Kuku TV

Kuku is India’s largest storytelling ecosystem: audio stories, an OTT micro-drama app (Kuku TV), novels, and creator tools, reaching 400M+ downloads. I joined as a Product Intern working across Kuku FM and Kuku TV on monetization, growth, and engagement.

Kuku TV’s monetization stack, including pricing, paywalls, and ad mediation, hadn’t been re-audited in a while. Engagement mechanics across notifications, discovery, and referrals were largely reactive rather than built around actual drop-off data.

A 3-person product team meant most execution decisions were mine to make and act on. I worked independently, looped in my manager to validate direction, then moved straight to implementation. Data wasn’t self-serve; most of it had to be requested from my manager or the analytics team, which shaped how I sequenced the work. The internship ran roughly three months, from May to July.

I mapped 45+ end-to-end Kuku TV user journeys across onboarding, paywall, cancellation, and referral to find exactly where users were dropping off instead of working from assumptions.

I benchmarked those flows against 10+ competitors: Story TV, DramaBox, ReelShort, Netflix, and JioHotstar for pricing, cancellation, and paywall mechanics; Google Pay, PhonePe, Winzo, and Swish for referral and incentive design. OTT referral programs turned out to be thinner than fintech’s, so I looked outside the category for stronger patterns. I used the drop-off data and benchmark together to prioritize what to fix first.

I restructured the paywall for users who rejected the first offer into a step-down sequence of alternatives. Dismissible in-app banners surfaced the next offer; push notifications and WhatsApp followed for users who still hadn’t converted, instead of repeating the same pitch.

The referral flow’s real drop-off wasn’t sharing; it was reward collection. Users earned payouts, but many never collected them because payment details came after the reward. I moved that step earlier and split one all-or-nothing payout into smaller rewards that unlocked as a referred friend progressed.

I audited ad mediation and ran targeted bidding-configuration tests to close the gap between impressions served and revenue earned. For SEO, I found that the issue wasn’t crawlability but category-level discoverability. I prioritized category hub pages and technical fixes over more show-specific keywords.

Net revenue increased 6%, ad revenue increased 165%, and ad viewer rate increased 16%.

A lot of the early weeks went into waiting on requested data pulls rather than pulling data myself. If I did this again, I’d push earlier for direct dashboard access. With three months and this much ground to cover, that lag was the main thing slowing the loop between finding a drop-off and shipping a fix.