By Tiyash Mukherjee

Posted on August 9, 2016

If you have a story which you want the world to know, here is the place

The company Saddahaq started back in 2012.  Saddahaq is a platform for social journalism. Here  journalists from all corners of the world file their independent stories. The concept is interesting so we spoke to the founder to know more. IndianCEO talks to the founder Pallav.

How does this StartUp work?

We do not have a standard editorial team who have written standards and parameters for articles. We want to explore variable expertise, so we leave it to the journalists as to how they want to present their story. Later on the response of viewers decides the hits or misses of a story. Of course we aim at one dimension for journalists to follow, but the fundamental idea is to explore thoughts and knowledge.

What has been the biggest challenge for Saddahaq?

Well as obvious money pose the biggest issue in starting or expanding the platform.  Journalism doesn’t interest investors as few people pay for reading online news. Therefore the only way for us to scale up revenue is to increase the readerships per month. We need to introduce certain models to attract viewers. Obviously capital is required for that. We are still working on that to be frank.

How did Kahaniya happen?

While we were on our plans to expand Saddahaq, Kahaniya was a natural emerge. If we wanted expansive readers base for Saddahaq, we had to rope in regional journalists. Statistics say there are about  360 million people on Internet,  out of which only 160 odd million people can read or understand English. So we decided to publish articles in major regional languages like Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Punjabi, Gujrati and so on. Kahaniya takes care of stories of major regional languages.

How did you come across this idea

Well I have the fetish for Telugu articles and stories. One day I was searching for some stories online,  which were hard to find. Then an idea dawned that why don’t we create an online platform where stories from round the world can be surfed under one social platform.

The Team

I am the premiere founder of Saddahaq, after which three more co-founders joined in. We all are software engineers. I am myself a computer engineer from Boston University. I have spent a major part of my work life in US.

The Revenue

Though we have 900 hundred writers for Saddahaq, we are yet to dig revenue. But with Kahaniya we have folded out an unique price plan. We encourage informative and interesting content from writers. The readers who wish to read the content have to pay a nominal fee. That is anything between Rs.1 to Rs. 5. We let the writers decide the price for their story. We have about 500 readers who pay  for stories in about two months.

The USP

There isn’t too much competition in this space. Yet I would say our technology and concept has a nobility to attract readers and stay in the business. This is a nascent concept so we have the responsibility to take it forward. We do ‘live publishing’ where authors decide the price of their articles. That sets us apart from many online publishing house.

Next in plan

We have designed our Android app and hope to release it in a matter of a month.

Log onto www.saddahaq.com and www.kahaniya.com for details.

Saddahaq and Kahaniya: A Place to Enhance Your Journalistic Competence