Apna time aayega, which means, "Our time will come", was one of the most popular Bollywood songs of 2019. This rap captured the daily struggles and frustrations of the largely underprivileged masses in India, and became something of a rallying cry for people to keep working hard. Because, eventually, their time would come. Why am I talking about a Bollywood song? For one, the protagonist of today's story, blue- and grey-collar job portal Apna, actually derived its name from the song. And today, less than three years after being founded, Apna already claims to have 22 million users and 200,000 employers on its platform, and 1.25 million of its users throng the platform daily. In September last year, Apna became one of the fastest Indian startups to enter the unicorn club, after raising a US$100 million Series C round led by Tiger Global. It's also one of those rare startups that has achieved profitability as well. You could argue that Apna's time has come. Apna's USP is that it aspires to be a blue-collar version of LinkedIn for India. Apart from connecting bottom-of-the-pyramid job seekers—cooks, delivery professionals, electricians, call centre workers, etc.—with employers, Apna also has a "professional networking" play where it curates vertical communities of interest. For instance, it has groups for electricians or plumbers, which have relevant job and learning opportunities on them. And Apna is also building an edtech-esque pillar, with plans to offer short, cheap, and efficient upskilling courses. Apna wants to create an engagement flywheel between genuine jobs, networking, and upskilling. For the blue-collar segment, though, moving from jobs to networking to upskilling isn’t a seamless digital journey. And since Apna doesn't charge users or companies to post and respond to job openings, it needs to unlock the revenue potential of at least one of its other services. And this is not going to be easy. Even the white collar-focused LinkedIn has struggled to make money in India, its second-largest market. What can Apna do to crack the monetisation game?
