Pepper, a content mediation platform which was born on campus less than a year ago, is already turning many heads in the marketing world because of its unique writer-centric approach to content development. The company, which was the brainchild of third years Anirudh Singla, Adit Mittal, Rishabh Shekhar, and Parv Panthari, acts as an intermediary between content writers across the country and media houses looking for good material. ‘We basically mediate the demand-and-supply chain of content,’ said Anirudh Singla.

As the company usually deals with high profile clients who aren’t willing to compromise on quality, the onboarding process for new writers at Pepper is meticulously scrutinized by the senior team members. ‘It’s a three-layered procedure. Firstly, we send out invitations for entries and ask them for cover letters and samples. Following this, we ask the best applicants to send us their CVs.

In the final round, we give them a test task to check the veracity of their content,’ said Singla. Based on their availability and interests,  the recruited writers get assignments from different clients. Currently, 87 writers between ages 17 to 85 are employed at Pepper.

Writers at Pepper are paid Rs. 5000-6000 per month, and are also periodically given detailed feedback for their articles. ‘For the empowerment of writers, it’s crucial that they understand where they can improve. To  acilitate this, we assign a quality score for every article based on different predefined parameters. This is something that has been appreciated by many of our writers,’  laimed Singla.

When the company was started in October 2017, the team of four faced many  hallenges because of their lack of credibility and the gaps in their knowledge about the  ndustry. For their first major assignment, they had to write 250 five hundred-word articles in the course of nine days in exchange for a pay which was well below the industry standard. But after the first few months of cold calling, many companies began contacting them for assignments. The Pepper team used this momentum to its advantage by quickly expanding the workforce and taking on projects from big companies like Zivame, SocialCops and WittyFeed.

The company is now planning to introduce material in Indian vernacular language. From twenty clients and four hundred thousand words in February, the company has managed to expand to fifty-three clients and two million words in the recent months. Singla attributed the company’s enormous success to the persistent dedication shown by the team members (now ten in number) and their ability to multitask efficiently.