content to be accessed by your followers or you want this to be paid. For the sake of this conversation, let's say I want this to be free because for most creators, the mix of content is a lot of the content will be free. Some of there will be behind a sort of like a hard registration wall and then some of that content will be paid because in general, not all content that's out there is pay worthy for all creators or for most creators as well. Even the big sort of New York times of the world as well follow the same philosophy in different ways. So let's say this is free. I want to create a why did why did we create scroll stack and quickly upload a photo. Let's see what do I want to put in find a photo somewhere here for the post. There you go open photo is uploaded. I can say a source. This is design team. These are why and then I then I can add if I want to add an image, if I want to embed a video, if I want to add a list link or a page break, I can let's say add a list. This is one reason to reason three. And then what we are I think here I'll mention that what we are also launching in the next two weeks is not only audio or video, but we so not only images or video, but you will also be able to embed native audio. So you don't necessarily have to link to Spotify or anything else. We are actually for the Indian market, we feel that you'll be able to cross the chasm with a lot of creators who are more comfortable talking about what they are passionate about versus actually writing about it. So I think audio is something that we are keenly working on. We want the experience to be as smooth as possible, as smooth as uploading an image as well. So that's going to happen here as well. And then once this is done, because this is open web, right? So we are not an app. We are open web because this is accessible by SEO. Anybody can look for it. Anybody can find it. The moment you create it, all of this is saved real time. And the moment you hit post within three seconds, this is live. So anybody who goes on my scroll stack right now at ritesh.scrollstack.com actually can actually see this. Google will start drawing this and essentially listing this at the same time. And it'll happen very, very quickly. But as we have mentioned, we also have payments integration. So while I'm not on my mobile, let me actually see if I can show the mobile view of this. So view developer, let's see. Do this. So this is the browser. Browser essentially is one of the sort of like US's famous newsletters that used to be on Substack. They moved away from Substack because they are trying to sort of figure out what is the value that they charge for the 10%. They're also trying, but they're mostly focused on Western audiences because they want to grow in India. They've actually created an Indian version of browser where they don't charge by subscription, but they charge by post. So let's say you want to read what are the absolute five best pieces for the day that you want to read around a variety of subject. You can pay 10 rupees and read, right? So let's say on 16th September, this was their article that they charged 10 rupees for. And I want to pay 10 rupees. So this here, because I'm on my essentially not on my phone, it asks for my UBI ID, but this, if you were on your phone, this will automatically take you to your Google Pay where you actually don't have to enter anything at all. And you will be on your Google Pay. I will finish this on my Google Pay on my phone. If I was on my phone for this whole thing, this will take literally 15 seconds. But here we'll take probably like five seconds more to finish the whole thing, but you will see how fast all of this is. And for payments, we're not saying that we've built anything that is proprietary, right? We are essentially using what is available mainstream. So here, done. In the 15, 20 seconds that we were talking, I've unlocked this article by paying the browser 10 rupees. And I have access to the top five pieces that I should be reading today in that timeframe, right? So this is how fast the entire platform works. Again, on the mobile as well, you can see that there is no scroll stack branding. There is browser and this is browser sort of like user base. And the feed is entirely browser, right? So we essentially want to make sure that we are creator first. So that's where I'll essentially stop the demo. If you have any questions about product or anything, again, when we do questions with Abhishek, I welcome all kinds of questions, any feedback that you have, please throw them my way. I'll quickly go into sort of the philosophy of why we started scroll stack, right? And when I say V, it was essentially Sameer and I. So Sameer is the person who started scroll about six years ago. Sameer and I have known each other for about five years of that journey, because when I was still at Facebook, we had done some projects together that only scroll was willing to take up because they were digital first, digital native, and we did some very interesting projects around elections in 2014. And so Sameer and I have known each other for a while. And once I left Facebook to spend a lot more time or all my time with my family, I had more bandwidth to sort of, you know, think through other things in terms of what are interesting problems to solve for. And this was one of those. It's a scroll stack. What are we trying to solve for with scroll stack? Scroll stack is a platform that is mobile first, that is multilingual, and it has global payments attached to it. Our vision is to make selling of online content by creators as easy as selling of physical goods. That's one of the challenges today is let's say you make $500 or $25,000 smartphones or smartwatches, you can sell them online in five minutes flat, right? You can register on Amazon, start doing this, all of that. But right at 2500 piece article, you know, or create a great comic book and try and sell it online, right? You have to jump through 50 different hoops to do that. It's not possible. We actually want to make selling of online content, whether it's audio, video, text, whatever digital content format, we want to make that super easy for everybody. And that takes us sort of like to the big problem. It's not just one faceted. It's not just about selling things, right? All big tech platforms where creators build their following today. And also by the way, before we go into this, we don't see scroll stack as a replacement for big tech platforms, right? This is an and strategy. So creators have never had an audience like you can get on Twitter, Instagram or a TikTok or a Facebook before and creators should continue to build out their audiences on those platforms. Platforms like scroll stack, sub-stack, Patreon could actually be a graduation for them where they take some of the current followers and do that. And trying to do that, the challenge is at support and social media. So out of the big tech platform, I spent 16 years across Google and Facebook. So I know that they are not changing their advertising led models anytime soon, right? What we are doing, they could do this in five minutes, but it goes against how they currently monetize. So it's going to be very difficult for them to actually change their DNA and do different things. That's what platforms like Patreon, sub-stack and others come into play. But the challenge there is a lot of these are high effort, right? So let's say if you write a newsletter and you try to monetize the newsletter, which means that you have committed to delivering a certain quality content on a regular basis, which means that it's going to take up a lot of your time. But what if you only want to produce once a month and you only want to charge for that once a month, the rest of the writing that you do, which is short form that you don't want to charge for, right? So for us, we actually are not going to sort of commit ourselves to say we will only have subscriptions or we'll only have paper post. We will build a platform that works for creators in any form that they choose to create content on. So you don't have to necessarily say that I'll do my newsletters on sub-stack, but I'll do my post on some other platform. Do your newsletters, do your paper post, do your audio, everything on one platform and actually you'll have the ability to sort of, you know, go across ways of monetization and also ways of reaching people. Also, there is no black box like Medium, right? On Medium, you might be able to get paid, but the challenge on Medium will be that there is an algorithm that says like how much time people are spending. So then you are encouraged to sort of write longer and longer and longer, but a lot of the times the best writing or best content is actually something that you can consume very, very quickly. For example, let's say somebody is writing about investment tips, right? There, right? The best learnings I have had has usually come from very pithy, very small articles that says these are the five things that you need to do, not five shares you need to buy, but these are the five principles that you need to follow and why, versus reading, you know, a 5,000 words long piece. So I think, and all of this is, if you are an English speaker, everybody on this call is able to figure all of this out easily, but assume that most of Indian creators, right? A lot of creators who write in non-English, never heard of Medium. Medium has very little non-English content, forget Hindi, right? Very little French, very little Italian, German, nothing at all, right? Substack as well, like Indian creators are on Substack, but how many Hindi creators are on Substack? Because it's only newsletters that you can do. What about in India, how many people actually have email addresses that they use regularly? But when you change it from email to WhatsApp, then you open up a billion plus people who actually you can tag it to. So all of this is actually a lot more difficult for multilingual and mobile-first creators. Worldwide, this shift of content that is available across multiple platforms, some of it is paid, some of it is free, is actually happening already, right? And the demand that is rising the most is content that helps people get better at something. This is like self-improvement or art or anything has to do with any of that, right? And like what do you see on the side? I'm not going to talk through every piece is different platforms where this is happening. Out of all of these, the most interesting platform for me in all of this is actually Himalaya in China. This is an audio-only platform where they have hundreds of millions of people who are actually consuming the content, right? So let me actually switch to that slide first, right? So Himalaya has 35 million people who actually come to their platform every single week or every single month and there are all kinds of content. So the most popular content there range from audio series for primary school children to Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy to EQ classes to drama to Peppa Pig converted into Cantonese or Mandarin, right? And hundreds of millions of listens for all of this. So the demand for creator-led content, whether it's audio or text or images is actually huge. And this Himalaya producers are not necessarily your professional, you know, top tier content creators and so these are people who are passionate about something and they've turned their passion into something big. And there's a huge number of these creators, right? So these creators have large following but very little control right now. So there are 50 million accounts on Instagram that have more than a thousand followers. That number is between million and a half to two million on YouTube, about 7 million on Twitter and about 50 million more on TikTok, right? And this is people who are already on those platforms right now, right? In a country like India where there are a lot more people who don't use these platforms than who do. So these numbers are only going to go up over a period of time as well. When it comes to, let's say, a small portion of that will be able to convert their followers into payers. Payments as well is something that has completely been revolutionized over the last few years, right? We've had UPI, which is for once we are ahead of the world when it comes to adopting, like creating and adopting technology. But the rest of the world is actually not that far behind with Apple Pay using frictionless payments, Google Pay doing this and again, we'll see how long this China tussle with the western world last. But in all in all, getting payments done globally, especially if smaller and smaller payments, it's going to continue to get easier as well, right? So for us, just to cap it off, right? Our goal is to make it easy for creators to own their audience and charge for it, right? As easy as we can make it be. What you can do on ScrollStack, you've already seen, so I'm not going to spend time on this. I think one of the things that we offer that is unique as well is we don't only have a platform, but in scroll, right? So ScrollStack and scroll has sort of connected it. In scroll, we also have an audience that we can push a lot of creators work to as well. And so that's what makes it a true marketplace where we are not only saying that we are a SaaS offering, and put your work here. We'll also help a lot of the creators to actually get their work out to a lot of people. And we'll continue to grow the audiences across these platforms as well. So we actually have the discovery wheel going as we speak. And this is a quick comparison in terms of what's possible on different platforms. Of course, we have all checks for ScrollStack, but it's also important for us to highlight that these are some of the key things that we started with solving. So we want to make sure that we are putting the creator first. We have built multi-lingual support from ground up. So starting today, you can actually not just Indian languages. If you want to write in Korean, you could write in Korean. We have one Japanese creator whose Japanese work on ScrollStack looks fantastic. No technical integration required for payments. If you wanted to do payments, if you don't want to do payments, that's fine as well. We'll make sure the platform is free for you forever. One push reach for messaging and email. So I think that's something that is actually built into the platform as well. And most importantly, I think which a lot of creators need who don't have a large following already is discovery and essentially social support. So we have a dedicated team that actually creates social media promotion material for a lot of these creators. And so if you follow ScrollStack on Instagram or Twitter, you would actually see this for a lot of creators pushing out as well. So I will stop here and we can jump into questions, conversations. However, Abhishek, you want this conversation to go in. Great. One to start with, congratulations for launching ScrollStack and maybe you'll be launching it in a big way and more creators would come. I mean, I'm excited as a creator. So I'll start with two questions, which, which our audience has just shared with us. And because we'll just clear, because you've just finished. And that's when they were asking those questions. Then I'll come to my question and we'll keep covering those questions again. One, the Vijendra Monty just asked a question. And he's saying, how would the payouts happen? Will they go directly to the creator or will there be a graded payment as in you will accumulate first and then give it out to Vijendra later? He's eager about the payments. Got it. Hi, Vijendra. Good to have you here again as well. So for those who haven't seen ScrollStack as a platform, Vijendra is one of our creators. He's also currently featured on the homepage as well. And we had a session with Vijendra last week as well, where he spoke to all the different creators. So good to see you here. Vijendra payouts will happen at the beginning. It will be essentially, ScrollStack will collect the payments and then distribute once you accumulate. We have plans to actually also enable direct payments to creators where we don't have to do this, where it happens real time. We have to hit a certain scale before we make that happen, but we are currently talking to payment processors in sort of like launching that as early as possible. So the plan is to move to that Vijendra for sure. But for now we are accumulating and then distributing to creators. Okay, I have the question for the same thing, but since you're all allowing people to collect money through the UPI, does not UPI collect money directly in their accounts or does it have to be like first it goes to your account and then that's how it happens? Right now it has to happen where it goes into our account and then we essentially distribute, but it's not only UPI. So we have everything that we have cards as well. We have bank transfer as well for those who don't want UPI. So right now we have a single channel payment integration, so it has to come through us. But as I said, we are essentially working on figuring out how do we make it so that at least creators who are expecting to create paid content regularly should be able to get it directly to them. So we will have like the more nuanced answer to that is we will always have two types of creators. One type of creator who will create paid content more regularly. People like Vijendra, people like Vivek Kall and others. And then for them it actually works better if the payment goes to them directly so that they don't have to wait for us to accumulate and then do that. It's easier for us as well if that happens because it's less work on the platform site as well. But the authority of creators will not create paid content as regularly or at the same frequency. For them it's easier to actually go through the process of creating their own payment integration into scroll stack while we will make it directly easily available with the payment processor. They might not even want to do that. They might say and say, fine, pay me once a month like AdSense or somebody else might pay you as well and I'm perfectly happy with that. So just like the other platforms in which this happens, we expect majority of the creators to fall into that. But we realize that creators who create a lot of content might fall into category where their direct integration is needed, which we have already shared. When you were giving a presentation, you mentioned a very interesting data point saying that people who have more than 1000 followers on various platforms, you said on Twitter, there are 7 million such people and so on so forth. So I would start with, okay, you must when you started building scroll stack, the first thing which may have come to your mind is, oh, there is an audience out there. There are these set of users out there because that's how you walk backwards by knowing your audience. So can you like throw us some data more about when you were thinking, was there a persona in your mind? Are there different categories of users or in terms of age, in terms of what kind of content they create or were they earning money by doing this or not? So can you paint us a very brief picture, kind of, who is the audience actually? I mean, I understand all creators are your audience, but maybe more specific. Yeah, so we actually see we've gone down this path and we've realized that so at some point we did think that there is a typical creator and that creator is a more sophisticated creator who creates content that is payment worthy and all of that. But I think as our journey has happened over the last six months, we've realized that there isn't a typical creator at all. And you will see this in the variety of creators that we currently have. You only have about 100 or so people who actually create content on Scroll Stack right now, but it's all kinds. So for example, we have Bijendra who writes both fiction as well as social commentary and hopefully at some point he'll also bring his comic books on Scroll Stack as well. We have somebody who already creates comic books based on their family. We have somebody who writes in Hindi on social commentary. We have somebody who writes Urdu Poetry. We have one person who has done a series of ground reporting for Bihar elections on the ground with his own pictures and his own commentary. There is no one set of people who actually write on Scroll Stack. We have a 17 year old who writes about history and there's a fantastic job of doing that as well. So we have all of these kinds of people where there isn't one type of creator that we have the last three or four months we've actually this realization came to us very early on once we started talking to a lot more creators right where we realized that we actually want to build for people where they have no idea right that they are actually a creator where this label does not apply. See ideally we want to be in a world where everybody is a creator because everybody is passionate about something right. So Abhishek you talked about passion economy right we are building for the passion economy and passion economy is made up of people like even me as well right where I have zero creative bone in my body right like that credit goes to my wife who like paints beautiful paintings and you know all of that stuff large canvases and all so but I can at least write about let's say how to brew your own beer you know or I think I'm an expert on test cricket while I will I will not get even scroll won't publish my writing you know on on cricket but I will consider but I can write it on scroll stack right that is my passion right I am that ideal person and it could be in any language right so for us and everybody right who has that they have anything to contribute to whether it's they want to draw a picture for that whether they want to say that on their phone record it and just post it or they want to you know write beautifully and you know create long pieces we don't have a type we don't have a personality in mind we don't have a language in mind we don't have a region in mind this could be anybody who can get started in a few minutes get going and just continue to do this right and as I said right payments is more of a thing where we know that a small percentage of creators will actually sell things most of them are pursuing their passion but at some point in their journey they might reach a point where they are able to monetize we want the ability for them to monetize there for people as well right so that's essentially sort of like the brief journey slash philosophy Abhishek that we've gone through yeah in sort of like last six months where we started on one end of the spectrum and we've ended up what I think is the right end of the spectrum yeah you had briefly touched about how like Chinese creators are building some great content and also because what sounds how it sounds is like some of parts is better than the entire whole thing which will come out later on many more creators come on board so like Himalaya you mentioned 30 odd million people are creating these audio tapes audio books and so on so forth do you have a because you've worked at google and you've worked at facebook which is essentially I mean at least for facebook it's all about user generated content so do you have some insights about India's content creation trend or the phenomena which is happening that will be like really helpful to understand how things are going yeah and I left facebook about two years ago so I'll share learnings and assume that these are like at least two years old so yeah I have been involved so I have had the front row seat at least at so I both had google as well so I was setting I was involved while I was based in California I was involved in setting up both google and facebook in India while being at those companies I have like the front row seat at like seeing how the platforms have progressed especially with Facebook because it's more recent yeah it started off with a lot of English content a lot of you know a lot of more like prestige content being very very popular and all of that stuff in the last four or five years right while the content demand which ideally should drive content generation has been highest for Indian languages right and we and at while I was at facebook we saw this regularly that people were clamoring for content that was in local language and that's where you saw that that's where I think tiktok become really became really you know successful that's why I'll actually bridge these two right facebook and tiktok so tiktok became really successful because it actually picked up very very quickly where facebook couldn't really latch on to which don't make content creation so easy that people don't have to think twice before actually creating and sharing right so and in local language so the most popular creators if you look at pages with highest following on facebook versus pages in highest following or creators with highest following on tiktok before it was banned right on facebook every the top 10 top 15 most of them actually created content in english let their posts were in english and all on tiktok it was indian languages purely right zero english creators on tiktok for india and that is what the country actually looks like right so I think if when you match these two the demand was really really strong on facebook for indian language right and creators who can actually that you could connect with right whereas and tiktok actually came and made that super successful you know for for for their creators and all right so I think that that is the trend that I've seen over the last sort of five or six years shift and actually you know newer platforms coming in and doing a lot a much better job at it than established platforms because there's such a strong DNA right in established platform where you can't necessarily move that quickly whereas other platforms are more natively designed to take advantage of the ability of a smartphone in a camera and the audio etc right so that's that's how I will sort of like quickly answer the question Abhishek in terms of yes consumption as well as creation trends have shifted in the last five to six years that I've had the front row seat too yes one of one of the another question because when I when you were mentioning Skolstack it's about payments it's about it's about the local languages and obviously create building around you can also build your own audience so I have a question again follow up question about the local languages on all publishing platforms including wordpress, facebook, twitter though there are features endless features so there is a dedicated team in apple which works on using like translation you can use roman script and gets converted into your local script and so on so forth or you can also write and now apple also has a feature called where you just publish in you write in roman script but it you don't have to worry about it becoming the english words both all the publishing platforms have failed when it comes to creating content or publishing content written content in the local languages and that's where most of the people struggle even on facebook like I remember like my mother is a english is not does not speak english she gets english but when it comes to creating content even on whatsapp she does not want to create everything in hindi or mathliar or whatever is a language but it ends up becoming the roman script like roman script is the default publishing script for all the local languages now where I find a lot of platform like yours if you want someone to publish in gujarati they would have to like and we know our school schooling system even people who have graduated from school they're not able to do that so how will you tackle that problem for a creator publishing it because a lot of people like say vijendra and me I can write in hindi but maybe I have lost touch with writing hindi the way I used to but I have kept speaking hindi and maybe not audio but I want to publish how will that happen so that's one of the reasons I would want to yeah so I think so abhishek the problem that you highlighted which is like the keyboard problem right that these tech companies have tried to solve forever I think that we we will not even try to attempt to solve it right when the big tech solider is spending hundreds of millions of dollars I think that's where we will benefit from it I think there are two things that have have already happened that actually will make it much easier is I don't know about apple because I'm an android user at least on the phone is the speech to text is fantastic it actually gets 80 to 90 percent of things right right so for us I think like that one one of those things is something that we test regularly works very very well and so that's that's that's one thing that we expect to do and then the second thing is audio right why do you have to write you actually don't need to write right so for whatsapp actually is fantastic that way right record a short message send it across you will get the point across right and it's actually much much faster than actually you know type in any language even if it's even if you are the fastest type or in the world you can talk more quickly than you can type right so for us that's where like first of all the text to speech is actually very very good is is the first thing that it is but more than that we're actually counting on audio to solve for a lot of these problems especially for India right because we are also a culture that loves consuming audio content not only you know creating is something that is second nature right I think I don't think we've gotten as used to creating audio content but we are already very good at consuming audio content right so I think for the combination of these two will solve it in the short term longer term the big tech Google and Apple has to solve it for the rest of the world to actually benefit from it right because they are they are essentially controlling how we type on our keyboards there is not a lot that we could be doing but I know having been part of those work efforts at Facebook that there is so much money and effort spent on this that at some point they'll get it more right and or they'll get it you know more and more right so okay great so I'm now thinking like okay I've created my account on scroll stack as you mentioned okay I want to create account I've created the account I have now started creating some great content on it or whatever comes to my mind two things is there a style guide is there a community standard is there editorial policy which we all have to like adhere to because then there are problems state actors would not want you to publish something as it has happened on Twitter so these are like one this is this was a question from one of the audience actually which I am trying to integrate in our is is is there an editorial policy which we have to adhere to yeah so I think there are the way I would distinguish this is we don't have an an editorial policy because we are not a publication right the same way that a Facebook or a or a Pinterest or a Twitter does not have an editorial policy but we do have community guidelines and they will be similar to how other social platforms run their community guidelines right so our community guidelines are very much similar and and like some context to that is one of my as part of my nine years at Facebook I spent four of those running Facebook's global content moderation platform right so I know these things in and out and I was at Facebook public policy team for like the last three years of my time in India as well so these are the issues that I've dealt with firsthand right so we are our community guidelines are exactly the same as you would see on a lot of other social platforms as well we I know that we will have similar challenges as they would have as well and we will handle them in the same ways that other social platforms or or other platforms tackle as well and and this is where sort of like so scroll dot in is sort of like where editorial policies apply because like nourish runs that and that happens right scroll stack is an open platform where anybody can come and create so we don't have editorial control we don't want editorial control as long as you meet the community guidelines you are able to publish when we receive a complaint that this particular post does not meet the editorial guideline we will judge them against the editorial guideline and do how the rest of the world operates it is now an established operation or a science but to say you know to sort of like moderate content across the web on the internet not easy but it's at least established I think we will follow the same formats and I have learned that I can again apply from big tech that so that we don't make the same mistakes that they've made over the last 10 years you also covered this a bit and there is a question from wherein as well from the audience and I also have the same question okay I've created the content I'm not adhering to any editorial guidelines how will I get discovered you briefly mentioned SEO will happen but what is is there a process and but you should just know that okay you'll write like this and you will get discovered what is the process like yeah sure so I think there are there are a couple of different ways in which you will get discovered so right now when the platform is new we're actually able to promote every creator that comes on the platform and I think that will continue to stay true for a while right so I think that one is if you again as you follow scroll stack on Twitter and Instagram you will see that we have a dedicated team that actually create a social promotion out of the content that you post and we do this both in terms of images and videos etc right so that's one way of making sure that you are being discovered by our existing audiences etc second is as we start to scale now we are going to make sure that there are categories or there are you know topics that people write under right and this is self classified as for example if you're going to write on tech then you will use the hashtag tag hashtag crypto and all of that so whenever somebody and then we will continue to promote those category pages so and and if you are a high quality creator you know that that that sort of like is featured on that category page then as part of traffic that that category page gets right you will automatically be discovered by people who actually goes to that category page as well right so that that is something that we will continue to push with we will also do cross platform promotions as we scale right so there are like we might have for example we might have a widget after somebody finishes reading an article on reading an article on scroll.in that says discover the best of scroll stack right and then we will continue to sort of like cycle through our creators or posts on that widget as well as you know like that is very high traffic right so I think like that is a lot of discovery there as well and over a period of time we will drive a lot of dedicated traffic and acquisition as well as a platform for scroll stack as a platform as well right so for us we do see this as a marketplace and not necessarily as a SaaS so it is more in our interest to make sure that you get discovered and more people discover you on scroll stack and you are successful on scroll stack so there is a lot of things like I'm just highlighting the top two or three things that I can at this stage without sort of you know giving out the secret sauce but that's a discovery process will start to happen and it's already happening right right now for example as I said there is right now if you go to scroll stack.com we feature 10 creators right and these 10 creators change on a weekly or a bi-weekly basis on a weekly 10 posts and they also continue to shift as well right so we will have multiple ways in which we help creators be discovered either at a creator level post level or topic level. Yeah because Nitin one of our audience Nitin he has a concern that since we all know that organic reach is going down in social media it's nearly like out of not more than six percent of your audience is able to read what you publish as you mentioned that these other things which will which you will be doing and since you were mentioning we are also promoting on social media so that's unless you're spending money like and unless you're doing paid social it's very difficult to reach out to the audience and social so that was the concern which Nitin has so is that is that the reason that more SEO will play more role here on scroll stack than anything else like promoting even if your team does promotion on social media unless you're spending money it won't be much helpful. Right so I think so there are there are two sides of it right one is SEO will definitely play a role on an ongoing basis because again like there is no such thing as you know that you can't beat SEO discovery right having built scroll.in from ground up I think this is something that we know for sure right scroll.in has not been built on paid social media outreach right it has been built on like growth through organic social channels as well as you know SEO discovery as well so I think we have that muscle for sure that for both organic social outreach as well as SEO will utilize it as much as possible. We haven't necessarily completely ruled out doing paid social promotions but again we don't want to get to that stage until and unless we actually excuse me yeah scale and get to that right so we build at some point we will do that as well but again it's not something that we want to default to from day one because that is and having been on the other side it is a fickle audience right so we would much rather have you build a longer lasting audience which might be smaller in size because if you want size and let's say if you want 100,000 followers please be on instagram and facebook right there is no better platform than instagram and facebook or probably twitter you know for you to get 100,000 followers but if you want that those dedicated thousand people or 3000 people who come and consume your content on a regular basis that's what scroll stack is for right it's for more of your sort of like committed followers and others versus gain a large size right so that's why we say that we are not a replacement for your large social platforms that give you thousands and thousands of people through their platforms we are more of a graduation for you to go from 100,000 who may see your content for three seconds for example one of the things on scroll stack an average person who an average user who visits scroll stack spends three and a half minute consuming content in one session single session right which means that they're reading probably a post end to end right whereas on instagram your post gets three seconds max not even right so that's the difference between the two platforms right for three seconds of fame please be on instagram when that when you need to convert that three seconds to three minutes that's where the scroll stack graduation should happen. Is there a plan or do you think that since there will be so many people who would want to create now I'm assuming will you be helping them learn the tricks and the tips of how to create content because there is a process like we talked about content strategy in the last two sessions people are wanting to create newsletters these are the ways to go about it will you be holding such workshops or helping people they will be obviously published guides as well but how do you want to help our audience get educated about this yeah absolutely so there are so the short answer Abhishek is a yes right we've already started on this journey somewhat so we've already had two creator meetups as we talked about it the first one was more about sort of like just making sure that the creators were familiar with the platform the second one was the one where two of our creators shared their sort of process in terms of this is how they create this is how they sort of go through it and we will continue to do that which is the best way to learn is from your fellow creators right this is my process this is what makes me successful we will also make sure that we as we have these meetups we will get external people as well let's see somebody who is a very good writer or teaches creative writing right we have somebody on our team who teaches creative writing at Ashoka right that person can come in and actually talk about here is the process for people who are first starting out etc and then honestly there is so much resources that's available online already there that we don't want to reinvent the wheel where we will make sure that people are exposed to that is one right so I think that will that we will make sure that these by these doing two things one is help people learn from existing creators who are doing well on the platform and two making sure that we create things that are unique for our platform as well as general guides that are easily available for example how to create best audio content we don't have to write the playbook for that right like I'm sure like Spotify will do a much better job of how to create great audio content than we can we would rather make sure that people have access to these resources that are available for everybody and not have to reinvent the wheel right the short answer is yes but that's how we actually plan to approach it at least in the next 12 to 18 months all right so I've created content you're distributing my content people are reading about it now Nadika has a very interesting question all right you give me the freedom to price put up a price for my content but how do I come up with pricing because it's a very complex thing we all know that it is a separate thing that there are experts and there's a whole team thinking about it they're pricing analysts which who work in all the big companies so what would be your idea what would be your suggestion or is there a way that people who I want like browser is charging rupees 10 what should Vijay Indra Bhuvanthi charge for these comic books what what is the way out yeah exactly so this is this is a difficult one right and we have spent a lot of time trying to think through this which is should we be guiding creators through this should the creators figure out their own because each creator will have an audience where the audience see at the end of the day in an economy right in a in a market place it's the audience that decides what is the best price to pay especially for something like content that hasn't been priced before as well right so we are at a very interesting juncture where we are not necessarily dealing with a known commodity that has a set price if you go and buy a soap there are price ranges for that right if you buy and if you go and buy a car there are price ranges for that if you go and buy a song online right there are there used to be price ranges for that right but that doesn't necessarily transfer very well to the type of content that we are talking about right so I think it is a first of all this the the quick answer to that is Abhishek it's going to be a journey that both us and creators learn along the way right where how does this actually happen and I think the marketplace will also teach us a lot of things right which is people will tell you right and say hey look this was great at 10 rupees right or this was way too expensive at 100 rupees and as well so I think we will have to A the answer here is at the creators end experiment definitely instead of starting low start high and then come low because it's very difficult to go from low to high it's easier to come from high to low right I was actually like I was talking to somebody who has a lot of experience in pricing news content and new subscriptions globally right that that person used to run Sydney morning herald and all of that and we were having a conversation on how did you decide how did you go through this like 10-year journey and stuff and the biggest learning for that was that be aggressive you'll always shortchange yourself but be aggressive in terms of how you price it price your content so I think one is that second is as our our platform gains traction and we see trends happening one of our commitments to our creators is we will continue to share these trends with you right that look at these price points we are seeing these types of content do really well it's too early for us to do that right now right now we don't have enough data to do that but once we have that we are going to start doing that to make sure that we are also sharing these learnings with creators by either publishing a blog post that sort of says hey look this is how you know some of the early creators are pricing and and you know how that's working out of course anonymously as well so it will be a mix of these things where we will share as a platform you will experiment as a creator and most importantly the market is going to give us signals that we need to be open to and you know continue to adjust along the way all right then this has been a problem with publishing for very long and I mean we we all have been like looking for the Napster movement for publishing and people said that micro payment will enable that somehow it has not worked out for all the publishing we all thought oh now blockchain people said oh this will solve all the problem about micro payments now so but you guys are taking I mean going ahead with the micro payments and 10 rupee or 5 rupee do you think this will bring in some kind of a ease to consume because if I want to buy subscription for an economist or for Wall Street Journal or for any of these publishing brands it's a huge drain on my pocket I mean since I pay an Indian rupee and their price in dollars it's always a huge drain and I would love to make I love to pay 10 rupees of browser even browser is like 35 dollars a year which I which I subscribe to so for me when I saw 10 then I felt cheated why did I not right and I don't read all of it because exactly half the time you never go through that exactly yeah so so abhishek so this is a this is a chicken and the egg problem right so again we've spent a scroll right we've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking to global publishers about subscription journeys that they've had and these are the best names that you've mentioned right that they've shared their journey the american publishers and the european publishers are not going to go down the micro micro payments way they are not anytime soon right they don't believe in it they don't because it hasn't worked in their markets because when they started their subscription journeys micro payments did not exist yes apple pay has only come up in the last year or so in a really massive way right so now when you go to new york you can pay with apple pay on the subway right that is a true micro transaction in the us at a dollar or a euro in european all of that it did not exist so they don't believe in it they believe in whatever data tells them so i don't think for them for a lot of them it'll actually matter but some of them so we've also had conversations for scroll stack with some of the global publishers and some of them are starting to receive micro payments as an entry point like the browser has done for indian audiences yeah so that will start to happen right that we are sure of that at least some of them who haven't seen the kind of success that have also general on new york times has seen they will start to see that because they haven't had subscription revenues come in they will see this as an option they'll be more open to it right for indians indian publishers right i think that moment is here in now it there will be a there will be a an inflection point that will happen in probably six months year two years we don't know right we are willing to wait it out but i think for indian public publishers in general whether and i don't think it has to happen on scroll stack i think it has to happen at the market level right it can be a platform specific thing it has to be a market specific thing so i think that will happen in the next 18 months to 24 months or probably sooner where we will figure out the combination of content that audience is willing to pay for and raise the audience space for it right see it's always not about what how is the audience paying the first threshold is is the audience willing to pay for this are we creating content good enough that the audience is willing to pay for right that is the biggest challenge while the creators or publishers might think that i have fantastic content that audience should absolutely pay for it but if they're not willing to pay for it then it's not gonna happen right this is going to be a big challenge for news in india because people expect this for free while they will spend rupees for or five rupees for a newspaper every day right they won't pay for high quality journalism online why are online henna free may change would be free right so that so that will for news it's much harder we don't want to solve it for news but let's solve it for everything else which is much bigger portion of content so two very quick questions and then we will address the elephant in the room sure i'm saving it for the last how do you allow like to use pictures like will there be a copyright issue like i downloaded something from the internet and put it as an image how do you because usually people don't get caught unless it's a major but is there a policy do you think it's yeah we do we do yeah so the we will expect you to respect the copyright of any content that you put on and again as i had mentioned if it does get reported for violating any of the community standards then we will have to sort of like take appropriate action so the the same rules of good etiquette and copyright and other things on the internet applies to scroll stack as well because again we don't want it to be a platform where we don't want to be known for the wrong things right so we are actually going to be you know good about how do we make sure that we protect you know people's right especially if it's a creator led platform right what you create is what you own right so yes it is an important thing and we don't want people to sort of you know take that for granted for sure i remember flicker used to be like one great example like they would they built this within the community that you would not really use someone else's exactly um also will you allow anonymous users absolutely okay great now let's address the elfield in the room i mean we have been talking about we talked about it briefly so sub stack has also come with an indian payment now they've introduced the indian payment that was the biggest problem when it came to using sub stack in the beginning now since i can create an account then i can also publish there and i will take money in the end and maybe they will also be working on the indian language so how are you going to because they may as well be your biggest competitor maybe not because uh because the marketing yps says yes they are but maybe your bigger competitor is facebook or maybe they are your competitors so how who are your competitors and how will you tackle sub stack because it has already garnered that huge amount of interest and enthusiasm that joke is around that everyone has a newsletter these days exactly right so i think for me the last part you said is actually what sets us apart right we are not a newsletter platform at all right now you cannot create a newsletter on scroll stack right that's not going to happen for another you know at least a few more months so we don't think we are a newsletter first platform because again when you look at india right see english speaking audience in india and rest of india are two very different things right english speaking audience in india and for even a smaller percentage of within english speaking audience indian newsletters are big but for most indians newsletters they don't care right they want content that is you know consumed on a daily basis on their whatsapp on a website where they can click a link on whatsapp and quickly go and consume and all of that stuff so we are actually building for that so we are very glad that sub stack has finally launched in india you know for an indian payments and all of that stuff and on twitter somebody said like hey like you guys might have had a role to play in it i don't think so personally but if it is then i'm glad because it has helped a few creators right if you have a sub stack newsletter please keep it going right we would love for you to be successful in each of the platforms i think creators should use all kinds of platforms that make them successful and and eventually figure out which platform is best for them you would much rather grow the pie then say that i want to take somebody's business i want to take somebody's business we have there is a big enough economy out there in passion economy where we are at the cusp of it we haven't even started to realize how big of an opportunity this is and how big this could be right so i think we are happy for all kinds of platforms to exist there is so like sub stack is somebody that we would compete with patreon is somebody that we would compete with we facebook is not our competition right we want to benefit from facebook's growth tiktok's growth youtube's growth all of that they're too big for us to sort of consider that they are our competition right so for example we don't think that video is an area where we want to be number one in that because you can't be a youtube right youtube does it so well for a video creator or tiktok when it was still around and i hope it comes back right at some point that you don't want to be there right because they're already so good at it we would much rather solve other problems that these big platforms are not solving right so for us we love that sub stack is in india it proves that there is so much opportunity that everybody that more people should be thinking about this and building for this and more people more platforms that can solve creators problems we are also likely one of my big learnings from big tech right is the more platforms that come up you are encouraging a lot more creators to actually start creating as well right because they see value in different platforms as well right so for us fantastic let's all together grow the pie you know get more and more creators thinking what more and more people to think like creators build like creators create like creators and actually you know like remove this label that you have to be a creator to create right anybody right as i said i should be right about my test cricket learnings and you know publish while school refuses to publish it i should be able to you know get the world out there and you know do it that way so anybody should be able to create an audio thing and you know and you put it out there so for us it's not right we love competition we love for more platforms to be out there and because yeah because that was the reason i saw uh political fix was on is on sub stack so i was wanting to ask and that gave the answer very clearly and from what we have talked till now i understand that i remember that keynote address of steve jobs where he was describing the desktop as the hub of your entire thing of your internet and music and videos and it all would come together so i am looking at scroll stack as more of a hub of wherever your digital creation is happening other than the creation here you can always say oh my newsletter is there but you can go and read it in more detail here i've written something on twitter but i have elaborated more the thread i wrote it as a proper article here and you know already you know differentiated yourself from medium and differentiated yourself from other platforms so there was another question ghost is also allowing such creation and but then ghost is also you can also make your own templates and all so what do you think about ghost as a not as a competitor but yes people would want to create something there absolutely yeah so i think so i think there are there are lots of platforms that do this right so i think the way we differentiate ourselves is ghost is a sas platform whereas we are a content marketplace right like uh so i think that's the key key key difference in terms of like the two things where we will help with discovery we will help a category specific pages we will help home pages as well whereas ghost is more of a competitor for sub stack than us right because they're both uh they're both sas-based platforms yeah whereas we are a discovery led and we want to make discovery work as well we know it's not going to be easy right it's not the easiest problem to solve in the world but we are we are confident in sort of like our collective abilities to be able to take a really good crack at it and actually make something else okay so now i'll ask you your favorite question because you're you're more of a technical person and we have not even touched even and what was the most difficult part of creating scroll stack because then you because you it's your baby you started this did you meet the deadlines where did you miss the deadlines because you all know that's how it happens yeah how did you get the team together what was like that journey for you as a tech as a um as the founder where did you get those guys because all of this is like pretty new for our market and also to get hold of that team must have been quite a task uh i think the most difficult thing for you absolutely so i think see i we were i actually was very lucky that i found the scroll team right so like samir and the scroll team that the design team and the n-steam and others have done all the hard work right in creating the scroll dot end uh platform and and and it's beautiful right like for everybody who uses scroll you see that it's like it flows very well minimalist design and all of that so we actually had a very good team in place that and i'm actually here representing all of their work right so all the beautiful you know flows and everything that you see it's their work right i am the mouthpiece so i take zero credit for any of it all of that credit actually goes to the n-steam and the design team that we already have in place that we were very lucky to you know have in place and uh and both samir and i the hardest part for us right for samir and i to sort of like on this journey had been that we have created this entire thing remotely during lockdown okay okay great that was both interesting it also worked in our favor but also it was a tough thing to sort of like you you know try and do all of this remotely i've worked on sort of like product teams at google and facebook as well and it's much easier when you are in the room you know trying to hash this out you spend six hours trying to solve a problem but when you get out of the room you've solved it we didn't have that luxury here right uh we were also samir and i are also operating in two different time zones because samir went to new york for some meetings in march we were both there in feb i came back samir had to go back he's been there since march right okay we've been operating that way as well samir's been coordinating like with him working with n-steams and designs him across time zones as well we are starting to fill that out so we didn't have we have fantastic tech and design team so they made sure we didn't have technical challenges in trying to make this work they were great at you know like capturing our vision and turning into a reality but coordination during covid and working across time zones and stuff has been sort of like the most challenging but also most rewarding so it's been a very fun journey to be honest right we are like very proud of what we've made so far but we we've only reached the tip of the iceberg right like as i said in the next two weeks audio is going to be live uh we are also not we are also going to come out of beta right where right now you need an invite for you to be on scroll stack we're going to take that away anybody in two weeks will be able to go on scroll stack dot com create an account go live in five minutes you won't have to jump through the hoops that are great people so far have been able to jump through the hoops so that's that's been the journey so far abhishek and again like couldn't be happier with where we've landed and but a long way to go right it's just so so ritesh is the technical founder co-founder of the team because that's what we have heard like all i'm not from a technical background but oh you got to have a technical founder samir is the other partner and ritesh has taken care of the entire technical part of the no no not not not at all i think samir spends more time with the tech and design team because like they are scrolling they know each other really really well as well and then for me my my sort of like key strengths that i build to the team bring to the team essentially is how to build platforms right and then how to grow platforms not not only from a technical way but from sort of like operations and design and you know growth as well so i think we we haven't so samir and i have never sort of like divided that means you are technical i'm not and all of that stuff we essentially we solve the problems together and it's not just the two of us right as i said like we've got we've got a great tech and design team as well where samir and i don't have to solve the problems right we can actually present the problems to these teams and they're fantastic at actually solving these problems right so it's not we haven't necessarily operated in that classic way we are also not classic startup founders right we are not 25 from freshly graduated from IIT yes so i i will hit 40 this year at some point samir has crossed that chasm so we are not your typical 25 year old founders as well where tech is our strength our strength is the gray hair that you see in in both of us and sort of collective learnings having built platforms having built businesses where we know this is not our first rodeo right we've been around the block yeah because one of the sessions in the future i see because content web also talks about the tech stack of the publishing and they have had great sessions about it probably they would want to know more about the tech stack which is right and since i'm not the competitive person to ask about the tech stack finally finally i want you to help us know what should be the takeaways for our creators and and i would take that as a mantra because at times you have to just trust the other person who has created something and try to do something on those lines and then take it backwards did it work so what are the three takeaways which you want us to take away from the chat and we what do you want us to do our audience do you want us to go and create accounts or requests and a request and keep creating something how what does what what is your takeaway for us i mean yeah so i don't know if i necessarily have like three to be specific but let me sort of like share the most important things right so first of all is like please try the platform and and and see if if it if it works for you give us feedback send us feedback my email is british at scroll stack dot com it's out there our team is very approachable as well so we always welcome feedback we always welcome suggestions create as much as you can i think right and again like there are we have we have some creators on platform that like create a lot and that's where they learn the most from is would be sort of like my thing i know vijendra has been creating a lot on the platform we've got within huran sort of like bibliography he creates a lot there are other people we have mr prakash jen who writes in hindi i love reading him you know in hindi as well because i always clamor for hindi writing fantastic so create create create whatever platform you create on please create lots and lots because i think that's where we've seen creators learn the most uh and like try different platforms right try scroll stack uh try subtract if you're a believer in newsletters and all of that so i think that's it right i don't have necessarily a bishik any big takeaways or learnings right just like let's let's go through this journey together let's figure out what works what doesn't work we are committed to making this work for as many people as possible we are not going to build for one specific use case we would rather build for uh 80 percent than 20 percent so um yes and and writing languages i think that's one thing my one big ask would be write in other than english please please please because that's where there is most amount of clamoring uh or right create in you know other than english right when i in sort of say i should write if you don't want to write so a bishik people like you where you said like you've lost touch in writing in hindi you can record in hindi and put it out the world yes will i actually have a much bigger audience because you know people a lot more people could listen to things and get it then write especially in india with our education system so i would say one thing that i would ask everybody to do create in languages other than english because huge audiences out there they're waiting i i will vouch for that yes if you have to write to ritesh please do because that's how we are here because i tried to log into the system and there was an error i found a bug and i wrote them a mail i wrote it to kanek on twitter and she forwarded to him and they were very quick to respond so please do write to him uh he does respond he's just not saying for the for the sake of saying and last question before i all before we end because we have been talking about newsletters all the while and there is sub stack and i publish on mailchimp and like you may have thought okay there are newsletter publishers serious newsletter publishers how should they be using scroll stack because a lot of our community would want to understand oh there is a there is a way forward with our newsletters we would want to try this out so if there is a use case in your mind or which you have thought about it just let us know because i would want to try out because i'm a newsletter publisher most of the times yeah absolutely see the the challenge that a lot of newsletter publishers have today is uh it is piecemeal content right you've sent one newsletter out and but your best newsletter for somebody out there might have been something that you sent three days ago like so how do you make sure that all of your newsletters actually remain in one place right like what browser has done where they have the newsletter but the that like individual each piece each email that they sent every day is actually cataloged on scroll stack right so a bishop for you you subscribe to browser so you have it in your email right but this is a place where you actually see and say what have they published over the last one month what sounds most interesting right so it's actually scroll stack could be a great way for you to actually list everything that you publish on a daily basis via email to actually have it all in be one place and more easily easily accessible for people rather than look through their email right because they might get 15 other emails and people who subscribe to newsletters you might have better stats than i do because i don't think about newsletters every day but they might be subscribing to a lot more newsletters right so it then it might get lost in that so create a home for all of your content right where what newsletter is a way to distribute your content right not just to post your content right whereas we actually want to solve a much bigger problem where where do your where does your content live right so that could be the answer for that okay thanks a lot Ritesh with with some great feedback and insights which we got and i would really want that scroll stack because i had a different view when i started talking with you about scroll stack and when i'm ending the conversation i have a very different view and it's a very pleasant view that okay you have thought deeper about how we will be creating content and how we're doing taking the passion economy ahead some data says that 30 percent of our Indian economy workers are already doing that kind of work freelancing mostly but yes also having a platform which has taken our audience very seriously and created that that should really help thanks a lot for your time we will probably get back and talk more after some time after you've launched it and more people have been using it and i hope audience has found the session very useful thanks a lot for your time Ritesh it was great talking with you thank you so much absolutely my pleasure i loved it one of the best way to spend the Saturday morning and thank you has geek thank you Abhishek for organizing this thanks everybody who's listening watching and if you have anything please reach out have a great weekend everyone