Amit Varma's Entrepreneurship Journey

Who is India's most beloved podcaster? This week we will be talking to none other than Amit Varma!

Welcome to our second episode on the trend report on audience first products. We’re really excited to have Amit Varma with us in this episode. 

Amit hosts the weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen. It offers us unique longform content and we are all such fans. No wonder it gets over 150,000 downloads a month!

Amit is currently a columnist for the Times of India, Bloomberg Quint, and Cricket Next. He wrote India Uncut, which was one of India’s most popular blogs in the years it was active, between 2004 and 2008. It now serves as a repository of his published work and all the new writings now come in the form of a newsletter. He's the only person who's won the prestigious Bastiat Prize for Journalism twice. Business Week has named him one of the 50 Most Powerful People in India.

Today's conversation was a journey! We begin in days of blogging, move through the social media revolution, and explore viral forms of content creation in 2020 like podcasts and newsletters. 

Amit has many insights into the Art of being a creator online and what it takes to grow a large audience and build a community. At the core he believes that you need to have a passion for what you're doing because content creation is a labor of love. To be a successful content creator you need to care more about the work than the number of views or downloads. 

We also discuss Amit’s latest venture, The Art of Clear Writing, his first attempt to monetize his audience after more than 15 years of being an online creator. We also explore his future plans and his continued love for longform content. 

The end of the conversation was quite unexpected– Amit was an entrepreneur during the late 90’s when he went to New York to pitch the idea of iTunes before it even existed. He also built a quizzing website which was in the top 3 of India’s most trafficked websites for a while. Tune in to find out how those ventures ended and why Amit decided that being a full time writer would be his mode of entrepreneurship. 

As usual, if you have any questions or just want to connect– please feel free to join our WhatsApp. TID Trends WhatsApp Group

Link to our newsletter: Audience-First Products Report
 
The Art of Clear Writing Course
Seen & Unseen Podcast
India Uncut Blog
Amit's Twitter Account
Amit's Newsletter