Enterprise: Story Bodhi

Founders: Vinita Agarwal & Eesha Palkar

Year it was founded: 2017

Sector: Education

Based out of: Pune

The formative years of children determine their cognitive, emotional and social development. Vinita Agarwal and Eesha Palkar established Story Bodhi out of a desire to provide children positive stimulus, packaged in a fun and engaging way. Story Bodhi creates contemporary animated stories in a digital format. These stories fuel the creativity, imagination and thinking ability of children. Both Vinita and Eesha bring their experience as professionals and as mothers to creatively helm Story Bodhi. Vinita is an electrical engineer and has done her MBA in Human Resources and is the Business Head of the enterprise. Eesha, who has studied in the US and UK is the Content Head and she believes her true calling is writing stories. They both firmly believe in the importance of investing in young adults to maximise their future wellbeing.

In conversation with GlobalLinker (GL), Vinita & Eesha share their business journey

GL: Tell us about your business and how it came into being.

Vinita: About a year back, Aanvi, a 4-year-old child, was in a car when she heard a famous Bollywood film song. Her question enquiring what “Javani (Adulthood)” is, shook both of us because we realised that the current world is so much more different than the world we grew in. We delved deeper and understood the root causes of this. Both parents working, stressful professional lives, hectic daily schedules and nuclear families are just some of the problems which directly or indirectly have an effect on the most fertile minds of the family, the children. Children are like sponges who need their minds to be constantly occupied. What differs from the previous generation is the content and format of this exposure.

Story Bodhi is a platform of stories set into the modern times with its roots in age old yet highly sensible traditions. When any of us look back, our happiest times were the evenings with our grandparents eagerly waiting for them to tell us a story. These stories helped us explore the peaks of bravery, the time-tested values of being good human beings, the importance of life skills and so on. Most of these story sessions typically ended with tearful eyes and calls of “one more” which turned into a smile of happiness with a promise of a new story the next day. The night was filled with vivid dreams of the great story which Grandma told us. Story Bodhi is an attempt to use animated stories to recreate these experiences through digital medium and was formally launched by the Hon’ble Education Minister of Maharashtra Shri Vinod Tawade on 28th April 2017.

GL: What is the USP of your business?

Eesha: Story Bodhi focuses on two things— Content and Channel.

Content: The content being created by Story Bodhi is built on the pillars of knowledge, values and storytelling which fuels creativity, imagination and thinking ability of children. The characters of these stories are those of modern age with ethos and values of Indian culture. Short and crisp, these stories aim to deliver all of the above within the time allowed by the short attention span of children.

Channel: In the sea of non-curated content, Story Bodhi through its Application, Youtube channel, Facebook and Instagram is unique with the objective, content and its format of presentation.

GL: What are the challenges you have faced in establishing your business?

Vinita: Being first-timers in this online content creation world, a lot of time is being spent on reworks. Another challenge is the recent social media developments that favour paid promotions more than organic. Also, we have to deal with the ever-growing traffic in similar type of content.

GL: How have you benefited by being a member of GlobalLinker?

Eesha: We got introduced to GlobalLinker through our mentor Mr Dhananjay Parkhe. We are exploring the platform and believe it’s a great place to network with other entrepreneurs.

GL: What is your big business dream?

Vinita: Everybody has a story. Be it a person, a business or institution, each one wants others to know their story to understand who they are and what they want to be. Story Bodhi wishes to be an engaging storyteller for such people or entities through right content, right format and usage of right channels, thereby becoming a content-centric organisation specialising in the genre.

GL: What is your message to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Eesha: Entrepreneurship is something that happens to you. It is a combination of the right idea, right fitment to need, right timing and the perseverance to follow through with your belief. It is in the moments of self-doubt when you question your product idea, business operations or funding issues that your entrepreneurship capability gets honed. Don’t look at these moments as dark ones. Like the moments when children feel pain in their limbs, these moments are signs that you are growing. Smile through it all!

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