Stage: Building the Market Case for Regional OTT

Harshit worked on the Stage deal as his first investment at Physis Capital. Stage is a regional OTT platform focused on Haryanvi, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri, and other Indian-language content, and the firm was an early backer.

His primary task was to build the market case: was there a real, sizeable audience for regional-language content, and could Stage capture a meaningful share of it?

He used IMDb as a primary research tool, searching for shows available on the Stage app and reading user reviews. The reviews for Haryanvi and Rajasthani content were consistently strong, which told him two things: audiences existed for this content, and they were engaged enough to take the time to rate and review it publicly. He also subscribed to Stage himself for a month, watched the content, and found the production quality higher than expected for a regional platform.

For market sizing, he built a bottom-up model combining mobile penetration data, internet connectivity rates, and estimated willingness to pay for regional-language content across Rajasthan and Haryana. He supplemented this with competitive landscape analysis and exit scenario modeling.

He also ran informal primary research within the office, asking colleagues about their awareness of and interest in regional-language content. The IC had some skepticism about the ceiling of the addressable market, but the combination of IMDb data, bottom-up sizing, and direct content quality assessment gave the team a credible narrative.

Stage was already at approximately 100 crores ARR at the time of the deal, which provided a strong baseline. The firm's thesis was that the platform had the potential to grow significantly from that base as it expanded into additional languages and explored AI-based content generation.