How The Juggernaut built a media business targeting the South Asian diaspora

Founder Snigdha Sur explains why she went all-in on paid subscriptions.

Image via SnigdhaSur.com

Snigdha Sur’s first idea for a media startup was a kind of Netflix-for-Bollywood streaming service, but when she spoke to investors about the idea, they all pointed out that it would be too easy for Netflix to simply copy her strategy.

Though she quickly scrapped that idea, she still wanted to launch some sort of outlet that would service South Asian Americans, a group that she felt was underrepresented in mainstream media. This led to the launch of a free weekly newsletter that amassed several hundred readers.

That free newsletter eventually evolved into The Juggernaut, a subscription-funded publisher that has a dedicated and growing fan base. I interviewed Snigdha about how she convinced YCombinator to let in a media startup, why she launched a hard paywall, and whether she’ll ever introduce advertising into her revenue mix.

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Launching a free newsletter

Prior to launching the newsletter that became The Juggernaut, Snigdha had no professional journalism experience, though she had worked on both her high school and college newspapers. After graduating, she considered going into media, but the industry upheaval in that sector made her nervous. “I came from an immigrant background and I didn't have that financial cushion to take that leap of faith at that point in my life. I wanted to be independent and not add extra stress for my parents.” She ended up going into management consulting instead. “It's basically like an executive bootcamp. You learn the ins and outs of the business world over two years in the analyst program. It’s such a rapid succession of meeting so many different clients and so many different people in so many different working styles that it feels like you fit together like five to 10 years of work experience in just two years. It's kind of intense.”

But Snigdha could never quite shake the media bug. As an Indian American, she had long noticed that South Asians were vastly underrepresented in the mainstream media, even though that demographic represented $460 billion in disposable income. She began thinking about a news outlet that could cover the South Asian diaspora. “The first iteration of this was a free newsletter. I wanted to test my idea, but I wanted to do it in the cheapest way possible. I was still working at McKinsey, and what I would do is on the weekends or whenever I was free, I would just put together a newsletter for my friends on what was happening in South Asian and diaspora news, and I started sending it to them. And then pretty soon they would give me a ton of feedback and start sharing it with their friends, who would start sharing it with their friends. By no means was this newsletter large — it was only sent to 700 people, but it came to a point where I didn't know more than half of the people on the list.”

Turning it into a business

Snigdha reached a point where she realized that she enjoyed compiling the newsletter each week much more than her day job. “I saved a ton of money while I was working to where I had five to six months of runway, and I just quit, frankly. I told myself that during these next five months I would work really hard to make this more of a business and potentially raise money, and if I couldn't make it into a business that was self-sufficient or raise money, then I would go back to the job market and find something else.”

Snigdha was friends with a YCombinator graduate, and he encouraged her to apply to the accelerator. “I applied like five days late, but my friend said it shouldn’t matter. The funny story was that I went off to a friend's wedding in Spain when the interview results were out, and so I wasn't checking my work email, and because of that I was the last person to open this email that said that I actually got an interview. I was so over the moon, but then it quickly hit me that I had to somehow fly back to New York ASAP and then fly to SF and do this all while figuring out how to fly back in time for the New York City marathon.”

Snigdha ultimately ended up getting into YCombinator.  “I would say that the most important things that define the program are the peer pressure, the partner sessions —  where they talk through specific things like company culture, diversity, and product sprints — and then access to the entire alumni network. You’re put into this group of about 10 founders and every two weeks you're updating the group about your progress, and if there's anything that forces you to feel accountable and make sure that you're moving and chugging along, it's standing in front of that group every two weeks and saying, ‘here's what we did.’”

At YCombinator, The Juggernaut kept evolving each week. “Initially we just kept on trying to get the newsletter to grow and we weren't doing any paid ads. It was all organic and it was stressful.” Eventually Snigdha realized that aggregation alone wouldn’t generate much growth and that she needed to accelerate her plan of expanding into original reporting. “And so over the course of three weeks, I somehow convinced the engineer to build an MVP website for us, completely custom with Stripe and everything integrated with MailChimp, and then we hired a few incredible writers as contractors. And that's when we really started to see change. We started YC with no official product or tech at all, no revenue, just a MailChimp list, and by the end of it, we had a newsletter going and we had paying subscribers, which is insane. We had brand recognition. We had people who were clamoring to write for us.”

Solidifying the business

Snigdha graduated from YCombinator in 2019, and since then she’s been focused on expanding The Juggernaut’s content output and accelerating subscriber growth. Because most of the article content is locked behind a paywall, her team has to get creative about how they expose the brand to new readers. “We have a few ways to make our product porous. One is we have great social media on Instagram, so people can preview a lot of our content that way. Second is we have a free newsletter where people can read our analysis, our voice, our style, and hopefully see value in it. And the third thing we do is that we have a really cool feature that we stole from The Information where any person can gift an article to anybody else for free. And sometimes what we do is we go to the main Juggernaut account and just gift an article for free for our entire newsletter audience, AKA, make it open for them to read. They just have to enter their email address.”

Snigdha has also focused on hiring freelance writers with already-existing brands and giving them permission to write about topics that they couldn’t cover anywhere else “It took us a while to find our voice, but as our voice got stronger, we quickly realized some basic things. Like the first three paragraphs have to be really strong because it's what you see before the paywall.” They also homed in on formats that seemed to drive the most engagement: longform features, cultural analysis, and opinion.  “We also do profiles. We have interviewed the likes of Padma Lakshmi and Riz Ahmed. We like to go deep with them and try to produce a profile that no one really has read before about them — how do we talk to them in a way and ask them questions that they haven't really been asked before?”

Today, the site mostly relies on freelancers, but Snigdha hopes to secure more investment so she can hire out a full-time staff. “We want to grow sustainably. We didn't want to make that mistake of hiring 20 or 30 people and then having to lay off 50% of the staff.  That's something that we've seen happen in the media industry for far too long, and I really didn't want it to happen at our company. And so we're probably going to hire way more full-time people after our Series A, so watch out for that, but in the meantime for seed financing, we were very, very careful to grow sustainably.”

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.