With a diverse range of compelling content, how Indian podcasters are rewriting the rules of the game in the third-largest podcast listening market in the world. We take a look: 

Raj Shamani: ‘Figures out’ with Arvind Kejriwal, Lalit Modi & counting
@FiguringOut

For Raj Shamani, Figuring Out is not just a name for his podcast, but he says it should also be a “habit for every achiever or dreamer who wants to grow in their lives on an everyday basis”.

Initially, Shamani created content reading books, researches, newspapers and articles to make videos through which he “could help people improve their lives”. In 2020, he started his journey of podcasts to talk about topics like how to make money during the pandemic, ways to increase money and influence and how to come up with a business idea. Over time, he started bringing guests such as Gary Vaynerchuk, an American businessman and author, Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, Razorpay’s Shashank Kumar, and so on. 

“I genuinely want to figure out how to get better with my health, wealth and relationships so that I grow in my life and that’s what made me start Figuring Out,” he says.

Shamani’s approach was simple, to “improve personally by talking directly with the top 1% of experts—the living legends in their respective fields—rather than learning from something that may be a hundred years old”. “I wanted to learn from what was the most relevant today, from those who have already achieved extraordinary success. That’s how Figuring Out came into being,” says the 27-year-old YouTuber and podcaster from Indore, currently living in Mumbai. 

Shamani has had conversations with people from all walks of life, including Arvind Kejriwal, Ananya Panday, Diljit Dosanjh, Kangana Ranaut, American YouTuber MrBeast as well as controversial personalities like Lalit Modi. The podcast with Modi is something he thinks is the “best podcast for him at the moment” because “that was the most difficult thing to do as getting the guest was almost impossible.”

Shamani says he is very particular with his guest list and has filters like whether they have something to “teach the audience”, some insights that a “common person doesn’t know” and whether “they trust him and are open to sharing whatever he will ask”. 

That said, he tells FE how in a podcast with Lalit Modi, he was able to ask whatever he wanted to and Modi did not know any questions in advance. “There was no kind of interference. I really respect that man to be able to open up for everything. I don’t know exactly what’s the other side of the story and what’s right and wrong, but here’s what I can tell you with conviction—there was not even a single question he knew in advance, nor did he try to control the podcast at any point of time,” Shamani explains.

Junking the entire recordings of podcasts that don’t pass the filter check, including not being able to support the statements with data or facts, is another highlight of his productions. “Trust me, we have shelved episodes that don’t add any value to my audience base. Our main goal is to share content that’s meaningful and helps our listeners grow,” he says.

No wonder, according to Spotify’s 2024 wrap, Figuring Out features in the top 10 podcasts of India, and his channel on YouTube has 4.55 million subscribers and counting.

Karishma Mehta: ‘Chief everything officer’ with listening power
@HumansofBombay

Karishma Mehta calls herself the ‘chief everything officer’ of Humans of Bombay, a Facebook page she started at the age of 21 years in 2014 that has now become a community of over 3 million people who believe in the power of humanity. Mehta, now 31, would talk to complete strangers on the streets of Mumbai— with a camera, a notepad and some questions in tow—as she set out to share stories of their struggles, as well as the highs and the lows of everyday heroes and public personalities.

As an extension of her work, Mehta is now making her mark in podcasts, where she is able to unravel the “different layers that were getting missed due to the format constraints of an Instagram post” and “explore the full throttle of the person”. Otherwise, “everything that we do remains true to the person’s real and authentic story,” adds Mehta, who holds a degree in business and economics from the University of Nottingham, UK, and is a freelance writer for various publications, including National Geographic. She is also a TEDx speaker.

Mehta started the podcast series, How the hell did I do it, two years ago “to celebrate real-life heroes”. “From a single mother who had a baby out of wedlock to a woman officer who served the Army for 11 years, we wanted to bring out the extraordinary stories of seemingly ordinary people,” she says. Apart from this, Mehta also runs two other series, Realign and Humans of Bombay Show, where she brings personalities from various fields to traverse into the ‘how’ of their life trajectory. 

Besides everyday heroes, Mehta’s guest list has included celebrities and other accomplished people, including Aamir Khan, Alia Bhatt, Harsha Bhogle, MS Dhoni, Shikhar Dhawan, Mahua Moitra, Raj & DK, Manish Malhotra, Pankaj Tripathi, Neena Gupta, Jitendra Kumar, Huma Qureshi, Vir Das, Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Gaur Gopal Das, Gayathri Shivaram, and Karishma Ahuja, among many others.

Mehta likes to keep her conversations candid and says it’s her listening power that makes her guests open up about themselves. On one of her shows, actor Aamir Khan choked up when she asked him about his memories with his father. “A very big facet of the way human emotions work is that if you just listen, the person feels comfortable enough to share. I think sometimes opening the conversation with the intent to listen and really engage and be present in that moment is the differentiator. When you’ve been doing this for 11 years, it’s like second nature to you,” she explains. 

“It’s everything that I’ve learned in 11 years that is put together in one conversation,” she adds.

Sonal Kaushal: More than the voice of ‘Doraemon’
@TheMotorMouth

Sonal Kaushal is more commonly known as The Motor Mouth, because she voices a number of characters in cartoons. But she says her moment of celebrityhood came when she appeared on The Kapil Sharma Show and people got to know she was the Hindi voice behind the popular Japanese manga character Doraemon.

“My social media accounts crashed after that,” she says in a video on her YouTube channel that has over 55 million views and counting. The comments section is flooded by users who enthusiastically share how her identity is synonymous with their childhood. 

It also seems Kaushal’s “chirpy” personality makes her a favourite among her followers, a fact that reflects on the 5.39 million subscribers that she has on her YouTube channel The Motor Mouth and 2.3 million followers on her Instagram account ‘@the_motormouth’.

Kaushal’s podcasts are as much about audio as they are about visuals and she is very cautious in eliciting the ‘fun vibe’ from her content. “The difference between my podcast and the rest is that I feel my frame is always very colourful, which depicts my personality as well. While my initial videos had a dark set and lighting design, I realised that was not me. That’s when we added a lot of colours to the frame,” says Kaushal, who voiced Doraemon for 13 years till 2018.

Besides Doraemon, Delhi girl Kaushal has also lent her voice to Pikachu from Pokemon, Nene Sakurada and Musae Koyama from ShinChan, Bubbles in Powerpuff Girls, Dora in Dora The Explorer, among others. 

When she started her YouTube channel five years ago, she initially featured other voice artistes in her videos. She resumed it as the podcast scene started growing in the country. 

The 33-year-old podcaster’s background as a voice artist is an influence on her as a podcaster as well. The same goes for her channel’s name. “I remember I was inspired by BB Ki Vines (a YouTube channel by Bhuvan Bam) and I also wanted something different that would describe my job. So the ‘motor mouth’ comes from the mouth that keeps on working like a motor,” she laughs. 

Kaushal has interviewed many YouTubers, voice and mimicry artistes, and actors. However, the podcast with Mithilesh Patankar and Urmila Lawekar of the Mythpat channel on YouTube stands out, receiving over 2.3 million views and counting. “Mythpat is a big YouTuber. He is a gamer and he has a huge fan following. Most of my subscribers had come to me for Doraemon or other voices and characters. But when I connected with Mythpat, a lot of new people discovered my channel. Mythpat also connected me to other popular YouTubers like Thugesh and SlayyPoint,” she says. 

Kaushal says she wants people to watch her podcast and take inspiration from them. “For instance, I spoke to Reem (Sameer Shaikh, TV actor) which went viral (over 1.2 million views) as she spoke about an accident that happened on the set and how she handled everything.” 

While her husband Utkarsh Bali manages the business, Kaushal focuses on the creative side. When asked about her dream podcast, she says it “has to be with my father (Sant Kumar Sharma) and my husband because my father is a very good motivational speaker”.

Anupam Gupta: CA shifting from mainstream career to content
@PaisaVaisa

While working in the stock market, Anupam Gupta, a chartered accountant by profession, was always fascinated by podcasts. As an investment research analyst and thematic research consultant, a lot of his time also went into writing—he would write stories related to the stock market as a career option. He even published a book with Saurabh Mukherjea titled The Victory Project: Six Steps to Peak Potential in 2020. That’s when, he says, the “shift happened from mainstream career to content”.

During the 2008 global financial crisis, Gupta would listen to the Planet Money podcast by National Public Radio (NPR), an American public broadcasting organisation. “I knew that something like this in India would work really well,” he tells FE, however, adding that back then he did not have the technical knowhow, money, investment and time to focus on it.”

Regarding Paisa Waisa, Gupta says the podcast was started “very randomly” in 2017. “At that time, the idea was to have bite-sized monologues on financial concepts like mutual fund, equity fund, small cap, mid cap, insurance and all that, and do it every alternate day,” he says. However, he “got bored” in three months and that’s when he introduced interviews. 

Gupta started the interview format with Mahavir Chopra, an insurance expert, keeping the duration of the podcasts to half an hour. But that changed with the “breakthrough episode” in 2019 with Morgan Housel, partner at The Collaborative Fund in the US and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal, when his podcasts became an hour long. “I would like to call it the ‘breakthrough episode’ because it got us our first sponsor,” says Gupta. 

Paisa Vaisa, produced by IVM podcasts, boasts over 4 million downloads over 450 episodes since it started in 2017, where Gupta speaks to subject matter experts from mutual funds, stocks, real estate, loans, education financing, and insurance. On Spotify, it features in the top three business and technology podcasts in India.

Gupta says there is a huge demand for content around personal finance, making smart decisions and improving lives. He says today’s podcasts are also video shows that are as good as watching a channel like CNBC. “There is a tremendous appetite for such content in India. Within that, there is self-help, and within that again, there is personal finance,” he adds.

Pooja Dhingra: Pastry chef keeps sugar in kitchen, out of conversation
@NoSugarCoat

Known for her macarons, pastry chef Pooja Dhingra of MasterChef India fame keeps “the sugar in the kitchen and out of the conversation” in her podcast NoSugarCoat. 

Dhingra, 37, is a familiar face in the Indian culinary space. Donning several hats as an entrepreneur and a chef, Dhingra is also making her mark in the audiovisual space of podcasts, bringing in guests who have been her mentors, people who have inspired her, her confidantes, and her contemporaries. “The people I pick are either those whom I know intimately and hope that our conversations will enlighten people to their struggles, or others I’m curious about and I want to know how they do what they do. Mostly, I try to focus on entrepreneurs or people in the food/ hospitality industry, as those are the fields I know the best,” says Dhingra, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris before attending a hospitality and management course at the César Ritz school in Le Bouveret, Switzerland.

Her NoSugarCoat show topped the Apple Podcasts charts in India for the first two weeks after its launch. It was also the top food podcast in India on Apple Podcasts during its season releases in 2018, 2021 and 2023, and the top food podcast in ten countries including Austria, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UAE and India. On Spotify, Dhingra’s show also features in the top 15 business podcasts in India. “Last season, the show crossed 500,000 listens overall with close to half of the contribution coming from season 3,” claims Dhingra, who opened her first macaron store in 2010 before creating the Le15 Patisserie brand in 2016. She forayed into podcasts in 2018, which was ideated in a “WhatsAspp chat with a radio friend of mine, Mae Thomas”, she adds.

NoSugarCoat was originally going to be the name of her sugarless cookbook but she chose it for the podcast instead. “It started out as an audio show, where I recorded the first season in my office (and kitchen) in the Cotton Press Mills Industrial Estate in Elphinstone, Mumbai. However, now, we’ve moved to make the show a video podcast from season 3,” she adds. 

For the time being, the podcast is on hold, with the last episode being uploaded in January last year with chef Ranveer Brar. “So right now, I don’t want the podcast to just be a side hustle, but a place where I get to explore the conversations I really want to have and do that more long-term. Right now, it’s ‘when I have time to do it, I do it’. However, I’m working to actually take NoSugarCoat into a new direction and maybe a new avatar. For now, it’s a mystery to me too, but I’m excited for the possibilities and opportunities for the next chapter of my podcast,” hopes Dhingra, who has about 7 million followers on Instagram.

Business of the spoken word

Just consider these figures. India, with its 57.6 million monthly listeners, is the third-largest podcast listening market in the world, next only to China and the US, as per a PwC report titled Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2020–2024. Also, according to Grand View Research, the Indian podcast market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31.9% to reach $3.27 billion by 2030. Another survey on podcast listening trends in India reveals that approximately 28% of Indians listen to podcasts once a day. Another 25% listen to it at least once a week.

The podcast business is booming in the country, and both platforms and podcasters are betting big on the popular digital audio-video format. Podcasts, both on the creation and listening sides, have been on a steady rise in India over the past few years. “There are several factors contributing to this optimistic future. Podcasts are becoming a versatile tool for knowledge, learning, and entertainment, and a platform for people to express themselves. Additionally, the increasing awareness of podcasts, a diverse range of compelling content, the convenience and accessibility offered by smartphones, and the expansion of local and regional content are contributing to the growth of podcasts,” says Unni Narayanan Nambudripad, podcast business lead at Spotify India. 

Last year, Spotify launched Spotify Audience Network in India—an audio-focused advertising platform—to offer brands in the country the chance to engage in audience-targeted podcast advertising. “Since 2019, more than 400 brands have advertised on the platform, ranging from consumer tech, to e-commerce and video OTT platforms,” adds Nambudripad. 

Spotify India has brands like Netflix, Amazon, MakeMyTrip, Mother Dairy, Samsung and Royal Enfield, among others, advertising on the platform. 

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Audible claims to have seen an increase in consumption of its audio content among Indian listeners in recent years. “We are still in the early stages of building the category, so what’s most important for us is that new or potential customers understand the category and the quality of content and type of service Audible provides,” says Shailesh Sawlani, country manager, India, Audible. The platform claims to have expanded its catalogue by 32% to over 480,000 titles at the moment. “This year, we have had some major launches like Marvel’s Wastelanders: Wolverine and Marvel’s Wastelanders: Doom headlined by celebrated actors along with a renowned ensemble cast,” adds Sawlani. 

While audio is central to podcasts, the visual aspect has also become equally important. “Podcasting is an evolving business. What started as an audio business has now evolved into a video business. Working closely with YouTube and other platforms means we need to evolve the models we have been working on,” says Amit Doshi, founder of IVM Podcasts, an Indian multi-lingual podcast network founded in 2015 that hosts a wide variety of podcasts, including Cyrus Says featuring Cyrus Broacha, Paisa Vaisa, A Century of Stories and A Century of Cricket, among others.

While platforms are tapping into the growing popularity of podcasts in the country, Indian podcasters are also utilising this as a business model and trying to monetise their long conversations with experts from different fields and those looking to build a brand. 

“I see podcasts as an opportunity for business owners, founders and experts from diverse fields to show their expertise to a billion people and attract the right kind of audience. I see myself as a facilitator who helps reach the right kind of experts to their audience and help them build a brand. This is a sort of business model—where we screen potential guests over months, ensuring they align with the values and impact we aim to create,” says podcaster, influencer and entrepreneur Raj Shamani, who recently hosted Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on his podcast Figuring Out. 

Platform revenue and brand partnerships are other ways of monetisation. “YouTube pays us a fee from the ad revenue for uploading on the platform. In the past, we have associated with brands like Mountain Dew and AJIO for partnerships as well,” says Viraj Sheth, co-founder of digital marketing company Monk Entertainment that manages BeerBiceps, the internet moniker and channel of digital content creator, entrepreneur and podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia.

Over the years, many podcasters are claiming their space, making it a bit crowded. What can set one apart from the others is curation other than the guest list. “I believe podcasts, which don’t have a differentiated positioning or guest list, will not survive for too long. Our growth strategy is to maintain our level of guest curation and keep our upload frequency consistent,” explains Sheth. 

Authors Nikesh Murali and Deepak Jayaraman feel podcasts accentuate their presence among the audience while helping them experiment with multimedia approaches. For instance, Murali, host of horror podcast Indian Noir that was ranked among the top five podcasts in India in Apple’s drama category, says his transition from writing to podcasting was driven by the realisation that the medium of audio storytelling allows for a more intimate connection with the audience. “Horror, in particular, is the most effective when consumed through audio, as it engages the imagination and amplifies fear through the shadows of the mind. Podcasting also offered a more accessible platform to reach a global audience compared to traditional publishing,” he tells FE. 

While Murali concedes that the ROI from podcasts has been better as compared to books, he laments at the lack of a podcast audio ad ecosystem in India and sponsorships for niche genres like horror which “severely impacts revenue”. 

“The good old days of exclusivity deals are over. Book publishing revenues have been on the decline for years. So they are both in the same basket. Broke podcasters, broke writers,” he quips. 

To monetise his podcasts, Murali says he has closed the free edition of Indian Noir that is now exclusive to patreon.com, a website where content creators can turn their work into businesses, from January 1. “If people want to continue listening then they need to go to Patreon and subscribe to listen on Spotify via the private research feed,” says Murali, who works as a policy advisor in the future transport technology sector in Sydney, Australia. “I am glad I have a day job that lets me indulge in my passion for audio storytelling,” he comments. 

Meanwhile, Jayaraman, who worked with companies like KPMG Consulting, UK, McKinsey US and EgonZehnder India, before stepping out on his own in February 2016, says: “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend the money to make videos. Audio seemed to provide the incremental intimacy without significant additional costs. That got me started on a learning journey which took the shape of my Play to Potential podcast in late 2016. This was long before podcasting became a thing in India.” 

Jayaraman’s podcast boasts 1.5 million listens and downloads across various platforms. Apple Podcasts has 168 ratings with an average of 4.9 out of 5; while Spotify has 96 reviews with a score of 4.9/5. His growth strategy for his podcasts is ‘think global, act local’ and has curated a mixed guest list that includes some of the leading Indian minds like  VishwanathanAnand, Ram Guha, and Nandan Nilekani, among others. 

Jayaraman’s new book, named after his podcast Play to Potential, has a multimedia approach where he has connected the nuggets from his podcast to the readers. “In the written chapter, wherever there is a certain insight, say from grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand, that’s made available using a QR code in the book,” he adds.