Lal Chand Bisu of Kuku FM believes in pumping the volume

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder, Kuku FM and Kuku TV (illustration by Priya Kuriyan) Summary The co-founder of Kuku FM and Kuku TV talks about the rise of mikrodramas, why content is a volume game today, and the 10 million paid users market prepares for this meeting with Lal Chandu Bisu, Co-ststuster of Digital and Compan I started watching a popular microdrama on Kuku TV, an app launched by the company earlier this year for short -shaped fictional storytelling. The show, called Revenge of My Fake Boyfriend, seems to be a smooth drama with a close screenplay and competent acting through fresh faces, aesthetically shot in a vertical video format. Each suspension of the show, over a mega-rich girl who is a self-made businessman, was only 2.5 minutes long, like all Microdramas of Kuku TV-a new genre in India inspired by the Korean and Chinese Mikrodramas that the company has been largely responsible for population over the past few months. It came to me that there was a whole world of entertainment there that people like me, to the British and American TV series on Netflix and Amazon Prime, are completely aware of. So if I meet Bisu (35) at Kuku FM’s office in Bengaluru’s HSR layout-the company covers two floors in a collaborative space and of the first questions I ask, is about this fragmentation of entertainment. “It’s been happening for a while. Even if you look at the user-generated content on social media, your YouTube feed and mine will be completely different,” says Bisu. He has no doubt, he says, that it is a good thing. ‘Now this is happening in professionally manufactured content, which we also call premium content. And this is the future of entertainment – due to the large number of content pieces, everyone will have another feed and library. ‘ The five -year -old company generates content with a quick cut. While the older Kuku FM app contains thousands of audio books, talk shows and audio dramas, mostly in local Indian languages, the Kuku TV app adds new videos every day (they added over 200 new shows, each between 1.5-2 hours long, just last month), with many of the hit Microdramas on the platforms that get more than 50 million views. “Indians have had limited options to consume content, especially professionally produced content. YouTube videos, Instagram roles are all there, but they do not meet the question of knowledge-based content or fiction and drama. We are close to releasing ten shows every day on Kuku TV. Over time, based on people’s choice and taste, they will be personalized and different feeds on the app. He does see it as a volume game, and talks about how with each transition in the way we consume entertainment, the net volume content that is available to us has jumped with a number of degrees. “First, we released films in theaters, right? One movie every Friday. Then came television and with the growth of cable TV, the amount of content produced jumped 100x. Then it was about streaming, and once again the viewer needed a lot more content, because now they could choose what they wanted to watch. We are in the fourth transition, when the streaming has evolved into the mobile leading premium content, ‘he says. In this world, content is treated mainly as a commodity that will be used like so many packages of biscuits or Bhujiya – the snack food of art and entertainment, if you like. ‘In a mobile first content, you need a high pace because your thumb is literally 1 inch from the screen and off the stop or hind button … You can change it at any moment. And secondly, you need a lot of content, because you can consume it at any time in the laundry room, while we need again with 100x, and it needed our 100x. It is also the logic behind the short -shaped content on which the business is focused today, because he believes that full -length films or episodes of shows are not ideal for quick consumption companies. “In mobile first content you need a high pace because your thumb is literally 1 inch from the screen and off the stop or hind button” worth about $ 500 million, and the company is currently working on a $ 70 million fund increase according to the media reports and is gaining about $ 10 million in revenue (Bisu did not confirm it). Monetization took place with a quick cut, powered by the £ 99 monthly subscription plan for Kuku FM and £ 499 for three months for Kuku TV. Starting with 250,000 paying users in 2021, it crossed 10 million paid users today, Bisu reveals. About 35% of their users are of Tier-1 cities, while most of the audience, at 45%, of Tier-2 cities, with the age group 25-35 represented too much in terms of the demographics of listeners. Kuku FM started in 2018 as a podcast-aggregator, co-founded by Bisu, Vinod Kumar Mena and Vikas Goyal-all Three is Alumni of Iit Jodhpur. “At that time, sound content in India was almost entirely music. There was a lack of spoken word content, especially in regional languages,” says Bisu. Around 2016, when the launch of Reliance Jio for the first time brought a high velocity, cheap mobile data in the lives of millions of Indians, there was a growing hunger for content in all formats, and the founders saw the sound in the category. “In the early days, we experimented with many things, biographies, summaries of popular English books. We realized very quickly that the audience of India was responding to storytelling in a very personal way and we ventured into fiction (in the form of sound dramas) -Horror, fantasy, romance, all these genres became big.” While the Kukufm app, among the top 10 free programs in the Google App Play Store, contains a significant amount of non-fiction content today, sound series are the fastest growing segment in the category in which it exists, with competitors such as Pocket FM (the current market leader) and Pratilipi FM. Indian listeners clearly cannot get enough of series fiction, dramas, romance, thrillers, mythology and biographies non-allly delivered in episodic, beaches. India’s audio boom is well documented – A recording in December 2023 by Pocket FM showed that Indian users spend more than 140 minutes on audio series daily, with 81% of the more than 20,000 users asked in the survey and say they consume audio entertainment daily. Meanwhile, a 2024 report indicated that the Sound Series segment had already established a hearing base on an equal footing with video streaming and OTT platforms, with 10-11% of the base that existed, coin in April 2025. Born and raised in the town of Bathoth in the Sikar district Rajasthan, Bisu was Bisu under the first of his family. He met his co -founders at Iit Jodhpur, where he graduated in 2012 and his co -founders in 2014. In 2013 he founded Edtech Startup EasyPrep, which Mena later joined. Based in Mumbai, the company, which is focused on providing multidisciplinary test preparation for competitive exams, was obtained in 2015 by another Edtech company, TopPR, (TopPR was then obtained by Byju’s in 2021). Living in Mumbai was a big change for Bisu, which was not used to local trains and long commuting. To kill the time when he traveled over Mumbai, he started listening to Podcasts. “I realized that it fits very well in my daily life. I did a lot of exercise earlier, and in Mumbai there was great commute time, so I would eventually use more than two hours of podcasts … such as Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, and many podcasts associated with the start-up world. Most of them were American-didn’t make it so well. Hai ‘(‘ it’s a solid format ‘).’ This observation returned to him after the sale of EasyPrep when he and his co -founders were looking for a fresh idea. “I started to observe myself-what do I do in my daily life, what affects me? And USME’s sound Nikal Ke Aya (the answer was sound). And after almost a year I connected the dots-I would create a product that I would consume myself, otherwise I would not start, ‘he says. “I was sure that although it is for a niche audience, the niche is quite large – there are so many people doing repeated tasks, from drivers to housewives – and they need something they can consume while doing these tasks. Yes, there is no great sound culture in India – we will create the culture! “The next wave of content-one in which we are already in most accounts-is-generated. Bisu says that nearly 70-80% of their work, at least at the conceptualization and writing level, is done by AI today. Title. Then we write the plot. Then we write the screenplay. Then we take it in audio and video. In the end, we make visual assets such as thumbnails, marketing material or episodic videos. So, in all these areas, AI plays a big role, “he says.” We have created our own AI instruments and use this indigenous AI end to end. ” However, he believes that AI is an instrument, just like search or e -mail, and not a participant for people: ‘You actually need creative people of better quality that can use AI and give you more and better content … Your AI output depends on the person sitting in front of the table. Not doing this without AI. 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