Ten years ago, a handful of us launched the first version of The Ken as India’s first subscriptions-only business publication. We were yearning to report and write longform business stories that were distinctive, original and sharp. But we were also limited by how many writers we were (eight).

With only eight full-time writers, we had a hard limit on what we could promise subscribers each week. The compromise we arrived at was one new story every day of the week. But that one would *never* be a rehash of something a subscriber might have read somewhere else.

It was both a bet and a seed.

A bet that subscribers would appreciate original business journalism that took us time to report, to write, to fact-check, to edit and, for them, to read (given our stories ran 1,800–2,000 words on average every day). And that enough subscribers would be willing to pre-pay us for a year by purchasing our annual subscription, implicitly trusting us to deliver on the other 364 days, too.

“It’s done. There’s no going back now,” I told my colleagues on Slack at 8.03 a.m. on 3rd October, 2016. We had gone live.

Two minutes later, at 8.05 a.m., our first subscriber had signed up, purchasing an annual subscription for Rs 2,750.

Because that bet was pretty much our only business model—one story every weekday in return for an annual subscription—it was also the seed we planted into the ground as a fledgling startup.

Ten years later, the seed has become a tree. I went back and tried to visualise it.

Daily stories became the “trunk” of our business and the one constant: every weekday since October 2016. They became something our subscribers could always expect. That trunk also gave us the stability to try new forms of journalism, new products, new markets, and even new offerings beyond our newsroom. Our initial bet gave way to experiments that grew in directions we hadn’t planned: podcasts before video, newsletters in a wave, a community pillar out of survey answers.

Not all of which were successful. Of the roughly 56 things we launched in 10 years, 29 of........

© The Ken