Startup Deep Dive : Terribly Tiny Tales — from 140-character posts to a Netflix series on Rs 5.5 crore revenue

Terribly Tiny Tales began in the summer of 2013 as a Facebook page where a handful of writers tried to tell whole stories in under 140 characters. Thirteen years later, in July 2026, the same company had an eight-episode series streaming on Netflix, co-produced by Bollywood actor Vikrant Massey — while its own revenue for the year ended 31 March 2025 was just Rs 5.5 crore (~$0.57 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0), down 34% on the year before (Tracxn, citing MCA filings for FY25).

That gap — a media brand that says it reaches 25 million people a week, sitting on revenue smaller than a single mid-sized Mumbai restaurant chain — sits at the centre of this story. Founded by Anuj Gosalia and Chintan Ruparel, Terribly Tiny Tales (TTT) grew from crowd-sourced micro-fiction into a branded-content shop, then a publisher, then a studio. In July 2024 it stopped being independent altogether: Collective Artists Network bought it outright, for a sum neither side has disclosed.

Quick facts

What they do

Terribly Tiny Tales sells storytelling as a service to brand marketing teams, and increasingly sells stories as owned intellectual property to streaming platforms and e-commerce apps. Brands hire TTT to build narrative campaigns — short films, social posts, web series — around a creative brief, using its network of writers and its own social distribution, instead of running conventional banner or display advertising. Separately, the company publishes books with Penguin Random House India, runs a paid writing school called TTT Academy, produces a vertical-video “microdrama” strand called Terribly Tiny TV, and now produces scripted television for Netflix. Its customers therefore span three quite different buyers: consumer brands paying for a campaign, students paying to learn scriptwriting and copywriting, and streaming or e-commerce platforms licensing or co-producing finished shows.

The origin

Anuj Gosalia, a Narsee Monjee College alumnus, had already tried and failed once before TTT. As per Platform Magazine’s profile of the founders, Gosalia’s earlier venture, Bechain Nagri — an e-commerce platform for independent artists to sell t-shirts and sketchbooks — built communities across 12 cities before shutting down. Before that, he had worked at What’s On India, a listings venture that, as per the same profile, was backed by Sequoia Capital and later sold; that stint under media executive Atul Phadnis is where Gosalia says he learned how content businesses are actually built and sold, not just written.

The founding insight for TTT was simple: smartphones were shrinking attention spans, long blog posts were dying on the page, and a story told in Twitter’s then-140-character limit could still carry a whole idea. Gosalia started TTT in the summer of 2013 as a Facebook page run through his own storytelling agency, “Not Like That,” gathering a handful of writers willing to work inside that constraint. Chintan Ruparel, a seven-year advertising copywriter who had written award-winning campaigns for The Times of India, Bharti Airtel, PepsiCo and Tata Sky at agencies including Ogilvy and Taproot India, was one of the early contributors. As per Platform Magazine, Ruparel turned down an offer to be a brand custodian at Google India and, after months of travel across India, joined Gosalia as co-founder in 2014 to professionalise what had been a loose community project — Ruparel taking editorial and content, Gosalia taking the business and CEO role.

The struggle years

The first real strategic break came in 2015, when TTT began experimenting editorially with video, producing its first branded film for United Colors of Benetton in 2016, as reported by BuzzInContent. Company leadership has described this at the time as a considered bet rather than a panic move — Ruparel told BuzzInContent that “if we are into bite-size storytelling, video is a natural extension to text.” But the timing mattered more than the framing let on: 2016 was the year Facebook’s organic reach for publisher pages collapsed. Independent analysis by SocialFlow, reported by the Columbia Journalism Review, found organic reach for publisher posts on Facebook fell 42% between January and May 2016 alone, worsening further after Facebook rebalanced its News Feed algorithm later that year to favour friends-and-family content over Pages. A text-and-image micro-fiction page that had built its following almost entirely on Facebook was moving into video at exactly the moment the free distribution underpinning that following started disappearing under every publisher in the market, TTT included.

The second, more recent setback shows up in the company’s own numbers rather than in a founder’s account. For the financial year ended 31 March 2025, Terribly Tiny Ventures Private Limited reported revenue of Rs 5.5 crore, down 34% on the prior year, while EBITDA fell 344.7% year-on-year and net profit fell 365.1% year-on-year — a swing from profit into loss, according to Tracxn’s summary of the company’s MCA filings, corroborated by TheCompanyCheck’s citation of the same filings. That reversal landed in the same period the company was meant to be scaling a new, more capital-intensive studio business inside its new parent, Collective Artists Network — a mismatch between the scale of TTT’s ambitions and the size of the standalone entity’s books that the rest of this piece keeps returning to.

The turning point

If there is a single moment that marks how far Terribly Tiny Tales moved from its origins, it is 24 July 2026, when Musafir Cafe premiered on Netflix. The eight-episode Hindi romance, adapted from Divya Prakash Dubey’s novel and produced by Anuj Gosalia and Vijay Subramaniam under the Terribly Tiny Tales banner with Homemade Stories, starred Vikrant Massey, Vedika Pinto and Mahima Makwana — with Massey also stepping into his first role as a co-producer, according to Netflix’s own release announcement and coverage in Startupfox. Sharanya Rajgopal, TTT’s studio head, is credited as creator and writer, and Ruchir Arun directed.

Set the two ends of that timeline side by side. In 2013, TTT was a Facebook page with a handful of volunteer writers producing stories that fit in a tweet. Thirteen years later, in 2026, the same company was a credited producer of an eight-episode series on India’s largest subscription streaming platform, with a leading Hindi film actor attached as a co-producer rather than just a performer. The company had gone from being paid, brief by brief, to write about other people’s brands, to owning a stake in a finished piece of scripted entertainment.

The money behind it

• No disclosed institutional funding round: Crunchbase records only one funding event for Terribly Tiny Tales across its history, without a disclosed amount, investor list or date — this appears to be a company that ran for roughly a decade without a reported venture round.
• July 2024 — acquired outright: Collective Artists Network, a talent and entertainment company, bought Terribly Tiny Tales for an undisclosed sum, as reported independently by Storyboard18, Social Samosa, afaqs! and BW Marketing World.
• The backer behind the buyer: Collective Artists Network’s own expansion has been supported by Nikhil Kamath’s Gruhas, through the Gruhas Collective Consumer Fund, a partnership set up to back consumer-facing founders — TTT joined a Collective stable that already included platforms such as Big Bang Social, Under 25 Universe and Galleri5, as reported by afaqs! and Social Samosa.
• What changed for TTT: founder Anuj Gosalia stayed on as CEO; the company gained access to Collective’s talent roster and production infrastructure, used on projects like Musafir Cafe, and cross-sell opportunities into Collective’s other creator and youth-community platforms.
• Total raised and latest valuation: neither figure has been publicly reported for Terribly Tiny Tales, either independently before the acquisition or as part of the Collective Artists Network deal. This piece does not state a number because none exists on the record.

How it makes money

• Branded content (historically the core line): as per BuzzInContent’s 2019 reporting, branded content accounted for roughly 80% of TTT’s revenue at that point, built on narrative campaigns rather than display ads. Named clients across sources include Tinder, Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, United Colors of Benetton, Amazon Prime Video, Swiggy, OnePlus and Myntra.
• Publishing: TTT co-publishes anthologies with Penguin Random House India — the first, a collection of 250 stories each under 140 characters, launched on 3 October 2017, as reported by The New Publishing Standard and Deccan Chronicle. Two bestselling anthologies have followed, per Platform Magazine.
• Education: TTT Academy, an ed-tech vertical teaching copywriting, scriptwriting and product writing, had enrolled more than 10,000 students as of July 2023, according to Gosalia’s interview with t2online marking the company’s tenth anniversary.
• Microdrama and studio distribution: Terribly Tiny TV, the company’s vertical-video microdrama strand, has generated more than 60 million organic views from over 2,500 storytellers, as per Storyboard18 — and TTT has produced content for Flipkart’s in-app microdrama section, alongside rival Pratilipi, according to Entrackr’s 2026 reporting on Flipkart’s entry into the format.
• Studio and IP production: television and film work such as Musafir Cafe, where TTT is a credited producer with a stake in the underlying IP rather than a one-time production fee. CEO Anuj Gosalia has said this studio line has grown “exponentially” and could eventually outgrow the branded-content business, as reported by Storyboard18.

No published take-rate, agency fee or margin split for any of these lines could be found in the public record, so none is stated here. The part outsiders most often get wrong, based on the gap between TTT’s public reach claims and its filed financials, is treating audience size as a proxy for revenue: a company that says it reaches 25 million people a week (a company-stated figure, not independently verified) filed just Rs 5.5 crore of revenue for FY25 — reach and revenue are simply not the same number.

The numbers

This is a shorter table than a typical Deep Dive carries, and that is a limit of the public record rather than a choice. Terribly Tiny Ventures Private Limited is a small private company; free-tier corporate data providers such as Tracxn and TheCompanyCheck disclose its most recent revenue line and year-on-year percentage changes from Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, but lock the underlying absolute profit and EBITDA figures, and older filings, behind paid reports. No Indian business-media outlet appears to have run a standalone financial teardown of the company the way outlets like Entrackr routinely do for better-known venture-funded startups. Rather than estimate the missing years, this piece states only the two data points that are actually sourced.

Where the money comes from

• Brand storytelling remains the largest historical segment, at roughly 80% of revenue as of 2019 (BuzzInContent) — spanning consumer internet, FMCG and fashion clients from Tinder to Cadbury to Amazon Prime Video.
• Publishing and merchandise sit alongside it, built on the Penguin Random House anthology relationship running since 2017 and community-linked merchandise.
• Education contributes through TTT Academy, with over 10,000 students enrolled as of July 2023 (t2online).
• Studio and IP work is the fastest-growing and, per CEO Anuj Gosalia, potentially the largest line over time — spanning Terribly Tiny TV’s microdrama output (60 million-plus views, per Storyboard18), distribution partnerships such as Flipkart’s Drama section (Entrackr), and scripted television including Musafir Cafe on Netflix.
• Geography is overwhelmingly India: every disclosed client, distribution partner and platform relationship in the public record is domestic; no international revenue split has been reported.

The surprise, in the company’s own telling, is the direction of travel: a brand best known publicly for 140-character Instagram posts now has its own CEO saying the branded-content line that built the company could be overtaken by studio and IP production, a shift most of TTT’s own audience has not yet clocked.

The risks

• Platform dependency: TTT’s original audience was built almost entirely on Facebook and Instagram organic reach. That exact dependency broke once already — Facebook’s 2016 News Feed changes cut publisher organic reach by roughly 42-52% within the year, per SocialFlow data cited by the Columbia Journalism Review — forcing TTT’s pivot to video. A similar policy shift on any of Instagram, YouTube or the newer microdrama apps it now distributes through could compress reach again just as quickly.
• Crowding in microdrama: Terribly Tiny TV competes in a suddenly crowded Indian vertical-drama market against Kuku TV, ShareChat’s Quick TV, EloElo’s StoryTV and EloTV, and newer entrants Yash Raj Films and Sun TV Network, as per Entrackr’s 2026 reporting. The same report notes Pocket FM has already exited its own microdrama vertical, Pocket TV — a signal that the format’s economics are not proven even for well-capitalised players.
• Financial mismatch with ambition: on its own FY25 filings, revenue fell 34% year-on-year to Rs 5.5 crore and profit swung sharply negative (down 365.1% YoY) even as the company pursues capital-intensive scripted IP such as Musafir Cafe and, per Storyboard18, plans a theatrical release. The standalone entity’s disclosed financial base is small relative to that ambition, though it now sits inside a larger parent.
• AI risk to the creator pipeline: Gosalia has himself warned that if a writer’s job can be replaced by an AI tool within five years, “90% of people will lose their jobs,” in his t2online interview — a risk that cuts directly at the community of registered writers TTT’s content pipeline has always depended on.

The takeaway

The lesson in Terribly Tiny Tales’s path is not that a Facebook page can become a Netflix producer — plenty of content brands say that is the plan and few get there. It is that reach rented from someone else’s platform is not a business, and the companies that survive are the ones that keep converting that rented attention into something they own outright before the platform’s own economics change under them. TTT did this in stages: Facebook followers into a Penguin book deal, video views into brand production contracts, a writer community into a paid academy, and finally, branded storytelling into an equity stake in a Netflix series. It still took thirteen years, one financial reversal in the very year it started scaling, and, in the end, being bought by a bigger company altogether to get there.

Frequently asked questions

What does Terribly Tiny Tales actually sell?

It sells branded storytelling campaigns to consumer brands, books co-published with Penguin Random House India, paid writing courses through TTT Academy, microdrama content through Terribly Tiny TV, and, most recently, produced television such as the Netflix series Musafir Cafe.

Who founded Terribly Tiny Tales and when?

Anuj Gosalia started it as a Facebook page in the summer of 2013 through his storytelling agency Not Like That; Chintan Ruparel, an advertising copywriter, joined as co-founder in 2014 and leads editorial and content as Chief Content Officer.

Is Terribly Tiny Tales still an independent company?

No. Collective Artists Network acquired it outright in July 2024 for an undisclosed sum, as reported by Storyboard18, Social Samosa and afaqs!. Anuj Gosalia continues as CEO.

How much revenue does Terribly Tiny Tales make?

Its legal entity, Terribly Tiny Ventures Private Limited, reported Rs 5.5 crore in revenue for the year ended 31 March 2025, down 34% on the prior year, according to Tracxn’s summary of its MCA filings; no earlier year’s absolute revenue figure is publicly available.

What is Musafir Cafe and why does it matter for TTT?

Musafir Cafe is an eight-episode Hindi romance series that premiered on Netflix on 24 July 2026, adapted from Divya Prakash Dubey’s novel and produced by TTT with Homemade Stories. It matters because it marks TTT moving from being paid to produce brand content to owning a stake in scripted television IP, with actor Vikrant Massey attached as both lead and co-producer.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Tracxn, “TerriblyTinyTales — Company Profile & Financials,” 2026
• Tofler, “Terribly Tiny Ventures Private Limited — Financial Summary,” accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Terribly Tiny Ventures Private Limited — Company Details,” accessed September 2026
• Social Samosa, “Snippet: Terribly Tiny Tales’ journey from a text-first flash fiction platform to social media storyteller,” December 2020
• Storyboard18, “How Terribly Tiny Tales built an IP engine beyond branded storytelling,” 2026
• Storyboard18, “Terribly Tiny Tales bets bigger on studio business, IP as Collective Artists Network scales storytelling ambitions,” 2026
• Social Samosa, “Collective Artists Network acquires Terribly Tiny Tales,” July 2024
• afaqs!, “Collective Artists Network acquires Terribly Tiny Tales, aiming to become the top new media company,” July 2024
• BW Marketing World, “Collective Artists Network Procures Terribly Tiny Tales,” July 2024
• Platform Magazine, “Anuj Gosalia and Chintan Ruparel: Terribly Tiny Tales,” accessed September 2026
• t2online, “Terribly Tiny Tales’ Anuj Gosalia gets candid with t2ONLINE over the brand’s 10th anniversary,” July 2023
• BuzzInContent, “Why Terribly Tiny Tales is tapping video content formats,” 2019
• The New Publishing Standard, “Terribly Tiny Tales and Penguin go twitteresque in India,” October 2017
• Deccan Chronicle, “Terribly Tiny Tales: Book with stories within 140 characters to release soon,” October 2017
• Netflix (About Netflix), “This Monsoon, let the journey that leads to love begin with Musafir Cafe, premiering July 24 on Netflix,” 2026
• Startupfox, “Terribly Tiny Tales Produces Netflix Series Musafir Cafe 13 Years After Launching as a Facebook Page,” 2026
• Entrackr, “Flipkart enters microdrama space with short form content on app,” 2026
• Columbia Journalism Review, “The secret cost of pivoting to video” (citing SocialFlow data on Facebook organic reach decline), 2018

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.