Building a Micro-Drama Giant — A Conversation with Kuku’s Founder

Second Thoughts is our ongoing series where we sit down with founders who are playing the long game, builders who are shaping categories, not just companies. In Episode 2, we spoke with Vinod Kumar Meena, the co-founder of Kuku, a fast-growing micro-drama platform, about the changing physics of attention, what scale really means in content, and why creativity at volume is ultimately a data problem.

The big idea: What call centers did for services, micro-content will do for India’s creative exports.

Meena’s central thesis is both simple and sweeping: India is on the cusp of exporting content at global scale, much the way it exported services through call centers two decades ago. His logic follows a clear progression.

Every new medium reshapes human behavior. As viewing habits moved from theaters to television to OTT and now to phones, attention spans compressed and content cycles accelerated. The modern audience consumes faster, scrolls sooner, and expects stories that adapt to their rhythm. Micro-dramas, short episodes of just a few minutes, with entire arcs completed in around two hours, fit this mobile era perfectly.

Across every new medium, the same evolution unfolds. First, user-generated content pioneers the format; then professional creators refine and scale it. Short video platforms were the first to establish this playbook. Micro-drama represents the next structured leap, a format where storytelling sophistication meets production velocity.

And crucially, language gives India a natural advantage. With a large bilingual workforce fluent in both local and global idioms, India is uniquely positioned to produce content that travels. “We’re good at being bilingual,” Meena says, noting how that multiplies export potential. His conviction is clear: “What happened in call centers will happen in content. We’ll have a huge distribution of creative output going from India to the rest of the world.”

The attention economy has new physics

A crisp history lesson: theaters optimised for 3-4 hour films; TV fragmented attention and sped up pacing; OTT compressed episodes to 20-45 minutes and enabled niche audiences. Mobile took it further, your finger is “one centimetre away” from switching.

That proximity changes everything. It makes fast hooks mandatory and constant novelty non-negotiable. Each episode must land its premise within seconds, and entire storylines must resolve before fatigue sets in.

In this environment, supply becomes the true moat. When switching costs are near zero, the platform that can deliver a steady stream of fresh, engaging content holds user attention the longest. People often attribute platform dominance to algorithms or star titles, but in practice, scale of supply equals share of time. Historically, the players that achieve production scale first tend to define the category.

Scale, not just hits: Creativity at volume is a data problem

Kuku’s answer to the perennial “gut vs. data” debate is pragmatic. Meena sees creative success as a probability game, one where the law of large numbers is a friend. “If you make a hundred shows, ten or twenty will break through,” he says. You don’t predict hits; you produce enough to discover them.

This philosophy reframes how creative output is built. In-house teams can cultivate taste and editorial discipline, but there’s a ceiling to intuition. To scale creativity, you need to mobilize hundreds of creators and let data identify what connects. Each performance data point, including viewer drop-off rates, engagement peaks, and genre resonance, feeds into the next production cycle. Data doesn’t replace creativity; it multiplies its odds of success.

“At scale,” Meena says, “creativity is a data call. You produce more, and the winners emerge. The moat is the capacity to create and learn fast.”

The consumer has matured: “People know you pay for premium content”

Contrary to the pessimism that often colors discussions around digital monetization, Meena insists that willingness to pay is real. Piracy has sharply declined, and impulse subscriptions have turned into habits. With payment infrastructure like UPI and widespread low-cost data, the barriers to trying and paying for content have nearly vanished.

Kuku’s paying user base reflects this mainstream shift. Nearly 70% of its paying users come from metros and Tier-I and Tier-II cities, the same segments driving India’s digital payment revolution. “Even college kids don’t pirate the way we used to,” Meena says. “They have Netflix and Prime because price points fell and paying got easy.” The cultural shift from “free entertainment” to “fair value” is now well underway.

Micro-drama vs OTT: Different jobs, different supply

OTT remains a hero-content business: a game of big tentpoles, limited releases, and appointment viewing. Micro-drama, by contrast, is habit content: fast, serialized, and designed for daily consumption.

That distinction changes the economics entirely. Mobile users open entertainment apps multiple times a day, expecting something new each time. “You can’t drop one show a week and keep a daily audience,” Meena explains. To sustain engagement, Kuku targets a 10–50x content volume compared to a typical OTT slate, sometimes even 100x at scale.

The reason is simple: on mobile, time spent is abundant. Users can spend more than four hours a day on their phones, and platforms that serve this super-user segment build durable habits. “What a big OTT player produces in a year, we need that per month,” he says. “The volume math is just different.”

Category benchmarks and where India could land

When asked about benchmarks, Meena points east and west. In China, leading micro-drama platforms are already projected to generate revenues exceeding the entire cinema industry, proving that structured short-form storytelling can achieve category-level scale. In the US, dozens of micro-drama startups are vying for dominance, but leadership is consolidating around those with deep supply pipelines and audience data.

India, he believes, is poised for its breakout moment. Content revenues in most countries track per-capita income, but India’s population scale and payment rails create a unique multiplier. As incomes rise and digital behavior matures, he expects India’s micro-drama industry to reach multi-billion-dollar scale, even outpacing some traditional film segments in the years ahead.

Profitability, discipline, and the “growth at any cost” myth

Kuku’s operating philosophy is built on realism, not hypergrowth. Meena calls profitability a design choice, not a byproduct. Content costs don’t rise linearly; they step up as capacity expands. Scaling without payback logic, he warns, is a trap.

That philosophy extends to organization design. Right-sized teams outperform bloated org charts. “India isn’t Silicon Valley,” he says. Copy-pasting Valley-style structures, especially at the growth stage, only slows decision-making and burns the runway. Over time, Kuku also learned that consensus-based decisions create inertia. The company moved to clear veto rights and simplified decision lines, ensuring that speed and accountability remain intact.

“Being logical, we ran decisions like a democracy. Big mistake,” Meena admits. “You need a single decision-maker with veto or you stall.”

AI and the output frontier

In Kuku’s hands, AI isn’t a PR tool; it’s a throughput amplifier. Automation now accelerates scripting, editing, and post-production, giving creators leverage over time. “What someone did in a week, they now do in a day,” Meena notes. The productivity boost is especially visible among top performers, whose output has multiplied without expanding headcount.

Interestingly, Meena sees India’s creative bottlenecks not in talent but in infrastructure and capital, from studio sets to camera capacity. “We have enough creative manpower,” he says. “Money and systems unlock the rest.” In that sense, AI is less about replacing creators and more about scaling the supply curve without losing creative quality.

ESOPs, liquidity, and a culture of wealth creation

Ownership runs deep at Kuku. The company has implemented broad-based ESOPs, ensuring that most team members share in the company’s long-term value creation. Many employees have even chosen to convert cash bonuses into equity, a powerful signal of belief.

Equally important is the company’s approach to liquidity. Kuku plans to offer recurring secondary windows, allowing employees and early investors to realize partial value over time instead of waiting for an IPO. This kind of responsible liquidity culture is slowly reshaping how Indian startups think about wealth creation and retention. “We want people to work hard now,” Meena says, “and build wealth that endures, even after they move on.”

What’s working with audiences right now?

Trends evolve fast, but he shares a current hit: a contract-marriage micro-drama, a theme that “taps a hidden desire” and is performing across cohorts. The larger point: genre diversity unlocks new audiences. As the platform experiments, new segments arrive just like TV channels brought distinct TGs (soap operas, kids, business news) to cable.

The founder’s two “second thoughts” that changed everything

Every Second Thoughts episode ends with a question: what moment of reconsideration changed everything? For Meena, there were two.

The first was dissolving the big core committee. Too many decision-makers were slowing execution, so the company shifted to a system with clear ownership and veto authority. The result was instant: speed, clarity, and momentum.

The second was creating founder-led offshoots. After years of tight focus on one product, empowering a founder to build a new business line independently, such as Kuku TV, unlocked disproportionate growth. Autonomy, not centralization, became the new growth engine. Both shifts were deceptively simple, but they transformed Kuku’s organizational rhythm and resilience.

Our Take

Kuku’s story is a study in operational realism. The company is not chasing hot takes about “the algorithm”; it is engineering the supply moat needed to win the mobile minute. That means industrial-scale production, ruthless decision hygiene, and a financing model that respects payback with AI as a throughput amplifier, not a press release.

The more interesting macro is India’s role in the next content epoch. If the thesis holds and the structural advantages such as payments ubiquity, bilingual talent, and mobile-native formats pay off, India won’t just be a content consumer; it will be a content exporter at scale. And if founders keep pairing meritocratic cultures with repeatable creative systems, we may see something rarer: creative industries built like high-throughput, data-literate businesses—without losing the art.

Brand Manager

Aayushi Thakur

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who is Vinod Kumar Meena, and what is Kuku?

A: Vinod Kumar Meena is the co-founder of Kuku, one of India’s fastest-growing micro-drama platforms. Kuku specializes in short, serialised content created for mobile-first audiences with limited attention spans and high engagement frequency.

Q: What is the concept behind micro-drama, and why is it gaining traction?

A: Micro-drama is a structured evolution of short-form content with brief episodes of a few minutes each that complete a full narrative arc in roughly two hours. As viewing habits have moved from theatres to TV to OTT and now to mobile, attention spans have shrunk and content cycles have accelerated. Micro-drama fits perfectly into this new consumption pattern.

Q: How are Indian consumers changing in their willingness to pay for digital content?

A: Kuku’s experience reflects a broader truth: Indian consumers have matured. Piracy has declined sharply, and thanks to UPI and low-cost internet access, frictionless micro-payments and subscriptions have become mainstream.

Q: What global benchmarks guide Kuku’s growth outlook?

A: Kuku looks to China and the United States as category benchmarks. In China, leading micro-drama platforms are already projected to out-earn the national cinema industry, proving the economic scale of the category. In the US, dozens of micro-drama platforms are emerging, and leadership is consolidating around those with the largest content libraries. Meena believes India’s opportunity is even greater: with a massive bilingual workforce, deep mobile penetration, and frictionless payments, India could build a multi-billion-dollar micro-drama economy over the next decade.

Q: What “second thoughts” shaped Kuku’s journey the most?

A: Vinod Kumar Meena highlights two pivotal decisions that changed everything. First, dissolving a large core committee in favor of clear decision ownership dramatically improved speed and accountability. Second, creating founder-led offshoots like Kuku TV empowered new leaders to build independent product lines while maintaining shared vision.

Sources

Youtube