Krishna Kumar, Group Editor, Dare

Krishna Kumar, Group Editor, Dare, has been with the CyberMedia Group, publishers of the magazine, for 10 years. Prior to this he was with Venkateshwara Hatcheries as Manager-Coordination in the Chairman’s office.

A B.Tech in Civil Engineering and an MBA, Kumar has spent a significant part of his career in project management and IT, and hence, doesn’t’ consider himself ‘technically speaking’, a ‘journalist’.

During his career, Kumar confesses to have done some ‘crazy things’ such as identifying and buying aircraft, project management for Asia’s largest poultry farm, and setting up India’s first vendor-neutral IT test facility, among others.

In conversation with exchange4media’s Abhijeet Mukherjee, Kumar speaks about Dare and his plans for the magazine. Excerpts.

Q. How has the magazine’s performance been so far? How many copies were sold in the first issue? It is ahead of our subscriptions target, ahead of the print targets. I do not want to put any numbers.

Q. Dare is a new kind of magazine. Who is your TG? What type of specific needs will Dare fulfill?

Dare’s TG is fairly widespread – firstly, anyone who is interested in starting a new venture of his own, for example a floriculture business or even teaching like online tutorial business. We are not looking at the ‘paanwallas’ or the ‘doodhwallas’. We are looking at businesses that have the capability to scale up to Rs 100 crore in five years. Secondly, those who have businesses of Rs 100 crore and want to take their businesses to the next level. Thirdly, people who work in large organisations, who are independent and have a lot of freedom to operate and who are looking for innovations to build a brand. So, we have three types of reader groups. An interesting thing came up when we spoke to a number of people. We came to know that there were some successful businessmen who had the financial resources and wanted to find out new ideas where they could invest in. We are trying to explore innovative ideas that people normally do not think about.

We speak about business environment like government policies, bank funding, and bank credit. We also look into things like logistics, marketing, branding and providing big office spaces. At some suitable point of time we would also look at connecting entrepreneurs to the ecosystem, which might mean connecting entrepreneurs to logistics to funding to IT services, etc.

Q. Is there any foreign counterpart who is coming up with similar international titles? We did a lot of research before we started this. There is a magazine in the US which does this for extremely small shops – what we call mom and pop shops – like how to run a cake business from home or how to make business cards and sell that. But the scale at which we are doing has not been done by anyone else.

Q. What role would the website play since the online edition is subscription based? Right now, our website is looking only at the subscription part of it. The actual website is under construction. We have built a very interactive business model and plan to provide resources like databases on funding agencies, quality marking agencies, where to file taxes, etc. We would take care of this ecosystem part of business. There are no inventory issues in online. Over a period of time we plan to build a strong community online, which would come up early in 2008.

Q. A number of premiere business schools are associated with Dare. What role are they playing? We have tied up with INSEAD, an international business school that gives us access to INSEAD professionals and content exclusively created for us. INSEAD can also use our content in their teaching. This apart, we have a tie-up with NEN that I had spoken about earlier in the interview. We are in the process of have more such partnership deals.

Q. How will Dare make a mark in the crowded magazine market when content is getting more specific? You have a magazine dedicated to hair, to dog, to interiors, to cars...

When we set up this project, we discussed how we would measure success. We had said that if we are able to influence even one person to make a leap that would be great, and there is not any typical measure of success anyways. We have definitions of success like if we are able to move people or if we are able to bring in changes in people, we have succeeded. We have enough proof in terms of the feedbacks where people have said that. After reading the first issue of Dare we had one person giving up his job to start a new business, issue two had a letter from the publisher of the largest selling Tamil newspaper that said ‘I would pay for the subscription’. Issue two also had a man from Kerala saying ‘I want to tie up with you to start a business’. That is our internal measure of success, something that can’t be put in terms of money.

That said, we also have in mind our stakeholders, staff, etc. and we have a certain kind of measure. One measure is of course the number of copies read and sold. We also have a target per month. We increase our number of copies by certain numbers every month because of increasing demand. Another measure would be when our readership would be surveyed, that would tell us how many readers we have. Thirdly, how many influential people we have reached, and finally how many of our target readers we have reached.

Q. Finally, what is the strategy for success for an upcoming magazine? There are many magazines out there and if you look at a typical newsstand, the magazines are piled up one on top of the other. So, the key question was how do we survive in such a market? Different magazines have different methods, some opt for the advertising route, some go for the POP route. Ultimately, the bottomline is that there are two things that decide success – somebody has to come and ask for the magazine by name; secondly, when someone asks for us, we have to be there. We do not know where our readers would ask for the magazine – it could be anywhere – and we have to be there. These are the two things that for me are the strategies for success. Our focus is that in the launch phase we are not asking for too much of advertising because our focus is on the two things mentioned above.

Q. What is the content of Dare and how is it different from other business magazines? A typical business magazine is about news makers and news. For instance, Arcelor being bought by Mittal is big business and hence news; Tata planning to make a hydrogen car is big business news. This is what most typical business magazines cover. However, we are looking at newsmakers of tomorrow, which means that if Tatas are coming out with hydrogen cars, what business opportunities does it offer you? While other business magazines are looking at business as news, we are looking at how to do business.

Q. With the growing popularity and usage of the Internet and the television media, will your target audience devote the time to read the magazine?

What do television and Internet give? Internet gives us news, and what does TV gives us? It gives news and entertainment, but when you need analysis and when you want to think about it you do not watch TV. You fall back on magazines. We do not carry news. If you are in the process of setting up a business and you want funding, you have to read our magazine to figure out where exactly you need to go. Similarly, say you have an established business and you are looking for an idea, we would provide you ideas that TV can’t provide, because you need to understand certain things and get to understand the maths. The maths is provided in our magazine that perhaps could be done online, which we are planning to do, but the first thing you would like to look into is print.

You may say that television also provides analysis these days, but look at it this way – suppose a TV channel is airing an interview with someone who is in the floriculture business. I am sitting on my couch, watching TV, but I miss the programme because I am watching some other channel. In that case, my chances of viewing the programme are gone. This does not happen in a magazine.

Secondly, at the time of watching the programme I might not be interested in floriculture, but a month later I am. So, where do I get the information? Thirdly, five minutes later I have a question, how do I get back to the businessman interviewed on the channel and get the answer? In a magazine you do not miss the story, there is an archival value. You can get back to us through the SMS service and email. I can guide you to a website or get someone to reply to your queries. In a way I might sound contrary to popular view when I say that print well done could be more interactive than television, because television has not reached that level of interactivity. But I know it will reach someday, but not today, because it is easy for us to jump to visual media to online and provide the answers.

Q. How would the content of Dare help an aspiring entrepreneur or a fresher out of B-school school wanting to start his own venture? Two things – we have a tie-up with the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), which works with over 250 Indian engineering and business colleges running entrepreneur cells and we get a lot of inputs. Students are always bubbling with ideas and we provide all the information need on logistics, trademark, funding, etc. At the end of the magazine, we have info on government regulations, how to register a company, what sort of registration suited them the best and so on. We also provide information on how to get funding. There is a lot of hype and hoopla around VC, but that’s not the only way of funding, and sometimes not even the best way of funding. We tell people where to go and how to go about it to garner the funds.

Q. A pioneer in its own segment and priced at Rs 30, what percentage would Dare collect from circulation viz-a-viz advertising? Let me put it this way – the magazine selling market is very tough. When we started the plan for this project we had a number of options on pricing the product from Rs 5 to Rs 100 and beyond. We actually thought of keeping the price of the magazine at Rs 200. Why we chose to price it at Rs 30 is because 12 months of the year multiplied by Rs 30 makes it Rs 360, which is around Re 1 a day. What I am trying to say is that if you want to improve your business and start a new business pay Re 1 a day. With Re 1 a day we do not intend to earn from circulation because in the initial years we are spending more than what we are getting. The good news is that our subscriptions are far ahead of our target and most of them are coming online. By the time we were two issues out, we were ahead in subscriptions. We do not want to earn anything in the first year through circulation. It is an investment time for us.

Q. How important is it for an upcoming magazine to get advertising revenue? Don’t you feel it’s a chicken-egg situation? I mean, if you do not have circulation or you are not a known name in the industry, it is difficult to get ads and vice-versa?

Interesting question. In a way it is important and in another way it is not important, because if I go after advertising I would lose focus on content. And if I do not have advertising, then nobody is speaking about you. It is a Catch-22 situation – do I need to go after content or do I need to go after advertising are the questions that come to mind. How much advertising do we need? We can say that at the moment with the amount of advertising we are getting, we can sustain ourselves for some time. Right now we are slightly ahead of our target.

In a way it is a chicken-egg situation because we are a start-up. In many ways we are treating Dare as a start-up and Cybermedia is funding this venture. Like any other business, Cybermedia provides us some benefits. They are a known brand, know certain people, there are contacts that we are using. There are certain advantages that we get, but like any other start-up operation, it is difficult to get business. People are not waiting for us. It is a chicken-egg situation, but not that bad.