TL;DR: Sector-specific data, satellite imagery, and vehicle registration data provide some answers Growth in India appears to be slowing right now — real GDP growth rate has dropped every quarter since March 2018, and was a dismal 5.83% in the Q4 (Jan-Mar) 2018–19 quarter. This was the lowest GDP growth…

TL;DR: Names can be used to estimate affluence, ethnicity, age, gender and other attributes Is someone named “Rhea Ahluwalia” more likely to be affluent than someone named “Panna Lal”? If your instinctive answer was “Yes”, you would — ceteris paribus— be right. Indian names (both first and last) contain enormous…

TL;DR: Add more value than you extract. Build real relationships. Follow up humanely. I started Loki.ai in September 2017 as a solo, bootstrapped entrepreneur. Since then, the business has rapidly grown and become profitable — with no investment in marketing or PR. All of our business has come through direct…

Content is a curse. It causes you to think you can make what’s going to delight users. It causes you to ignore their contributions. It causes you to focus on your own content rather than how to get the best content in the world — content that anyone can make. …

Publishers today face a paradoxical challenge. Revenue and profitability outlooks for the industry are shaky – even as it reaches record audiences and creates unprecedented cultural impact. There is impressive audience growth in digital, but online ad-revenues and CPMs are too low for sustaining large-scale journalism. Most publishers have not…

This story is a part of a larger series on a playbook for digital publishers — “The most poorly read stories, it turns out, are often the most “dutiful” — incremental pieces, typically with minimal added context, without visuals and largely undifferentiated from the competition. They frequently do not clear the bar of journalism worth paying for.” – New York Times 2020 Report (published in 2017) …

This story is a part of a larger series on a playbook for digital publishers — Don’t ever tether your business to the benevolence of a third party. – Jim VandeHei, Co-Founder of Axios and Politico As social media (particularly Facebook) exploded in the early to mid 2010s, publishers like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Refinery29 surged in popularity. With their dizzying growth and valuations, distributed publishers (those…

TL;DR: I learned how to work at scale, had relative freedom, and got a decent amount of money as a bootstrapped solo entrepreneur. However, I found it difficult to do truly impactful things without a team/tribe. Overview of the company My company (Loki.ai) provides data APIs, dashboards, and iframes to media companies. It scrapes…

Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep has been one of the most impactful books I’ve read this year. Was first made aware of the book on Peter Attia’s podcast, and then received 3 independent recommendations to read the book from friends. I read the book cover-to-cover, and took copious notes. Sharing…