How This Fashion and Lifestyle Enthusiast Coded her Future Into Curating Content For Bollywood News

NANDINI SHENOY (37), FOUNDER, PINKVILLA

For Mangalore girl, who worked her way up as Microsoft's engineer in the US, no access to Bollywood gossip just because she moved to another country, was unacceptable. Needless to say, the 2000s weren't the days of digital media either. Most consumption of news and entertainment content was done via newspapers, magazines and coffee table books. It was then that Shenoy decided she needed access to Bollywood content, even if it meant creating a platform herself and thus was born one of the most popular Bollywood news websites Pinkvilla. It took Shenoy six months to create a user-generated content website where anyone could post. Her eureka moment came when in 2009 some photos of actor Sonam Kapoor that were posted on Pinkvilla went viral. Since then the website has had no looking back. "I quit my job in 2010 and focused on the website. Production houses started reaching out to us for advertisements. So, we have been selffunded and profitable," says Shenoy.

Shenoy is now determined to keep evolving with Google's changing algorithms. "Being from the tech background, I know that if the content works and the search engine optimization doesn't, the website can't work. If Google and other technology platforms don't understand Pinkvilla's content, it will go nowhere," she adds.

Shenoy curates right set of products to the right pieces of content using computer vision and other machine learning algorithms. She believes having the right people is paramount. "If you don't have the right people, you end up concentrating on what's not really relevant," asserts Shenoy, who co-founded the company with her husband Jeu George working with Netflix in the US.

CONTENT MASTER

LAUNCH: December 2007 in Mumbai

NO. OF PAGE VIEWS: 40m per month from 7m unique visitors

TURNOVER: $1m

HEADCOUNT: 35

TOTAL INVESTMENT: Bootstrapped