Making Classical Cool - IndianRaga

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in entertainment but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sriram Emani, Co-Founder and CEO of IndianRaga, located in Boston, MA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

IndianRaga is disrupting the traditional Indian performing arts space by infusing modern innovations in teaching, presentation, and performance. Our customers are adults in the age group of 25 to 45 and kids in the age group of 5 to 15 from across 25 countries. They are well-educated, discerning individuals who value the role of arts in enhancing creativity, mindfulness, and confidence and love our concept-oriented approach to learning these skills.

IndianRaga has a library of over 2000 music videos that are exciting to young and old audiences and is often an entry point to most people into the fascinating world of Indian classical music and dance. We have over 200 million views from across 65 countries and have performed at iconic venues like the United Nations Headquarters, World Government Summit, and Lincoln Center, amongst others.

What's most heartening to me is that whenever I meet new people at events across different cities, they often hear me say IndianRaga and immediately smile and talk about how they or their young kids love our music and listen to it all the time! That is exactly what I wanted.

Tell us about yourself

I've been passionate about the performing arts since I was a child. Although I studied engineering and then management, I believe that my most valuable life skills have come to me through my training in complex performing arts genres like Carnatic (South Indian classical) music. Growing up in Mumbai, I was surprised to see that most of my classmates barely knew about our traditional art forms, and I wondered what would make them fall in love with it as I had. I kept thinking about it as I explored the world of Broadway musicals, Disney, and Cirque du Soleil, and ultimately one of my professors at MIT took me out to coffee and asked me why I had not started a company yet. I had written a rather elaborate business plan for a concept called IndianRaga in his class as the final deliverable, and in a few weeks, IndianRaga was born.

What motivates me each day is the creative side of my job. I get to wake up and work with some of the best young talents in multiple genres of music and dance, discuss ideas for collaboration, and work with great audio and video production teams to help them come to life. I get to pick the songs that our students will be learning in their online lessons with our teachers and figure out which concepts they are getting stuck on and how we can help them learn those better. What could be more exciting!!

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Finding a sustainable business model in the art space is not the most straightforward challenge. Today we have a host of reliable business streams, from our subscription-based educational offerings to our more premium music-video collaboration programs. Developing these programs that are valued by thousands of customers globally is what I consider my biggest accomplishment on the business side.

On the creative side, having some of the most viral hits on social media for Indian music and dance, thus putting a spotlight on some of the best upcoming talents, is what I consider my biggest accomplishment. Some of the artists we featured early on in our journey are now professional singers and dancers in Bollywood and Western pop, collaborating with iconic artists and being nominated for awards of excellence in their field. That to me, is really heartening that we likely played some role in their journey to greatness and that they are inspiring many more as they grow with IndianRaga.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Killing projects that are heart-warming but not financially viable is the hardest thing. We've had a few projects that are beautiful - a few animation projects we did for younger kids and a much longer Fellowship residency week where artists had the enviable joy of jamming away for days and nights on end before producing creative work - but the upfront costs for these programs were so high and the potential revenue from digital media sources not viable enough to support them, that we had to nix them or alter them into more financially viable nuggets. As a bootstrapped business, it was important to be disciplined and deliberate about some of these decisions so that we may continue to grow and scale and, hopefully, one day, support these again!

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

1. Delight an initial target audience that may be just a subset of your ultimate one. Spreading yourself thin trying to make too many different customer groups happy will only exhaust you. If a core group loves what you do, word spreads, and things get easier before you add on more!
2. Use content effectively for organic traffic on social media. If you get into the habit of spending on expensive social media ad campaigns, it will be an uphill climb. Organic and word of mouth are the best in getting the most reliable conversions.
3. Iterate and fail fast. Don't spend a ton of money to test out an idea. Have an MVP, test fast and efficiently, do meaningful and detailed focused group discussions or customer one-on-ones, figure out what's working and what's not, and pivot/refine.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://indianraga.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndianRagaProject/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indianraga/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IndianRaga
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indianraga/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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