In 2004, Snigdha Sur, then 14 years old, was set to leave for Washington DC to represent New York City for the annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.
She’d already done this once before, in 2001, at the age of 11, and had faced down all the uncertain feelings that arise when you’re so young and walking into something so large. But this time, she first had to compete against her city co-champion and … Regis Philbin on Live With Regis & Kelly. Regis!
“Are you ready to beat the boys?” Philbin’s co-host and Sur’s on-air partner, Kelly Ripa, asked her on live television. The studio audience was looking on. Sur, all of 14 years old, said yes. “As if there was any question,” Sur recalled. “I’m always ready for whatever the challenge is. I’m not afraid of hard things.”
That feisty spirit comes through in Sur’s subscription-based website the Juggernaut – which she founded in 2019 and publishes heady pieces that dust off a long-forgotten piece of history, or try to give nuance to a current topic. Did romantic kissing originate in India? How did cruises become south Asian getaways? These are the kinds of stories Sur’s readers can count on. It’s refreshing for a time when, according to a Pew Research study, 76% of US journalists are white.
“I think about that number all the time,” Sur said. “Those stats are so heart-wrenching and they’re also why [the big publications] can’t beat me. That kind of newsroom will never be able to tell the community’s story as well as the Juggernaut can.”
Having grown up in the Bronx and Queens after immigrating with her parents to the US from India in 1990, Sur said she found no media outlets meant for south Asians of her generation. She rose through the stages of a supposedly traditionally successful life – first pursuing undergraduate studies at Yale, then two different consulting stints at McKinsey & Company with an MBA at Harvard Business School thrown in between.
The need for what the Juggernaut would become certainly was there all along. As she once told potential investors of the south Asian demographic: “We’re half a trillion dollars in spending power in the US. We’re 1.8 billion people in the world.”
A visitor to the Juggernaut today will find stories ranging from a look back at Steve Jobs’s 1974 visit to India to badminton’s history and comeback in the US. There’s a review of season three of Indian Matchmaking and a profile of Gaurav Gupta – the favorite fashion designer of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion who made his long-awaited debut at the Paris haute couture week in 2023. “You don’t have to be south Asian to write for the Juggernaut, but you have to be able to dive deep and be curious,” Sur said.
It took Sur a while to scare up the courage to quit her job and secure proper backing. She made the Juggernaut her full-time job in 2019. Today she employs four full-time employees and has plans to expand the staff later this year – including a much-needed full-time engineer and several staff writers.
According to Sur, if she stopped ramping up staff and spending on marketing, she would find herself in the black. But cutting down on investment would curtail the growth she’s seen. While unwilling to share overall numbers, Sur said the Juggernaut counts the likes of Padma Lakshmi, comedian Hari Kondabolu and actors Freida Pinto and Poorna Jagannathan as subscribers.
Back in 2020, funds were running low – $50,000 in the bank low. At the start of Covid-19 outbreak, Sur readily admits that the US government’s paycheck protection program and subscription revenue helped keep the lights on before she could secure $1.2m in funding from Precursor Ventures and a syndicate of angel investors in October 2020 that keeps the business chugging along.
“We had these ambitions to do TikTok more,” Sur said. “We had ambitions to do more podcasts. I think in 2021 we had ambitions to do way more regular events.”
Instead of splurging on the extras that might have driven her out of business, Sur refocused her attention to the stories. She wanted to see what drew readers in – and more important, what didn’t. While things like book reviews were nice to include, they simply didn’t have the pull that true crime did. They had to go.
The Juggernaut wasn’t a vanity project. This was Sur’s business. And it needed to deliver the content people wanted if it was going to work.
“I was like, pardon my French, ‘Fuck this,’” she said. “We’re gonna just go back to the core business. Yeah, we’re gonna do less, but we’re gonna make it awesome.”
Your initial infusion of $2m got a lot of press back in 2020. But how far did that really go?
To the outside world, $2m seems like a lot because it’s $2m, right? But one thing to remind people is I never got that $2m at one time. I got $800,000 in the summer of 2019. And then I got $1.2m in October 2020. You know, four plus four hours of sleep doesn’t equal eight hours of sleep?
What are your thoughts about your role with south Asian writers and representation – I actually don’t like that word.
I hate that word, too. I hate, hate, hate whenever I read an article where the angle is “representation”. Kill me now. Please stop. That should never be the angle.
That’s one of the reasons I started the Juggernaut, which is to ask: “What’s the second level?” Representation isn’t the end-all be-all. The end goal isn’t representation. I think the end goal is showing how we are living our lives and noticing our histories and noticing stories in such a way that is respectful of each and all of our individual trajectories.
When someone pitches me a story on south Asian musicians at Coachella, that story is not just about representation. It opens up 10 more questions: Why now? Why those artists? Do south Asians even attend Coachella? Who are the artists for? Does it even matter? The story is never just about representation. We always want to get to the second level at the Juggernaut.
What was the most annoying thing about starting a small business?
The paperwork!
What’s something that you found useful that other entrepreneurs might use?
I did once hire a Vedic astrologist to look at the birth chart of my company. That was something?
But seriously, something I’m trying to get better at is firing myself from more functions and delegating more. So I’m trying to move away from a digital to-do list – where your tasks can be endless – and bought a daily planner Moleskine where I limit myself to only the biggest, most important things. You can’t go beyond the page, so limits are good! I’m trying to get better at it.
What is your ultimate goal for the Juggernaut?
I’d really love for stories that are important to our community not to be a footnote. I want the Juggernaut to be a household name.
When there’s a show happening, or when there’s a story happening, I want people to say, “Wait, we should call those folks up and ask them to help us with the story or consult with us.” I don’t want to see just one show like Indian Matchmaking. I want to see 10 versions of what dating or arranged marriage looks like in our communities.
I would love to start a studio like what the New York Times did and take [the weekly column] Modern Love and make it into a show. I really do look up to the New York Times a lot in terms of showing what is possible – through super-serving your audience.
And I also look up to the Athletic a lot. One of their founders [Adam Hansmann] is one of our investors. They knew who their audience was – sports fans. They just built that, got out, got cash.
What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t doing this?
There are alternate universes, right? I think that if I weren’t doing this, there was an alternate multiverse where I would be trying to work at Amazon Studios and they were going to put me 50% in Bombay, 50% in LA, working on film production, film and TV production, which is nice.
There’s another alternate universe where I’m doing something else, but I’m pretty confident that all the multiverses would still end with me saying: “I want to build something like this.”