Inside Gaana’s success story: Sandeep Lodha on the platform’s journey so far and what the future holds

• Sandeep Lodha, CEO, Gaana pens down the platform’s success story.
• He shares how Gaana* has managed to beat all its competitors and vision ahead.

A lot of work has been happening behind the scenes at gaana to take the user experience up to the next level, we are as excited and passionate about what Gaana is becoming than we’ve ever been. Here’s a brief update on what we’ve been working on at Gaana, and some of the results that get us excited to get up every morning and bring music to a billion Indians!

Creating the most intuitive and engaging musical experience

At our core, our passions are centered on making Gaana the most intuitive and engaging music product available. We’ve worked hard to improve a lot of things under the hood to make that happen - like optimizing our recommendation algorithm, speeding up music playback, and improving our user experience.

The major metric, which tells us if we’re doing a good job, is retention - how many people who used Gaana last month are still using it this month. And we’re happy to share that from May to Sep, we’ve improved our monthly retention by 48%.


Source: App annie

Other metrics tell us the same thing. Today, our users listen to 36% more songs and spend more time per day on Gaana than ever before, up 39% in the last 6 months.



The verdict is clear: Users love Gaana, more than any other streaming product
Source: Google Play Store

Retaining & Growing Users

Our focus has been to ensure Gaana delivers a great experience. And because of this, our growth efficiency is higher than ever before. Over the last few months we have improved our marketing efficiency (cost per net added user) by 31%.



Making Gaana a healthy business

Delivering a great musical experience to crores of Indians is exciting, but we’re also here to make a healthy business. We’ve revamped our ad products to make them more effective. Increasing the share of direct business allows us to actually reduce ad load. The net impact is that our ad revenue per user (ARPU) has grown 135% in the last six months.



I’ve been the CEO of Gaana for just four months, and I know we are just getting started. We have so much more to offer, and you’ll continue to see exciting product innovations and of course great music on Gaana in the months to come. Today, hundreds of million music lovers use Gaana. We’re building one of the largest consumer media platforms in India. The party has just begun!

Bas Bajna Chahiye Gaana,
Sandeep

*Gaana is owned by Times Internet, which is the parent of Times Bridge, Business Insider's partner in India*