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From selling the bicycle for an event to ₹6 Crore revenue in 2019.

The Story of - Josh Talks

A Thread 🧵👇

 1/ Shobhit Banga and Supriya Paul started Josh Talks journey in April 2014 with a small event at the Air Force Auditorium in Delhi.
2/ In December 2014, the team organised a large event at SRCC, where Boman Irani, Anshu Gupta, Arunima Sinha and other speakers joined and talked about their story. There were over 6,000 attendees.
3/ After the success of pilot events in 2014, the team official launched Josh Talks on 14 January 2015.
4/ In 2015, the team decided to start an English YouTube channel to spread the pursuit faster to people who didn’t attend the events and reach out to people in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities too.
5/ “Josh” is a Hindi word which means Passion. It is a very powerful word that fills people with energy and makes them act towards the things they have been wanting to achieve.
6/ Josh Talks logo contains a microphone that indicates how Josh Talks offers a media platform that covers a wide array of subjects with speakers from every conceivable background.
7/ Dr Ritesh Malik, Founder & CEO of Innov8 was an early ‘angel’ for the company, who invested around ₹10 lakh in 2015 which was spent into operational expenses.
8/ In October 2016, Josh Talks organized India’s largest youth conference in Delhi - LEAP which was a 2-day event in which known investors, designers, artists and others participated as speakers to share their remarkable ideas and stories.
9/ The team worked for 6 months for the entire event and the budget reached ₹35 lakhs. Unfortunately, since 3 days before the event, no sponsors were confirmed and the team decided to cancel the event.
10/ But, the team thought of trying out one final idea. Instead of getting 7 sponsors, who could pay ₹5 lakhs each, the team decided to create 70 stalls for ₹50,000 each.
11/ Within 3 days, 70 stalls ranging from a vast number of food stalls serving multiple cuisines to entrepreneurship and the team was able to fund the budget of ₹35 lakhs.
12/ At last, 24 speakers graced the event and over 5,000 audience participated, across age groups. The event turned out to be a massive success for the team.
13/ Back then, Shobhit Banga, Supriya Paul, Vedant Maheshwari, Nabeel Rizvi and Manish Pandey were the first team members and have been working there till now.
14/ Josh Talks witnessed losses of ₹10 lakhs in 2015 and ₹50 lakhs in 2016.
15/ In November 2017, the company raised ₹1.2 crore through angel investment from Girish Mathrubootham, Apurva Chamaria and more. This round helped the company to roll out content in regional languages.
16/ The company was registered in a list of "Top 50 Startups of India" of 2017 by Economic Times.
17/ In February 2018, the team started 5 new vernacular YouTube channels including Josh Marathi, Josh Bangla, Josh Tamil and others. The team size then increased to 40 members.
18/ Josh Talks founders Shobhit Banga and Supriya Paul, also featured in Forbes Magazine under its 'Asia 30 Under 30' for 2018 list.
19/ In October 2018, Josh Talks introduced Josh Kosh to offer comprehensive career guidance, completely free of cost.
20/ In the financial year 2018, Josh Talks has crossed ₹6 crore in revenue and profit of ₹75 lakhs.
21/ On 25 January 2019, Josh Talks was awarded with the National Media Award by Honourable President of India, Ramnath Kovind for MakeYourMark campaign to create awareness and engagement amongst the first time voters. The campaign was launched in 2018.
22/ As of May 2019, Josh Talks has covered over 1,500 speakers in 9 vernacular languages including English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Telugu. Josh Talks has a team of over 85 people with an average age of 23 years.
23/ Josh Talks also organizes offline conferences and skill-building workshops. It has reached more than 1,50,000 people offlines through their events in 30 different cities and workshops in over 1,000 colleges.
24/ In June 2019, Josh Talks launched Josh Skills which focuses on upskilling individuals with courses in regional languages for skills such as spoken english, personality development, graphic designing and bunch of other courses.
25/ Recently, Josh Talks has raised $1.5 million in pre-Series- A funding round led by New York-based Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) on 27 February 2020. With this new round of funding, the startup said that its valuation crossed the ₹100 crore mark.
26/ With the support of MDIF, Josh Talks is looking to expand its vernacular growth in India, build its skills vertically, and targeting other developing nations. The funds will also help the company to scale its e-learning platform, Josh Skills.
27/ Josh Skills claim to have a course completion rate of 25%, which is way higher in comparison to 3%-4% completion rates of Coursera and edX.
28/ Currently, Josh Skills app has 1.9 million installs and 10% of these installs have converted into paying users, which is 1.3 lakh paying users. The majority of its courses are in Hindi, but there are also some courses available in Bangla, Punjabi and Marathi.
29/ In a short span of 3 to 4 years, Josh Talks has covered over 1,500 speakers in 9 vernacular languages and its YouTube channels have over 9.37 million subscribers with over 45 millions views monthly.
30/ Recently, Josh Talks has partnered with Google to provide an opportunity for jobs seekers in India with the training and tools they need to get a job. It’s called Kosh Jobs.
31/ The current focus of Josh Talks is on growing the skills vertical out and expansion in vernacular content as Josh Talks grows more in the languages that they are currently in and expands into new ones.
32/ The three products include the flagship Josh Talks, Josh Kosh (an inclusive career advice platform and Josh Skills (a skilling platform).
33/ Josh Talks is India’s largest and fastest-growing impact platform and eventually their goal is to unlock human potential.

Ref : https://t.co/ATd2juPraG

End of thread. Stay Tuned for another thread next week. 🔔

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