These colleagues quit Facebook to start YouTube for audio, find early success
“You can think of Headfone as a YouTube for audio,” says Pratham Khandelwal, co-founder and CEO of the audio storytelling platform he launched with former colleague Yogesh Sharma after quitting his job at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.
“Just like YouTube, you can create content on the Headfone app and distribute them as a channel or personal profile,” Khandelwal tells indianexpress.com, adding that initially, the company did experiment with formats like audiobooks and podcasts but soon realised that Indian users want to listen to audio dramas across genres. Although the premium segment might be interested in knowledge-based content, the masses are more into fictional stories, he elaborates. “We are focusing on the stories, but fictional stories that can be told in the audio drama format, or narrative storytelling.”
But Khandelwal, in his early 30s, is clear he does not want to be a production house; the same approach that differentiates YouTube from Netflix. “We at times do experiments with original content…but the broader vision is that we want to empower the creators so that we can have a diverse and scalable content repository for listeners to listen to that content.”
Graduates from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad (IIIT-A), both Khandelwal and Sharma had a common vision to create an audio platform that connects storytellers and listeners. For now, the audio content on the app is free, whether it be hosting, creating, listening or distributing. “We are doing some early experiments around monetisation but that would be more on listening to premium content,” he adds.
The Headfone app is different from Audible or Clubhouse. (Image credit: Headfone)
Khandelwal says 60 per cent of Headfone’s users come from tier-2 cities, 30 per cent from tier-1 cities and the remaining ones are from tier-3 and tier-4 cities. Though Khandelwal has no access to the hard data, his hunch is that users who are using his app are those who also use YouTube more than Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.
Time spent on the Headfone app has significantly increased in the past few months and users now spend an average of 45 minutes on the app. But the focus is to retain users and hence Khandelwal says: “We are making our content repository very deep.” Previously you would find every kind of content on the Headfone app but now the strategy is to squarely focus on the audio content that can appeal to the masses in terms of marketing and our narrative.
To run a platform like this, Khandelwal says there is a need to experiment with the content. While content creators and storytellers are free to make their content, the three-person in-house team sets the tone that resonates with the users. In a way, this team helps the content creators decide what type of content should work on the platform.
“If people are interested in horror stories…we then try it out and discuss should we create a single episode horror story or a series and if we are creating a series then what should be the length of the episode and if the length of the episode we have finalised then what should be the language; if it is in Hindi, then it should be a proper Hindi or with a dialect like Bihari or Marwari,” he explains. The average length of an audio drama episode on the Headfone app is seven to ten minutes.
