10 Pivots and Multiple Iterations

The Audio-First Platform Found Its Product-Market Fit Two Years After Launch

- S SHANTHI

Rohan Nayak, the 32-year-old co-founder and CEO of Pocket Entertainment, was in grade 6 in DPS RK Puram, Delhi, when he discovered his first love, Naruto, a Japanese manga television series. The first love affair lasted seven to eight years before it gave way to movies. When he joined IIT Kharagpur in 2010 to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering, he spent the first year watching around 150 movies from different genres, languages, and formats. Therefore, it sounds like an understatement when Nayak calls himself an entertainment enthusiast.

Life was not all fun and games, though, as he also started dreaming of entrepreneurship. He and his co-founder, Nishanth KS, would often brainstorm ideas about starting something up. "The thought of building something that millions of users could use was incredibly exciting to us. It was that sense of possibility that sparked my entrepreneurial journey," Nayak says.

And what a journey it has been. Nayak, along with his co-founders, Nishanth and Prateek Dixit, has created one of the top audio series platforms in India, Pocket FM, which has surpassed the ₹1,000 crore revenue mark.

But the idea to combine his interest in storytelling, entrepreneurship, and his learnings at IIT came much later in life—it was during Nayak's long commutes from Delhi to Gurugram from 2015 to 2017 when he was working as a product lead at Paytm's Cube26. "I used to experiment with various content formats to keep myself entertained, and that's when I realised something. While video entertainment had a wide spectrum—long-form content like Netflix, TV shows, and movies—there was a noticeable gap in audio entertainment," he says. It was like an untapped white space. That's when the idea really took shape, and he instantly knew there was something big he could build.