About the venture
In the world of podcasts and Insta stories, Plop is a global, mobile-first company that creates immersive and interactive fiction for a young audience. Co-founded by Anushka Shetty, an IIMB alumna and Vineet Shetty, an ISB alum, in 2019, Plop hooks on a unique, fast-paced format to develop interactive bite-sized fiction to entertain and educate the Gen Y and Gen Z audience.
The Mumbai-based platform uses a format that takes written word and infuses multiple multimedia elements like video, audio, and role-playing mobile-based simulations to give a real-life experience to a smart-phone obsessed generation.
The young users depict a mature market where smart phone penetration is high. Plop intelligently uses all native features of a smartphone and weaves them into the content served to its audience. The platform creates engaging content which gives an instant dose of gratification in 12 minutes or less. On its platform, Plop experiences a week-on-week growth of 7%.
In a short span of time, Plop has marked its presence as a global product with over 60% of its users coming from North America, and rest from Europe and Asia including India.
During the lockdown, the company experienced a new use case. Plop emerged as a platform for Europeans, especially from Germany, Netherlands, and France to learn conversational English. The app is available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
Founders
Anushka Shetty is a Chartered Accountant by qualification. An alumna of IIM Bangalore, Anushka worked with Pricewaterhouse Coopers for almost five years before she co-founded Plop, a mobile interactive start-up, in 2019. The founder through her mobile interactive app is trying to carve a new entertainment category of digital storytelling.
Anushka, who used to a voracious reader, had not read a single book other than academic literature in a long time. She realized how there has been a transition from reading books to being addicted to smartphones for texting and using social media apps. Like her, there are several others in the same category. This prompted her and co-founder Vineet Shetty to create a platform that merges the ancient art of storytelling with the millennial art of texting.
Vineet Shetty is a hardcore techie with a degree in Software Engineering. An alumnus of Indian School of Business, Vineet has worked with Ernst & Young for three years. For Vineet, Plop is his third start-up after Codeniti – which organized hackathons for NGOs and Geekout – a co-working space for tech geeks.
Co-founders Anushka and Vineet underwent the same realization that the joy of reading has been replaced with the joy of texting, pinging, snapping, posting, tweeting, and so on. This was a driving factor for both Anushka and Vineet to create a platform for the smartphone-addicted Gen Z and millennials. As a result, Plop was founded. Plop is a global, mobile-first company that creates immersive and interactive fiction for a young audience.
How NSRCEL’s WSP helped Plop: Sharing their experience with NSRCEL in setting up Plop, the co-founders said, “It was a great kickstart. As a very early-stage start-up with just an idea, NSRCEL provided the essentials – an office space, infrastructure like internet, electricity, which may seem like nothing but when you are starting off, it is a huge help. Most importantly, NSRCEL offered a very helpful mentor and peer community. Our first mentor and advisor from the NSRCEL mentor network, Prashant Sanakaran, is someone we have continued to consult all these years. NSRCEL also exposed us to a lot of opportunities in the start-up space like Anita Borg Women Entrepreneur Quest where we got a chance to explore the start-up network in Silicon Valley, DST’s other startup programs, NASSCOM, etc. The program truly helps you take your first steps, and the network goes above and beyond to help you if only you ask for help.”
