Fresh Off The Press: Presenting Blume’s Maiden Book “Narrowcast”

(nar-oh-kast,-kahst)

A narrowcast or narrowcasting is the process of disseminating specific topics of information to a sharply defined audience.

Why do we love podcasts?

In addition to being quality content, podcasts play an outsized role in knowledge dissemination. In the startup/venture world, time is short and it is difficult for many founders and investors to take time out of their schedules and put their thoughts together. It takes three to six hours to write a decent piece, more if you are writing one with a lot of analyses. But podcasts allow them to spend an hour and share their best ideas and learnings. This is different from say, an industry like hospitality or transportation, where the written word dominates, e.g., essays in their trade magazines or reports. And that is what makes the startup/venture world different when it comes to podcasts.

Also, our startup world doesn’t have the equivalent of a HBR or high-quality trade magazines, which distill and showcase the best content/frameworks. But it is a fast-moving space. Learning is accelerated here. Startup playbooks are developing and evolving all the time. And given the time pressures of writing, a lot of the knowledge and insights are getting captured in the podcasts instead.

Hence podcasts matter. At Blume, podcasts hold a special place in the team’s heart. Our team loves consuming well-thought-out and well-curated content.

From a newsletter to a book

In 2020, Sajith Pai got together with a group of team members for an in-house project. Once a week, they would meet and listen to podcasts about the ecosystem and pick each others’ brains. From these conversations, they would distill learnings that we would then share internally, at first, and to the outside world later. This project lasted a few months but seeded the idea of something much bigger.

Introducing Narrowcast

We are proud to present Narrowcast — a collection of podcasts from the Indian startup ecosystem.

For the first edition, we asked podcasters from the country to share their favorite episodes with us so we could bring them together in a single place. We see this as the equivalent of Now Music CDs, bringing you the best podcasts of the year.

The initiative aims to not only highlight the thriving podcast community in India but also lay out the stepping stones for embarking on an entrepreneurial journey. From Abhiraj Bhal, Co-founder & CEO of The Urban Company to Anirudh Sharma, Co-founder & CEO of Digantara, for the first edition of Narrowcast, we requested podcasters to share their most memorable conversations with us from 2021 packed with learnings on growth hacking, culture building, personal growth, building in new sectors, fundraising and more.

The first edition of Narrowcast features episodes from Indian Silicon Valley, The VCpreneuer, StoryRules Podcast, 100x Entrepreneur, Summit Series by Elevation Capital, Use Case, Startup Operator, Maharajas of Scale, NewSpace India and SaaS Sessions.

Narrowcast is available on Amazon. The proceeds from the sale of this book will go to The Anubis Tiger Foundation, an animal rescue and rehabilitation organization in Mumbai.