Shutting down KalaKumbh

Today, I share an update - we are winding down operations at KalaKumbh . This decision is made after much introspection and realizing the market trends at the current moment.

We started with a mission to break the money-recognition cycle for musicians, helping them earn and grow through their skills and talent. Musicians often were paid as low as 1500 for the entire show of 3 hours and they would agree to do the same since they had no other options.

We started off changing this scenario by helping them earn by competing against one another. Our thesis was to uplift the musicians by giving them a way to earn money by their own talent while giving them a push to be better. Further, opening another stream of earning money would have allowed them with more freedom to pursue their dream of following their passion. We built the prototype, tested it with our early users and got a positive response.

Despite the positive response, we had to pivot to connecting musicians with event managers because of the music copyrights prevailing. We became a strong community of 10k+ musicians. But as the listings happened and we fulfilled, multiple uncertainties were coming up from event managers, which included last-moment changes, postponement of events, change of plans, non-response to musicians etc.

Eventually, we decided to shift our focus to connect musicians for college fests and retreats. Soon enough, we realized the TAM for providing musicians for fests and retreats was not big enough for us to become a breakthrough company. One strategy was to include other skills and expand horizontally but it did not serve the mission. Another strategy was to go back to the initial product our customers loved but we did not have that amount of capital available to us to get licenses for the songs. The revenue coming from the customers was not enough to get the licenses. With no capital infusion in sight, we decided to wrap the operations. The decision took quite a great deal of thought and reasoning but this seemed the best course of action considering all the circumstances.

This journey of almost 2 years was full of ups and downs, sweat and tears, learnings and failures. We understood that while our target audience loved us, it was not enough. There were still many uncontrollable factors that needed to be taken care of. We also realized the importance of agility and quick decision-making. Personal touches and communications played a huge role for us in building customer relationships.

Now, the journey comes to an end. With our experience, we really have huge respect for all the entrepreneurs who have built their startups and are building it. It takes a whole village to raise a child. So, thank you to all the people who trusted us, who joined us, and who walked with us through this journey.