Exactly four years ago, to the day, three very different people registered Kenrise Media in Bangalore, India as a limited liability private company.
The three people were Seema Singh, a career journalist just coming off from writing a deeply reported non-fiction book over two years; Sumanth Raghavendra, a serial entrepreneur on to his fourth SaaS startup; and me, a former journalist whose two-year-old tech startup had just failed.
The company we founded would go on to launch The Ken in October as India’s first subscriptions-only business news platform.
We’ve grown a bit since
- We crossed 25,000 active subscribers last quarter.
- Over 99% of these subscribers are on plans of at least one year. Many are on couple plans.
- A reflection of our subscribers’ confidence and trust in us is their average tenure with us. An increasing number are opting for our three-year plans. The average tenure has been greater than 12 months for three straight quarters now.
We did not get here by discounting
- This month will be our 12th straight month where our average order value will be around 110% of the price of our annual subscription.
The pandemic did affect us. It made us stronger
- Our growth accelerated. We added more subscribers in the first seven months of 2020 than we did in the first two years of The Ken.
- Last month we recorded the highest number of new orders and the highest number of renewals in our history.
We’re still young and small
- We’ve achieved all of this with a relatively lean but immensely talented team of 34 spread across six different countries.
We’re ambitious
- In March, we launched The Ken Southeast Asia, a subscription-only offering exclusively from and for Southeast Asia.
- In July, we took our newsletters, Beyond The First Order and The Nutgraf, behind a paywall.
In a world filled with choices and options, we’re clear what we love. Journalism, products, and subscriptions. And everything that lies at their intersections.
If you do too, write to us? We’re hiring.
