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Pratilipi, one of the largest Indian language self-publishing platforms, aims to democratise storytelling across languages, formats and geographies. Currently operational in 12 Indian languages with over 23 million monthly active readers, the digital platform allows Indian writers to publish content in their own regional language and foster vernacularism in Indian media.

Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Co-founder and CEO; Prashant KN, Chief Architect; Shally Modi, Co-founder and CPO; Gauri Kanekar, VP – Engineering – share the company’s growth story, the impact they are driving in this domain, and how their collaboration with AWS has been beneficial for their success.

Diverse product line

Over the years, the startup has launched sub-categories and sub-products within the brand, including Pratilipi Literature, Pratilipi Comics, and Pratilipi FM.“Pratilipi Literature is the largest platform with more than 700,000 writers who have published over 9 million stories read by more than 23 million monthly active users,” says Ranjeet.

At Pratilipi FM, people can either create or consume audio content such as audiobooks, podcasts etc. To expand its already growing network, Pratilipi has recently acquired IVM podcasts, The Write Order, and Westland Books. “We are also incubating a company called Project X which leverages advanced tech to convert content from one format to another,” shares Ranjeet.

Building on AWS

Taking Pratilipi from an idea to a platform that can cater to millions of reading/writing enthusiasts across the country, the founders hired a team of talented engineers. “A key enabler in our growth journey was the AWS ecosystem. Most of our services were architected within the AWS ecosystem which helped us reach the market faster, launch faster, and have multiple iterations as required,” says Prashant.

For a storytelling platform, the majority of the workload is online, “We rely on AWS managed services to handle the heavy-lifting for all our traffic and workload needs. Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon ECS, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Kinesis are a few key AWS resources that we consume,” he adds.

Team Pratilipi also analyses huge volumes of data to derive meaningful business insights in the shortest possible time. That is where the AWS serverless framework, which includes solutions such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon Quicksight, and Amazon Athena, provides great value.

Prashant further emphasises the need to build a solid security infrastructure for an online platform like Pratilipi, “Services like AWS CloudTrail, AWS Secrets Manager and AWS WAF assist us in strengthening our security posture,” he says.

Leveraging AI/ML

Partilipi, to its credit, has a humongous pool of over 9 million stories on a single platform which makes discovering the right story for users quite a task. “We have built custom algorithms served by AL/ML models which further empowers us to suggest the right story to our users which they are most likely to read,” says Shally.

Moreover, as a UGC (User-Generated Content), Pratilipi is required to comply with certain government and Google Play Store regulations concerning content moderation. The custom algorithm uses AI/ML to help the company comply with all the content guidelines.

Scaling with AWS

Pratilipi works in close collaboration with AWS when it comes to setting up the infrastructure and building personalised solutions for various products.

“In our regular cadence with Amazon Solutions Architect, we came to know about Amazon Personalize, and it was the best fit for our content personalisation use cases. With AWS’ good documentation, we were easily able to build a POC and put it in front of our few users and measure the impact. We witnessed a substantial impact, and that gave us the confidence in placing our future bets on Amazon Personalize,” says Gauri.

A single user spends an average of 120 minutes per day on the Pratilipi platform which makes it one of the most engaging digital reading platforms in the world. “Number of daily reads is one of the key metrics for us. More consumption leads to better engagement. Amazon Personalize algorithm helped increase reads per user by more than 50 percent in one of our use cases,” says Shally.

The way forward

Pratilipi has ambitious growth plans when it comes to diversifying the reader base and reaching out to people in different Indian languages.

“To ensure that the discoverability of content on our platform is seamless, irrespective of the language and the format – we are implementing the next generation of our search solutions with the help of the AWS platform,” concludes Prashant.