MeTubez: What We Have Built, What We Are Building, and What We Need to Scale
Building in public: the honest version
LinkedIn is full of founder updates that read like press releases. Milestone achieved. Team excited. Onwards and upwards. What is missing is the honest texture of what building actually looks like, which is messier and more interesting than the highlight version.
This is the actual MeTubez update. What exists, what we are building, what we need, and what we have learned.
What exists
Twenties Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. has been operating since 2019. MeTubez is the video platform product within our MeTime app ecosystem.
We hold a WIPO PCT international patent (PCT/IB2022/058509) on the core technology: a real-time three-screen live competition broadcasting mechanism that is one of the distinctive elements of the platform architecture. This is not a provisional or a pending application. It is an issued international patent.
We have a Government of India grant for this technology. This is not a startup grant. It is a technology grant for a specific innovation, which means the underlying technical approach has passed independent technical scrutiny.
The monetisation architecture has been designed from first principles. The key design constraint was this: a creator must be able to earn from their first uploaded video, regardless of their subscriber count, their content language, or whether a premium international advertiser considers their audience worth targeting.
This constraint, taken seriously, forces a different revenue model than advertising CPM. We have built that different model.
What we are building now
Platform development is in active progress. The creator onboarding flow, the content management system, the monetisation distribution architecture, and the audience engagement mechanics are all in development.
We are building the creator community before we go wide on platform availability. The first 1,000 creators on MeTubez will not be randomly acquired. They will be intentionally selected from the vernacular creator ecosystem: people who have demonstrated consistent content creation in regional languages, who have real audiences, and who are currently earning almost nothing from the platforms they use.
These creators will help shape what the platform actually is. Not through a focus group. Through use. Through their responses to what works and what does not. The best platform design for a vernacular creator from Gorakhpur is going to come from listening to creators from Gorakhpur, not from our team in Ahmedabad designing based on assumptions.
What we are looking for
Investment. We are at the stage where the right capital and the right partnership accelerates everything that needs to happen next: technology development velocity, creator community growth, and the market presence that allows us to recruit the creators and team members who will be the foundation of what MeTubez becomes at scale.
We are specifically interested in investors who understand the Indian vernacular internet deeply. Who have thought about creator economy infrastructure, not just creator content. Who understand that the market we are building for is not a niche but is in fact the majority of India's internet users, and who have the patience for the infrastructure build that realising that opportunity requires.
We are also looking for creator economy advisors. People who have built creator communities, worked in platform monetisation, or have deep connections in the regional language content ecosystem in India or internationally in comparable markets.
What we have learned
Building from Ahmedabad rather than from Mumbai or Bengaluru has been an intentional decision that has shaped how we think about the market we are building for. The vernacular creator problem is not a metro problem. Building from outside the metro startup bubble keeps us oriented toward the actual market.
The "like YouTube" comparison comes up in every investor conversation (see my earlier article on this). We have learned that the best response is not to argue against the comparison but to explain the structural reason why YouTube has not and will not solve this problem. That explanation is the investment thesis.
The technology asset, the WIPO patent, is worth more than we initially thought in investor conversations. Not because it creates a legal moat in isolation, but because it signals that we have done the hard, boring, institutional work that most early-stage platforms have not done. It signals we are serious about the technical foundation of what we are building.
The timeline is longer than we initially planned. Building platform infrastructure that works for creators who may have low-end devices, variable connectivity, and no prior creator economy experience requires solving harder UX and infrastructure problems than building for a metro English-speaking creator with a high-end phone and consistent WiFi. We knew this. The reality of it has taken longer than the plan anticipated. This is normal. It is still the right problem to be solving.
If you are an investor, creator economy builder, or ecosystem partner who sees what we see in this market, let us talk.
