Anurag Sundarka: Building a D2C Publishing Brand from ₹20,000

Anurag Sundarka's story begins with three failed ventures and a book no publisher would print. That rejection became the business.

Anurag is Co-Founder of ZebraLearn, the Surat-based learning platform he built with his sister Radhika Sundarka. ZebraLearn's differentiator is the Visual Book, where text, design, and visuals are integrated from the start for retention rather than decoration. The company grew from ₹10 lakh in revenue in 2022 to ₹10.7 crore in 2024, sells 10,000 to 20,000 books a month, and secured ₹1 crore from Ritesh Agarwal on Shark Tank India Season 4. ZebraLearn titles now appear in corporate training programmes, and the platform publishes for founders, marketers, and growth professionals.

Background – education and career

Ashish has held marketing leadership roles at Ola, Nokia, and Microsoft before moving into healthcare with Narayana Health. That path, from handset manufacturer to software giant to ride-hailing to hospitals, has given him a rare ability to translate martech principles across categories with very different customer journeys and buying cycles.

3 key takeaways from the episode

Martech is infrastructure, not a tool purchase. Buying the platform is the easy part; the hard part is the data, the process, and the team behind it.
Fragmented campaigns waste more budget than bad creative. Connecting the stack is usually a bigger lever than optimising any single channel.
Indian publishing has an omnichannel gap. Discovery, purchase, and application still live in disconnected places, which is where the opportunity sits.

Books written or mentioned

Anurag is the author of The BookPreneur, a guide to writing, self-publishing, and selling non-fiction books, drawn from ZebraLearn's experience launching multiple Amazon bestsellers.

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