In the past three years, Josh Talks has gained immense popularity amongst the youth of the nation as THE platform for getting inspiration and finding your potential. Some have even touted it to become bigger and better than TED Talks. With an aim to empower the underprivileged, the founders have gone beyond their scope to understand the problems of the economically challenged through detailed offline research across smaller towns, cities & villages in India.
Now let’s talk about the inspiring story behind the platform that is now inspiring the nation one story at a time?
How It All Began
It was in 2014 when two twenty-year-olds were at a birthday party discussing their career plans that the idea of Josh Talks was conceived. What Shobhit Banga & Supriya Paul – now co-founders, shared was a common frustration that young people have immense potential but certain circumstances don’t allow them to tap into it.
Josh Talks came about as a solution and transformed into a platform that used storytelling to showcase the possibilities that existed in today’s day and age and the possible paths to get to them. The simple goal was to be able to raise the aspirations of young people and show to them who and what they could become – despite the background they came from. By bringing out stories of people from diverse backgrounds including sports, stand-up comedy, entrepreneurship, Bollywood, politics and more, Josh serves as a platform that caters to everyone’s interest.
The idea started off with a simple conference where multiple speakers came and shared their story on stage for an audience size of 300 people and then grew to India’s largest conference in 2016 with over 5000+ attendees but the founders felt that the impact that was created was just not enough and then came the decision to take Josh Talks content online and focus solely on vernacular content to be able to penetrate into Bharat.
The Journey Continues
Now, Josh exists as a multilingual platform with content in over 8 languages covering Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Punjabi, Hindi & English and a viewership of more than 30 million views each month with penetration right down to the bottom of the pyramid.
Some of the stories that were most loved by their audiences were those of Encounter Specialist Navniet Sakera, Wrestler Babita Phogat, Actor & Writer Zeishan Quadri & many more.
Apart from the online presence, Josh Talks has also reached out to over 150,000 people offline through events in 30 different cities and workshops in over 800+ colleges.
Supriya and Shobhit are instilling confidence and power in today’s youth to chase their dreams and make this one life worth a lot more.
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