Kahaaniyon Ki Dukaan!

Spread the love

Story at a Glance

Company Name	WYN Studio
Founders	Bijay Gautam and Souniya Khurana
Website Url	https://wyn.studio/
Year of Establishment	2019
Industry Type	Media Company
Funding Raised in 2023	Initial seed round of INR 2 crore

Founder Bijay Gautam — **Co-Founder & CEO**
**Bijay Gautam**

Co-Founder & CEO
Souniya Khurana — **Co-Founder & CEO**
**Souniya Khurana**

Table of Contents

When and how did you start?

WYN Studio was born in the lap of the Himalayas in July 2019 at Satkhol. What started as a conversation on the concluding day of the Himalayan Podcasting Retreat between the host Bijay Gautam and participant Souniya Khurana formalized into a venture in September 2019.

How did you come up with the idea? Your inspirational moment

Our founders met at a time when both were on an exploratory journey to figure out what was next for them.
Where Bijay had quit his role as a Research Scientist in a leading pharma company, Souniya had in the past failed at building her first startup Karigar Konnect and was actively engaged in building a startup ecosystem and communities in Bharat with interventions in tier 2/3/4 cities like Jalgaon, Akola, Nasik, Marcela, Bicholim, Imphal, Amritsar, Indore, Bhopal, Baroda, Surat, & many more.

In the pursuit of answering ‘What’s next?’ Bijay chose to speak with personalities who had figured out their journey in life and uncover what inspired them through their peaks and valleys, kickstarting one of India’s longest-running podcasts, The Inspiring Talks, with 160 episodes now and a growing listener base of 50 Million+ globally.

Being one of the earliest podcasters, Bijay took this as an opportunity to share his learnings with others eager to explore the slowly growing world of podcasting.

And Souniya, in her first failed entrepreneurial stint and then while building founder communities, realized the importance of building narratives for brands for them to be compelling and engaging for the audience.

It was the culmination of their personal experiences that led both Bijay and Souniya to arrive at the most important question for every brand, “Kahaani Kya Hai?” which literally translated into “What’s Your Narrative?” and turning that into an acronym WYN.

Brief about the organization and founding members

We are WYN Studio, an award-winning new-age creative content studio! We are on a mission to enable brands to leverage the power of immersive, new-age, original, interactive content and storytelling not just to build an audience but create cults! Wyn Studio Co-founded by Bijay Gautam and Souniya Khurana in 2019.

The detailed journey, like what all you want to share with readers.

With Bijay’s strength in the podcast medium, his process-driven approach, and Souniya’s belief in the power of storytelling coupled with her decade-long experience in business development, it was a partnership with complementing strengths.
As pre-pandemic babies, as we call ourselves, we were excited when brands gave us an ear as we pitched the idea of building branded podcasts.

Hiring their first team member in November 2019 and working out of a friend’s bare-shell office space, they kicked off their journey in a frugal setup, mostly cycling to the office.

Onboarding their first client with HP and then beginning post-production for Prime Venture Partners, WYN hit it off by delivering great quality work and brand storytelling.

As confidence grew and more brands were eager to look at the prospect of including podcasts in their marketing mix, the founders, while still bootstrapped, decided to take the leap and move to a known co-working space in March 2020.

The joy of moving to a new office was short-lived as the pandemic-induced lockdown cut short not only working from the office but also left the team worried as brands stopped responding, having shelved marketing and advertising budgets.

Being entrepreneurs, giving up wasn’t an option, and the team had to decide on the path forward.

Then began WYN’s journey of building original podcast IPs like Can Inspire, Stuff Tales, Heirs of the Pandavas, Practically Gita, Kya Swaad Hai, etc.

What worried most brands turned out to be a blessing for WYN as the audience, fatigued by visual content, started discovering podcasts. The growing demand for rich and compelling storytelling in audio helped the shows get great traction. All the shows started to top charts and lead categories on platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Gaana, JioSaavn, etc.

One of India’s few mythological contemporary fictional shows, ‘Heirs of the Pandavas,’ co-created with a known name in the podcasting ecosystem, Nikesh Murali, won the very respected Golden Crane Award.

With a stellar portfolio of highly performing shows, WYN Studio became a respectable name in the Indian and global Podcasting industries.

As the markets slowly started to open up, more brands started indicating their interest in leveraging the power of audio. Which eventually paved the way for the team to win the trust of brands like Binance, Mamaearth, Naukri.com, Unitus VC, Pearl Academy, UPES, Amazon, Times Of India, 1Finance, Grip Invest, uEngage, Naturik Co, Success Gyan, Internet Moguls, Shayamal Vallabhjee, India Network, and the list continues to sizzle.

Currently, with a mad-hatter team of 20 creative folks, WYN has not only created high-performing podcasts, but also brand anthems, creator-led campaigns, interactive digital magazines, snackable video reel content for social media, and a lot more.

About funding, plans on growth.

With an initial seed round of INR 2 Cr. raised from angel investors like Rahul Narvekar, Pranay Anthwal, Narendra Firodia, and Sanjeev Sinha, the venture has been growing steadily and will soon be raising another round for an exciting development in the content space that is under works.

As we love saying “Kahaaniyon se pyaar hai, Kahaaniyon ka vyapaar hai!”

Your hook-up point, if any (something unexceptional you have done for your startup)

There was a time when the team felt a lack of excitingly creative projects, as most of the projects were similar in nature. It was at this time that the team delved into the idea of creating a song in-house, which eventually became a completely in-house production of the “Crypto Rap Anthem” that was much-liked by Binance, our existing client, and they then commissioned the same.