Inshorts: A Rs.600 Crore Company with just 60 words!

News insights from across the world on one platform in just sixty words which is crisp and quick, is this not interesting and easy to go through for most of us? Categories like national, business, sports, technology and what not are displayed on Inshorts.

The popular Inshorts which started off as News In Shorts is a content discovery platform provider for both Android and iOS users.

Like many other Facebook pages, Inshorts started off with the purpose of sharing information over the web about the latest news and buzz.

It was difficult to become popular by doing just the basic things and so the founders of this interesting platform came up with the idea of presenting news in just sixty words. This one simple but unique idea changed the fortune of the masterminds behind this company.

The brainchildren of Inshorts includes Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arnav who decided to start off the firm during their last semester at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

In an interview, Azhar Iqubal said that it was really easy to set up and unlike other startups where it takes months to get off the ground, they were up and running in 3 days flat.

In its initial days, it was available only in English, but now it is in Hindi too and based on its growth and success, the app will soon launch in regional languages as well.

During their college days, the three brainchildren observed that not many loved the idea of reading news every day and came up with the idea of launching a news “in shorts” which would deliver news in a brief.

Azhar along with his buddies created a Facebook page and in just a little span of time, they received a huge interaction to the tune of more than a thousand fans. Within a few months of the launch, the app fetched more than ten thousand downloads.

Within a year, it entered into the Forbes’ 30 under 30 lists and bagged the award for the Best Innovation App by the IAMAI.

Inshorts was founded in 2013 and now has more than three million downloads. The next step was pretty obvious and the masterminds developed an app. By the mid-2015, they had hit a million users mark.

To recreate the unique experience of reading a sixty words snippet, the news features an image as a card on the mobile screen of the app.

If readers would like to read the entire story, they can also do so by following the link to a publisher’s website within the application. By the end of 2015, the e-commerce giant Flipkart showed a keen interest in the idea of Inshorts and invested 4 million dollars. At the same time, Tiger Global Investors also made a whopping investment of 20 million dollars.

The startup generates around 140 stories a day. The user interface is simple, easy to use and attractive. The user just has to swipe to go through the latest news and happenings around the world. Soon, the application is going to incorporate multimedia like videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs, and others.