Why did I decide to build Sutradhar?

I started working on building my start-up Sutradhar almost a year back. Not a single day has passed when people have not asked me, “why I chose to create Sutradhar and not some fintech?” Not an unexpected question, considering I have been a part of banking and fintech ecosystem in varying capacity for good 15 years.

When I decided to start my entrepreneurial journey, building a fintech was the first thought that crossed my find. I brainstormed multiple Fintech ideas with potential co-founders and investors. I almost zeroed in on an idea, which had few supporters, but then something happened.

I always wanted to be a storyteller, having written my first play when I was 10 years old. I never stopped writing since then. Somewhere along the way I even wrote screenplays, hoping that some day movies will be made on my stories.

This was an opportunity to work on something that would bring real joy to me, something that I wanted to do and I decided to grab this opportunity. People who know me well enough can tell you about my love to History and Mythology. So somehow building Sutradhar started to look like a much better thing to do than building a Fintech.

As any entrepreneur would tell you, the first successful pitch you make for your start-up is usually to your co-founder. If you can manage to find someone else who believes in your idea so much that he is ready to take the same risks you are taking to make it work, you have won your first battle. So, I made a call to my friend for 18 years and told him what I wanted to build. It’s the same person who had passed on multiple pitches from my side in the past. This time it took around ten minutes and he was on board. In fact being someone who has been tracking consumer internet and commerce space for many years, he pointed out the massive business opportunity that can be captured by introducing community and commerce.

Thus, started the journey to build Sutradhar, first of its kind platform dedicated for stories from ancient Indian literature.

One of the most important thing that separates humans from other species and can be held responsible of our survival and dominance is our ability of construct stories. Stories are powerful and has been used to make or break civilizations across generations.

We are world’s oldest surviving civilization and by virtue of that, we also have an extremely rich repository of stories which have been passed on across many generations. These stories have defined every aspect of our lives right from the words we use to festivals we celebrate. Even things we do in our day-today lives can find their roots in these stories.

Do you know why earth is called Prithvi? Did you know that time taken to blink is called Nimish? Did you know that the red light in the sky just before sunrise is called Arunima? Why do we celebrate Dhanteras? What is the story behind Kumbh mela? Why Godavari river is called Ganga of the south?

There are millions of such questions with millions of stories. These stories are key to our cultural heritage and they must be told to everyone. That is the objective I had in mind when I decided to build Sutradhar instead of building a Fintech.

I hope with blessings from everyone we will succeed in our objective. You can download our app by clicking here. The app is currently for Android users only, iPhone user can watch some of our stories through our website or youtube channel.