Business Munchies: Regional Newsletters, Plant Based Foods, PE Fund for Regional Profitable Businesses

The Indian Dream

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) announce a new Referral Reward - you can be invited onto this podcast if you get enough referrals to our newsletter. Here's the link that you can use to generate your referral code!
(0:00) - Referral Campaign Thanks
(0:45) - Decentraland
(3:20) - Regional Newsletters - The New Tropic
(14:52) - The rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages
(21:00) - PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies
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1. Decentraland - A new virtual world that's combining two hot topics: NFT's & the Metaverse. You can buy pieces of land in the game that are permanently yours using NFT's and then you can use that land to showcase everything else you've bought on the metaverse like your Gucci bags or whatever else. This is the direction of the future and we should keep our eyes on it.
2. Regional and Niche Newsletters - First saw this as a Tweet by Tanvi Dessai. Regional Newsletters are basically a digital version of something that's existed for centuries - local newspapers. People always want to know what's going on in our surrounding areas and there's no reason why this can't go digital. The New Tropic does $1.5 million in ad revenue just by focusing on Miami - it's now branched out to several other smaller cities in the US. There's no reason to just bifurcate by region - you can also do it by topic. One WhatsApp newsletter charges Rs. 11,000 per year for giving daily commodity prices updates on commodities not easily found in the exchanges. Another idea is to take Business Updates (government mandates, commodity prices, etc.) and just simplify it without any Business Gossip (who raised how much, etc.).
3. The Rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages - Amul placed a full page ad in several leading newspaper about the Myths & Facts of Plant Based Milks/Beverages. This move by Amul is an indication of the rise of Plant Based products in general such as meat alternatives, plant milks, Tofu, Tempeh, etc. Plant based milks already do about 150 - 200 crores of revenue in India and one of our community members also launched a brand called Oat MLK (please support him). Another community member is building Better - an amazing vegan food company - I highly recommend their spreads.This is a huge topic that we'll cover in a future trends series.
4. PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies - My favourite idea from this episode. Siddharth met a CA who invested early in several regional snack brands (like Bikaji, Yellow Diamond, etc.) and helped them professionalise and expand their reach. He is now set to make a bonanza as all these snack brands have matured and are planning IPO's. A PE fund can be built to focus on a particular sector (snack brands, industrial products, ice creams, whatever else) and tries to find regional players throughout India and help them scale up.