Excavating a Brand
TigerBites #3
If you spend enough time foraging through the sub-genre of newsletters and podcasts devoted to the labour of writing online, at some point you might come across a set of quotes by Michelangelo, one of history’s most formidable artists:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”.
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”.
Certified bangers, both of them. If there was a Hall of Fame for quotes, Michelangelo would probably own considerable real estate in some bedazzled corridor off of those two smash hits alone.
You can immediately understand why creators (and curators) of all shapes and sizes would gravitate to the wisdom contained in those words. To Michelangelo, perhaps counter-intuitively, the job of the artist was to unveil rather than construct. It was about stripping away everything that didn’t fit his vision, leaving behind only the material that did.
I think about brand building the same way.
When we started Tigerfeathers in mid-2020, we were essentially confronting a big block of marble that could have been carved in an infinite number of different ways. At the time we weren’t looking at meticulously piecing together a specific brand identity. We just wanted a permanent address where we could house our writing on the Internet. We had the tools, but no real plan of attack.
Back then our main objective was to validate our theses on whether:
- content creation was an effective mechanism for nurturing professional leverage
- companies in the digital age could be built ‘audience-first’ instead of ‘product-first’
- an independent newsletter could be scaled into a sustainable business
- amateur writers could find success on Substack
That gave us a fairly broad mandate on the kind of content we could publish. In two and a half years, we’ve now written stories on:
Indian startups with lofty ambitions, like Polygon, Mudrex, Juno, and Pepper Content
Trending tech verticals like the Direct-To-Consumer space, the history of Crypto in India, the future of digital lending, or the Business of Diagnostics
The fundamentals of Crypto/Web3, including deep dives on Bitcoin, NFTs, Crypto wallets, and the Metaverse
Thought experiments around Emergency Healthcare and Internet Careers
Deep dives on India’s groundbreaking efforts to build public digital infrastructure like India Stack, UPI, OCEN and DEPA
…among others.
We’ve alternated between ‘serious’ scholarly prose, and a more playful meme-friendly style. We’ve done 20000-word epics as well as shorter, punchier essays. We have pieces that have been read less than 2000 times, and many that have racked up tens of thousands of views from people all over the world.
I still don’t know if we have a business on our hands, but we do have what the kids these days refer to as ‘data’. From our experience so far, we know that:
- there’s a keen interest in the Indian tech ecosystem from investors, founders, and operators around the world
- our audience is less excited about hearing our views on global tech developments, and more attentive when we highlight trends, companies, and stories from India
- even in the age of short-form-everything, there’s still an appetite for long-form essays that are well written, deeply researched, and entertaining to read
- a single well-forged piece of content can be a potent resource in the Internet age; like a digital missionary that can be called upon to solve a number of different problems; like a precious resource that can be mined again and again and again
These insights might morph as our sample size grows, but for now we have an idea of who our audience is and what they want from us. We have a better picture of what the Tigerfeathers brand is, and more importantly, what it isn’t.
And so the marble starts to look less like a block and more like a sculpture.
In 2023, the ‘market’ for newsletters is different from what it was in mid-2020. For one, people aren’t stuck at home with endless time to read. And two, we’ve officially entered the age of AI-assisted content, which means the Internet is about to be flooded with an endless sea of commoditised media that’s been vomited out by applications like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and others.
The bar for good content is significantly higher. For us to ‘make it’, the Tigerfeathers brand needs to stand out on the Internet, and also amidst the landscape of Indian tech publications. I think we can.
Going forward, it makes sense to double down on what makes us unique, like:
- creating content that you can definitively tell was written by humans, for humans
- stories about India, and particularly about the people, products and ideas that will define the future of Indian tech
- writing that is equal parts entertaining and informative (i.e. we want to make our readers laugh)
- writing that is infused with genuine passion and curiosity for the subject matter (like crypto, Indian entrepreneurship, the creator economy, and AI)
For now, the goal is to become the gold standard for writing and storytelling in the Indian startup ecosystem. Hopefully that opens the door to other cool ways to extend the brand.
I can’t say for sure what the final destination of this newsletter will be - whether it continues to serve as a distribution channel for our content, or maybe for some unrelated future product or service (or as an advertising route for someone else’s product or service).
But we know that each of those routes opens up only if we continue to put in the work, only if we maintain quality over a long enough time period.
For most of the last three years, it’s felt like we’ve had a newsletter. Now it feels like we have a brand. Or at least the start of one.
Piece by piece we’re iterating our way to figuring out what Tigerfeathers can be, getting closer to finding the angel in the marble.
BANGER