18-year-old launches India's first print newspaper Aggregator - Paperboy

Bangalore based Jonna Venkata Karthik Raja the 18 year old founder of Paperboy is ecstatic as his 15 months of toil has finally come to completion. Paperboy is a mobile app that features a range of Indian newspapers and magazines that is uploaded on real time on to its platform. Paperboy is a language agnostic platform and will hence feature vernacular publications which is a crucial part of Indian news consumption habits. Paperboy aims to appeal to the global readership base of newspapers and envisions to becoming the ultimate platform to browse, buy and read each one’s local news on the go.

Paperboy currently lists over 400 newspapers and magazines nationally and is live on the Google Playstore.

Karthik Raja conceptualised this idea as he was finishing school, when he found that he was missing his daily routine newspaper whenever he was travelling. It wasn’t too late before his entrepreneurial instincts kicked in and he went about developing a blue print for the platform. He then went about enlisting the support of his parents who were very encouraging and supportive of his venture.

Originally launched with just two team members, Paperboy has now grown into a team of 50 young, energetic and enterprising individuals. With their primary focus on Tier 2 and 3 cities, which represents almost 31.16 per cnet of India’s population, Paperboy has already aggregated the widest variety of regional newspapers on their platform.

With a clean and simple interface, the app contains no pop up ads or interferences, and lets one access their news both in online and offline mode; thus, making it easy to for people to read their favourite newspapers at their convenience. The app is available on Android, iOS and the web. It claims to provide the same experience of reading one’s favourite newspaper but on a screen which is the in-vogue format of choice today.