By Pledging to Entertain Millennials Digitally, This Woman Entrepreneur Made it to Entrepreneur India's 35U35 List With her digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces, this woman entrepreneur is curing boredom for millenials

Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presents Entrepreneur's 35U35 list included some path-breaking names from the field of entrepreneurship and 34-year-old Aditi Shrivastava made it to the list owing to her digital entertainment company Pocket Aces. Know how she is entertaining the millenials digitally!

India has a burgeoning content market and with the advent of OTT behemoths like Amazon and Netflix, the entertainment content players have flourished and burgeoned in no time. The millennials, these days, spend most of their time on digital platforms, socializing and hunting relatable and shareable entertainment content. "That's when we put in place our motto — solving boredom and vowed to become available on all digital platforms," Pocket Aces, co-founder Aditi Shrivastava iterates.

Even advertisers have realized that this is where they need to spend their marketing dollars if they want to tap audience below the age of 40 years.

In 2015, Shrivastava's digital entertainment company released its first-ever video— Ban Banon Dice Media. In span of just two days, the video fetched over a million views. Consistently feeding organic content, their entertainment content generation products FilterCopy and Gobble soon attained the top spot in terms of views and engagement.

In January 2018, Loco launched its app. In the month of March, it added another feather in its cap by becoming the fastest app to reach one million daily active users. The game-changer for Loco came in the later part of 2018, when Little Things released on Netflix in October. "Witnessing the advertising billboards of Little Things all over the country and living the moment when it streamed in over 40 countries was the zenith of our happiness," she tells.

Aditi feels that their understanding of the audience base throughout the country — from a metro city to Tier-4 towns — enables them to create quality content. They have served over 85 major clients including Netflix, Google, Amazon, Flipkart, Samsung, Xiaomi, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Britannia, Nykaa and Epigamia. From a head count of 40 in January 2018 they have sequestered 105 people.

"Majority of our time goes in growing and training our team, which in turn helps maintaining a robust culture across different centers — Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. We are lucky to have super-low attrition, but each time we lose a brilliant colleague, we are super happy for them, but it is a loss for us," she says.

"The reliability of our content, which serves and interacts with millions of users all over India gives bouys us and coaxes us to produce creative and quirky content," she says.

On July 30, 2019, Pocket Aces announced securing Rs 100 crore from Sequoia India, DSP Group, 3one4 Capital, and other prominent investors, to close its fresh round of fundraising. Pocket Aces will utilize the fresh capital to invest in content, technology and talent. Since its last fundraise in 2016, the company has scaled viewership by 25x and monetization by 15x. Today, its socially distributed channels, FilterCopy (short videos), Gobble (food and lifestyle videos), Dice Media (long-form videos), clock 500 million monthly video views, making it the most viewed network on the Indian internet. The company will multiply its social distribution by starting three new content channels in the next 12 months. It aims to hit a run-rate of 1 billion monthly video views on original content by 2020, becoming the first Indian company to do so.

(This article appears in the February 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)