Mini Menon is an army gal. She was a late kid for her parents. Her dad was already a brigadier in the army when she arrived. (He subsequently retired as a Lt General.) She grew up in Cantonment towns all over the country, before finally landing up in Delhi to pursue her bachelors in history at St Stephen’s. Post graduation brought her to Pune. She first enrolled for a Masters in Archaeology at Deccan College. But she found that for a career driven woman, archaeology did not offer too many options. You could not even take up teaching after a PG in archaeology! Colleges required their teachers to have degrees in history. Added to this were the funding woes that Deccan college faced at that time – they were heavily reliant on international donors for even the smallest of their digs. After a few weeks at Deccan College, she switched over to journalism, joining the newly started Masters in Mass Communication course at the University of Pune.

While doing her masters, her friends came across an ad by Times of India, looking for entries for their Miss India competition. Her friends decided that Mini, who unlike her name stands at 5 ft 9 in, had all that it required to become a model. They sent in her entry. For a person who had rarely used lipstick till that point of time, becoming Miss India was a huge surprise. But this exposure to the world of fashion and glam helped her enter the newly emerging field of television. iTV was her first employer, but the channel died a premature death, only a year after starting. Mini then moved on to NDTV. She got into business journalism only because NDTV’s regular anchor for their business program had gone AWOL. Mini is a person who believes in the power of Homework, so she would do days of prep for every episode of this program. This genre proved to be her claim to fame – and she moved on to CNBC and later on Bloomberg doing more of the same.

In 2017, she turned 40, and decided that it was time for a reboot. She enjoys being behind the camera more than being in front. Entrepreneurial buds were waiting to bloom. So she went back to her first love – history. She is one of the brave entrepreneurs who entered a space with no proven business models. Here new baby was christened LHI – livehistoryindia.com. Am not sure if she also has a TV channel, but there definitely is a YT channel. Using her connects with the business world, she sought out history aficionados, and was able to get them to become seed investors in her company. Amongst them is Cyrus Guzdar, the logistics don of India who sold his company to DHL. Cyrus, interestingly, is an archaeologist by training. Ganesh Natarajan, ex CEO of Zensar, is another investor. There was a third one as well – he was a media guy, who was basically looking at an up-the-valuation-early-exit strategy. He soon got his exit, but probably not at the valuation he was looking for.

LHI has been three years into the making now, and the good news is that it is breaking even. The role model for LHI has been National Geographic. Queen Mini believes that content is King. So she has put together a team of archaeologists and historians to guide the channel for content. She claims that her programs are free of bias, but I don’t know whether story writing (which in a sense history is) can ever be done by unbiased authors. Probably what she means is that the channel accepts people of all biases.

NatGeo in its time could be driven by a patron and subscriber driven model. LHI was born in different times, where no channel can survive on subscription revenues. If it does, then the reach is going to be very limited – and content quality will suffer. At LHI, she tries to match content with business interests. For example, Future group was roped in as a sponsor for her program on Weaves of Ancient India. Unlike Nat Geo, LHI will have to rely on advertising and sponsorship. She is trying to stay away from the TimesNow strategy of generating TRPs through sensationalism. I spent  time on her website – and glanced through a few photo essays. The ads that came in between were not quite relevant – and the idea of sub contracting ads to Google – for a channel like LFI does not appeal to me.

She believes that tourism and education can make up significant revenue streams for LHI in future. Retailing work of Indian artisans, aka Fabindia, can be a potential money spinner. However, whether it is in the core competence of LHI, I am not too sure. Possibly for retailing, education and tourism, the way ahead should be through partnerships. She can look at a Google Ad words model of pay-when-my-viewer buys. This way she can extract a higher share of revenue – and focus on quality instead of quantity. She will lose out on scale, the very thing what investors hunger for, but in her kind of creative profession, scale without value means daal with lots of kala in it.