A byproduct of his own habit and observation, Hyderabadi lad, Karthik Jonna founded Paperboy, an online newspaper aggregator. With over 250 magazines and newspapers to their credit, the platform has a lot to show for itself.
Karthik Jonna, is no regular 21-year-old. Barely out of college, he is already heading a startup that has taken off despite the odds in just a year. Paperboy, is the brainchild of this youngster which has already brought under its wing, 250 newspapers and magazines. As he came to the realisation that digital is the next big thing and “print might disappear as we know it,” he came up with Paperboy, a newspaper aggregator on both app and website formats.
The Eureka moment
“I have the habit of reading the newspaper every morning. But as I grew up I didn’t have the time to do so. So it struck me that although I don’t have the time to find and read it in print but I do have time to scroll through my phone,” Karthik shares. Once the idea came to him in July 2015, he went ahead to do a ground survey among 150 of his own friends to know the news reading habits. “Turned out that all of them would want to read the newspaper if there was easy access to it particularly on their routine devices,” he says.
And then it took him until February of 2016 to come up with a concrete plan. “We considered a lot of names including Freepaper but finally we went with Paperboy as it suits our product the best,” smiles Karthik. Backed up by his father, Karthik started up on the technical front with an investment of around 1 crore. He shares as a funfact that they had to fly to the US to buy the domain name of Paperboy as it was in high demand.
Setting things in order
The next level in the execution was gathering clients. “Around six to seven months after we started off, we had no newspapers tied up with us. They were hesitant. Then slowly it started to build as we only worked with Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies,” explains Karthik.
Now as a 21-year-old, you would expect him to love his social life. But Karthik disagrees. “I go to college in the day and go to office in the evening. My father and sister handle everything when I’m away. I’ve never felt like I’m missing out on anything. I love working for my own company,” says the youngster.
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