Episode
Part 1: Kuku's Lal Chand Bisu on killing three products, ditching the free tier and charging Bharat ₹399 a year
- Podcast
- First Principles
- Published
- Apr 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3842
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/15b9ae4a
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Summary
Check out our corporate subscription plan: https://the-ken.com/corporate-teams/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=corporate-subscriptions Lal Chand Bisu started Kuku in audio in 2018. Almost everyone in the press wrote them off — the louder competitor was getting the headlines, the VCs didn't believe vernacular India would pay, and the assumption was that short-video would flatten audio. None of that aged well. Kuku FM did ₹242 Cr in FY25 at 175% YoY growth, with roughly 10 million paying subscribers. This is the conversation Bisu, who is just not the kind of founder who walks around telling you these numbers, finally agreed to do. In Part 1, we get into the company history, the pivots, the contrarian decision to cut the free tier, and what 40 million Hindi listens to Rich Dad Poor Dad really mean. Chapter list 00:00 — How old is Kuku FM, and what Bisu was doing before (Easy Prep, two and a half years at Toppr) 00:02 — June birthdays, coincidence, and Bisu's definition of luck — "most things are out of control" 00:04 — The three pivots: podcast aggregator → UGC → PUGC. What killed each one and what was kept constant 00:09 — Why vernacular audio IP didn't exist, and why Kuku had to become a studio rather than an aggregator 00:14 — January 2021: cutting the free tier and charging ₹399 a year. The investor pushback. Why no ads, ever 00:23 — Rich Dad Poor Dad in Hindi: 40 million listens. What that number tells you about the listener that English-first publishers have been missing 00:27 — How Kuku's content mix has shifted from entertainment to educational and inspirational 00:30 — Audio first, then video. Why audio is roughly 50x cheaper to produce and 50x cheaper to stream 00:33 — AI in the marketing pipeline: 500 ads/month → 5,000 ads/month, sam…