Startups 2.0: Where to Work – Quintype

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“Changing how media works, how people connect, and how society engages.”

Why should only big media companies have the best technology? Quintype was founded in 2015, to do for media companies what blogging did for the independent writers. They made it just as easy to start a media company as it is to start a blog.

Quintype team

Today, this startup has a suite of future-ready products for the modern day digital publisher. Their growing client roster includes such impressive names in media, as The Quint (the first Indian site launched for the growing millennial population), National Herald, Bloomberg Quint, Swarajya, Fortune India, Media One and Live History India.

What makes Quintype different?

Publishing is a tech-intensive space. And it’s still a fast-evolving industry. Technology plays a big role in the impatient world where people don’t wait for more than 3 seconds for a page to load, ads and all. The existing solutions were not built specifically for the news and content industry so it’s not easy for publishers to work like a news/content business as opposed to a website/blog, or handle huge volumes of traffic without crashing. Quintype’s differentiators are equally their deep understanding of the content industry and their vision of how technology can take the industry into the future. The products have lowered the entry barriers for any size of publisher to access leading-edge technology for their publishing business. 

Quintype’s clients are all in praise of how the products blow them away. Notably, they talk about the superlative experience and how the product is always up-to-date with the latest tech innovations.

“We’ve remained fully focused on creating products that are complete in themselves. In a dynamic and highly competitive industry like media, companies can drown in tech if there isn’t a solid, future-ready system. We’ve been working very closely with our clients, and platforms like Google and Facebook to improve every little detail that can take the publishing industry forward”, says Chirdeep Shetty, CEO of Quintype.

Quintype has  won a few prestigious awards in this short span – the 2018 CMS Critic Award for the Best CMS for Publishers, WAN IFRA Award for Best in Reader Revenue Initiative & Best in Social Media Engagement and more. Quintype was also selected as a Nasscom Emerge50 Company last year.

Why work at Quintype?

The tech team at Quintype is united in their #1 reason to work at Quintype – the tech challenges. Even more than the impact their work can create in a massive industry like media.

Ram, senior developer at Quintype:

“It feels good to work and solve problems that have huge impact, reach hundreds of millions of people and eventually lead to the growth of publishing. But it’s not the USP of working here. What I love are the technical challenges we face. For example, advertising is how publishers make money. How do we enable them to do contextual advertising and make money? For me, this is a fun challenge and technology is absolutely essential to solving this problem.”

Rashmi joined Quintype as the Head of Engineering in 2018, with over 20 years of experience, and more than half of it at Adobe in San Francisco. She’s excited to have joined Quintype at a time when the product’s move to SaaS was just starting to take shape.

“We enable media to do ‘what’s next’. The industry gives us enough technical challenges we can relate with. Fake news is a huge problem today that even the mightiest of tech giants are trying to solve. Engineers like to work where there are interesting problems to solve. Quintype has loads of those and that’s the USP of working here.”

Tejas has been with Quintype since 2015. Now he is the Head of Technology.

Quintype has come a long way since the first time a story went viral, causing our entire system to crash. We’ve since been building for resiliency, helping publishers across our network serve and monetise over 300 million page views every single month. We’ve learned our lessons the hard way, and we know what it takes for a media company to start out, begin to monetise, grow, and finally scale to become viral.

Quintype has been pushing to where the industry is. Their subscription platform AccessType was the first in India to launch pay per view and micropayments. For clients like Bloomberg Quint, this has meant an exponential increase in the number of readers, as people can now pay a small amount like Rs. 18 and read just one article.

Tribuvan, DevOps Engineer, says of the infrastructural challenges in tech.

“We have to be lean and frugal in our solution-building as we have to remain affordable to all sizes of publishers while delivering the same infrastructural advantages that the world’s top publishers have. So, for instance, reducing latency is a challenge, and the challenges of frugality, maintaining code quality and being ready for change with the market – it’s a balancing act with interesting engineering to do.”

Who should work at Quintype?

Quintype’s office has a certain buzz and lightness to it. People seem to be having a good time, working, playing, having conversations, making fun of each other and being a jolly lot. People speak their mind whether they are meeting you for the first time or every day. There are people here who joined Quintype just because they fell in love with the openness and friendliness of future colleagues.

The tech team has 80 people. Everyone is hands-on and codes, not just because that’s the culture at Quintype, but because they love to.

Technology moves so fast that in 3 years, you can lose your touch if you stay away from coding and upgrading yourself. At Quintype, the nature of work is such that if you’re not hands-on, you can’t contribute to innovation. So tech leads are hands-on and they are able to put themselves in the shoes of the developer. Everyone including the team leads believe it’s highly essential for good team dynamics.

While Quintype has built amazing products and are now expanding to major global markets, the fact remains that media is changing in unimaginable ways every day. They have a great team in engineering, support, sales and other departments, and together they’ve accomplished amazing things so far. And now they are perfectly placed to shape the future of media.

If you see yourself being a part of Quintype, check out the openings here. Want to see more startups with interesting work on offer? Explore the companies we’ve handpicked for you, and take your pick. 

One comment

  1. We have a burning desire to learn and explore with new technologies ,
    We want to involve with innovative hands on knowledge and grow as a team .
    It helps us to lighten our own future and others.

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